The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould (free ebook novel .TXT) đź“–
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rescue, was attacked by them and killed.
On another occasion they fell upon a little girl of four years old,
and ate her up, with the exception of one arm. Michel thought the
flesh most delicious.
Another girl was strangled by them, and her blood lapped up. Of a
third they ate merely a portion of the stomach. One evening at dusk,
Pierre leaped over a garden wall, and came upon a little maiden of
nine years old, engaged upon the weeding of the garden beds. She fell
on her knees and entreated Pierre to spare her; but he snapped the
neck, and left her a corpse, lying among her flowers. On this occasion
he does not seem to have been in his wolf’s shape. He fell upon a goat
which he found in the field of Pierre Lerugen, and bit it in the
throat, but he killed it with a knife.
Michel was transformed in his clothes into a wolf, but Pierre was
obliged to strip, and the metamorphosis could not take place with him
unless he were stark naked.
He was unable to account for the manner in which the hair vanished
when he recovered his natural condition.
The statements of Pierre Bourgot were fully corroborated by Michel
Verdung.
Towards the close of the autumn of 1573, the peasants of the
neighbourhood of Dôle, in Franche Comté, were authorized by the Court
of Parliament at DĂ´le, to hunt down the werewolves which infested the
country. The authorization was as follows:— “According to the
advertisement made to the sovereign Court of Parliament at Dole, that,
in the territories of Espagny, Salvange, Courchapon, and the
neighbouring villages, has often been seen and met, for some time
past, a werewolf, who, it is said, has already seized and carried off
several little children, so that they have not been seen since, and
since he has attacked and done injury in the country to some horsemen,
who kept him of only with great difficulty and danger to their
persons: the said Court, desiring to prevent any greater danger, has
permitted, and does permit, those who are abiding or dwelling in the
said places and others, notwithstanding all edicts concerning the
chase, to assemble with pikes, halberts, arquebuses, and sticks, to
chase and to pursue the said werewolf in every place where they may
find or seize him; to tie and to kill, without incurring any pains or
penalties… . Given at the meeting of the said Court, on the
thirteenth day of the month September, 1573.” It was some time,
however, before the loup-garou was caught.
In a retired spot near Amanges, half shrouded in trees, stood a small
hovel of the rudest construction; its roof was of turf, and its walls
were blotched with lichen. The garden to this cot was run to waste,
and the fence round it broken through. As the hovel was far from any
road, and was only reached by a path over moorland and through forest,
it was seldom visited, and the couple who lived in it were not such as
would make many friends. The man, Gilles Garnier, was a sombre,
ill-looking fellow, who walked in a stooping attitude, and whose pale
face, livid complexion, and deep-set eyes under a pair of coarse and
bushy brows, which met across the forehead, were sufficient to repel
any one from seeking his acquaintance. Gilles seldom spoke, and when
he did it was in the broadest patois of his country. His long grey
beard and retiring habits procured for him the name of the Hermit of
St. Bonnot, though no one for a moment attributed to him any
extraordinary amount of sanctity.
The hermit does not seem to have been suspected for some time, but one
day, as some of the peasants of Chastenoy were returning home from
their work, through the forest, the screams of a child and the deep
baying of a wolf, attracted their notice, and on running in the
direction whence the cries sounded, they found a little girl defending
herself against a monstrous creature, which was attacking her tooth
and nail, and had already wounded her severely in five places. As the
peasants came up, the creature fled on all fours into the gloom of the
thicket; it was so dark that it could not be identified with
certainty, and whilst some affirmed that it was a wolf, others thought
they had recognized the features of the hermit. This took place on the
8th November.
On the 14th a little boy of ten years old was missing, who had been
last seen at a short distance from the gates of Dole.
The hermit of S. Bonnot was now seized and brought to trial at Dole,
when the following evidence was extracted from him and his wife, and
substantiated in many particulars by witnesses.
On the last day of Michaelmas, under the form of a wolf, at a mile
from Dole, in the farm of Gorge, a vineyard belonging to Chastenoy,
near the wood of La Serre, Gilles Gamier had attacked a little maiden
of ten or twelve years old, and had slain her with his teeth and
claws; he had then drawn her into the wood, stripped her, gnawed the
flesh from her legs and arms, and had enjoyed his meal so much, that,
inspired with conjugal affection, he had brought some of the flesh
home for his wife Apolline.
Eight days after the feast of All Saints, again in the form of a
werewolf, he had seized another girl, near the meadow land of La
Pouppe, on the territory of Athume and Chastenoy, and was on the point
of slaying and devouring her, when three persons came up, and he was
compelled to escape. On the fourteenth day after All Saints, also as a
wolf, he had attacked a boy of ten years old, a mile from DĂ´le,
between Gredisans and Menoté, and had strangled him. On that occasion
he had eaten all the flesh off his legs and arms, and had also
devoured a great part of the belly; one of the legs he had rent
completely from the trunk with his fangs.
