The Book of Were-Wolves, Sabine Baring-Gould [chapter books to read to 5 year olds txt] 📗

M. de Chusnée, who came to her

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 Dôle, 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 Dôle,

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