others of this strange child they have encountered. As it happens, another local girl, Marguerite Poirier, knows the boy even better, having regularly tended sheep with him near their village of St. Antoine de Pizon. His name is Jean Grenier, she reports, and he has frequently terrified her with similar stories. Worse than that, he recently followed through on his threat to her: One day, when Jean was absent from his herding duties, a wolf attacked her and tore her clothes. The creature had red hair, like Jean’s!
Grenier and his case are taken up by the parliament in Bordeaux, in an investigation that, as in other witch and werewolf trials of the era, yields a surprising array of confessions. A certain “black man” named M. de la Forest gave Grenier a salve and a wolf skin, he says, both of which he used to turn himself into a wolf. Besides his attack on Poirier, which he confirms in every particular, Grenier admits to having eaten three children, including an infant snatched from a cradle.
But as with the case of Jacques Roulet five years earlier, the parliament eschews execution, in favor of life imprisonment in a nearby monastery. Pierre de Lancre, a famous witch-hunter who had been involved with Grenier’s trial, would visit the young man there in 1610. Grenier still copped to having once been a werewolf. Moreover, reported de Lancre, he “confessed to me also, in a straightforward manner, that he still wanted to eat the flesh of little children, and that he found the flesh of little girls particularly delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been prohibited from doing so, and he answered me frankly that yes he would.” But the boy would never get his second helpings; soon after his interview with de Lancre, he would die in confinement, the cause unrecorded.
Richard Mead, one of England’s most influential eighteenth-century physicians, published an account of rabies in 1702 that can only be described as lycanthropic. As with all fine horror tales, the case had been related to Mead secondhand, but (he assures us) by a man who was “very near of kin to the unhappy patient.” In Scotland, the doctor recounts,
a young man was bit by a mad dog, and married the same morning. He spent (as is usual) that whole day, till late in the night, in mirth, dancing and drinking: in the morning, he was found in bed raving mad; his bride (horrible spectacle!) dead by him; her belly torn open with his teeth, and her entrails twisted round his bloody hands.
The brevity of time between bite and neurological symptoms—less than a day!—dispels any notion that this was actually a case of rabies. The details of the attack, too, seem rather improbable. Rabies can elicit violence in human victims, to be sure, but these generally take the form of maddened outbursts, in which biting is uncommon. The concerted effort required to chomp open a human abdomen, notto mention dealing with the rush of fresh blood—it’s all a bit more than the typical hydrophobic could handle.
Nevertheless, the parallels between this medical case report, on the one hand, and the then-popular reports of lycanthropy, on the other, are notable. Mead even goes so far, just a few pages later, as to cite the influence of the moon. “Looking over the histories of the many patients I have attended in this deplorable condition,” he writes, “I observe about one half of the number to have been attacked with the spasms preceding the hydrophobia either upon the full moon, or the day before it.” Like many physicians of his day, Mead attempted to apply to the human body the mechanical insights of Isaac Newton, whose mathematical demonstrations of the properties of physical objects had left a deep imprint on the late seventeenth-century psyche. Mead’s theory was that the moon’s gravity pulled the bodily fluids in various directions at various times, contributing to the patient’s health or lack thereof. But despite this scientific (or at least
Grenier and his case are taken up by the parliament in Bordeaux, in an investigation that, as in other witch and werewolf trials of the era, yields a surprising array of confessions. A certain “black man” named M. de la Forest gave Grenier a salve and a wolf skin, he says, both of which he used to turn himself into a wolf. Besides his attack on Poirier, which he confirms in every particular, Grenier admits to having eaten three children, including an infant snatched from a cradle.
But as with the case of Jacques Roulet five years earlier, the parliament eschews execution, in favor of life imprisonment in a nearby monastery. Pierre de Lancre, a famous witch-hunter who had been involved with Grenier’s trial, would visit the young man there in 1610. Grenier still copped to having once been a werewolf. Moreover, reported de Lancre, he “confessed to me also, in a straightforward manner, that he still wanted to eat the flesh of little children, and that he found the flesh of little girls particularly delicious. I asked him if he would eat it if he had not been prohibited from doing so, and he answered me frankly that yes he would.” But the boy would never get his second helpings; soon after his interview with de Lancre, he would die in confinement, the cause unrecorded.
Richard Mead, one of England’s most influential eighteenth-century physicians, published an account of rabies in 1702 that can only be described as lycanthropic. As with all fine horror tales, the case had been related to Mead secondhand, but (he assures us) by a man who was “very near of kin to the unhappy patient.” In Scotland, the doctor recounts,
a young man was bit by a mad dog, and married the same morning. He spent (as is usual) that whole day, till late in the night, in mirth, dancing and drinking: in the morning, he was found in bed raving mad; his bride (horrible spectacle!) dead by him; her belly torn open with his teeth, and her entrails twisted round his bloody hands.
The brevity of time between bite and neurological symptoms—less than a day!—dispels any notion that this was actually a case of rabies. The details of the attack, too, seem rather improbable. Rabies can elicit violence in human victims, to be sure, but these generally take the form of maddened outbursts, in which biting is uncommon. The concerted effort required to chomp open a human abdomen, notto mention dealing with the rush of fresh blood—it’s all a bit more than the typical hydrophobic could handle.
Nevertheless, the parallels between this medical case report, on the one hand, and the then-popular reports of lycanthropy, on the other, are notable. Mead even goes so far, just a few pages later, as to cite the influence of the moon. “Looking over the histories of the many patients I have attended in this deplorable condition,” he writes, “I observe about one half of the number to have been attacked with the spasms preceding the hydrophobia either upon the full moon, or the day before it.” Like many physicians of his day, Mead attempted to apply to the human body the mechanical insights of Isaac Newton, whose mathematical demonstrations of the properties of physical objects had left a deep imprint on the late seventeenth-century psyche. Mead’s theory was that the moon’s gravity pulled the bodily fluids in various directions at various times, contributing to the patient’s health or lack thereof. But despite this scientific (or at least
Similar Books