On the Friday before the last feast of S. Bartholomew, he had seized a
boy of twelve or thirteen, under a large pear-trees near the wood of
the village Perrouze, and had drawn him into the thicket and killed
him, intending to eat him as he had eaten the other children, but the
approach of men hindered him from fulfilling his intention. The boy
was, however, quite dead, and the men who came up declared that Gilles
appeared as a man and not as a wolf. The hermit of S. Bonnot was
sentenced to be dragged to the place of public execution, and there to
be burned alive, a sentence which was rigorously carried out.
In this instance the poor maniac fully believed that actual
transformation into a wolf took place; he was apparently perfectly
reasonable on other points, and quite conscious of the acts he had
committed.
We come now to a more remarkable circumstance, the affliction of a
whole family with the same form of insanity. Our information is
derived from Boguet’s Discours de Sorciers, 1603-1610.
Pernette Gandillon was a poor girl in the Jura, who in 1598 ran about
the country on all fours, in the belief that she was a wolf. One day
as she was ranging the country in a fit of lycanthropic madness, she
came upon two children who were plucking wild strawberries. Filled
with a sudden passion for blood, she flew at the little girl and would
have brought her down, had not her brother, a lad of four years old,
defended her lustily with a knife. Pernette, however, wrenched the
weapon from his tiny hand, flung him down and gashed his throat, so
that he died of the wound. Pernette was tom to pieces by the people in
their rage and horror.
Directly after, Pierre, the brother of Pernette Gandillon, was accused
of witchcraft. He was charged with having led children to the sabbath,
having made hail, and having run about the country in the form of a
wolf. The transformation was effected by means of a salve which he had
received from the devil. He had on one occasion assumed the form of a
hare, but usually he appeared as a wolf, and his skin became covered
with shaggy grey hair. He readily acknowledged that the charges
brought against him were well founded, and he allowed that he had,
during the period of his transformation, fallen on, and devoured, both
beasts and human beings. When he desired to recover his true form, he
rolled himself in the dewy grass. His son Georges asserted that he had
also been anointed with the salve, and had gone to the sabbath in the
shape of a wolf. According to his own testimony, he had fallen upon
two goats in one of his expeditions.
One Maundy-Thursday night he had lain for three hours in his bed in a
cataleptic state, and at the end of that time had sprung out of bed.
During this period he had been in the form of a wolf to the witches’
sabbath.
His sister Antoinnette confessed that she had made hail, and that she
had sold herself to the devil, who had appeared to her in the shape of
a black he-goat. She had been to the sabbath on several occasions.
Pierre and Georges in prison behaved as maniacs, running on all fours
about their cells and howling dismally. Their faces, arms, and legs
were frightfully scarred with the wounds they had received from dogs
when they had been on their raids. Boguet accounts for the
transformation not taking place, by the fact of their not having the
necessary salves by them.
All three, Pierre, Georges, and Antoinnette, were hung and burned.
Thievenne Paget, who was a witch of the most unmistakable character,
was also frequently changed into a she-wolf, according to her own
confession, in which state she had often accompanied the devil over
hill and dale, slaying cattle, and falling on and devouring children.
The same thing may be said of Clauda Isan Prost, a lame woman, Clauda
Isan Guillaume, and Isan Roquet, who owned to the murder of five
children.
On the 14th of December, in the same year as the execution of the
Gandillon family (1598), a tailor of Châlons was sentenced to the
flames by the Parliament of Paris for lycanthropy. This wretched man
had decoyed children into his shop, or attacked them in the gloaming
when they strayed in the woods, had torn them with his teeth, and
killed them, after which he seems calmly to have dressed their flesh
as ordinary meat, and to have eaten it with great relish. The number
of little innocents whom he destroyed is unknown. A whole cask full of
bones was discovered in his house. The man was perfectly hardened, and
the details of his trial were so full of horrors and abominations of
all kinds, that the judges ordered the documents to be burned.
Again in 1598, a year memorable in the annals of lycanthropy, a trial
took place in Angers, the details of which are very terrible.
In a wild and unfrequented spot near Caude, some countrymen came one
day upon the corpse of a boy of fifteen, horribly mutilated and
bespattered with blood. As the men approached, two wolves, which had
been rending the body, bounded away into the thicket. The men gave
chase immediately, following their bloody tracks till they lost them;
when suddenly crouching among the bushes, his teeth chattering with
fear, they found a man half naked, with long hair and beard, and with
his
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