The Legend of the Beast of Gévaudan

HYBRID MONSTER

The first victim was a 14-year-old girl attacked while tending to sheep on her family’s farm, and many more cases followed, some witnessed by the public. Once news of the murder epidemic reached the royal court, King Louis XV commissioned his best hunters to follow the trail. In an era when homosexuality scandals had rocked the aristocracy, boasting of slaying a ferocious beast was a way for them to demonstratively reclaim their masculinity and mend their fragile reputations. However, it was no easy task. One pretender accepted a reward – reportedly the equivalent of a year’s wages for the average worker – as compensation for killing the beast. However, after the corpse arrived at the court of Versailles, the celebrations came to an end, as it was declared to be merely an ordinary “large wolf”. The real beast, according to reports, was a “hybrid monster” with a body as long as a leopard’s, and a mass of unruly bright red and black fur. While it shared similarities with wolves, it certainly dwarfed them in size.

A gruesome depiction of the Bête du Gévaudan, 1764

Soon, the murders began again but, having squandered vast sums of money on slaying a target that was still very much alive, the humiliated king refused to continue financing the extermination project. Instead, as the beast had a pattern of striking almost exclusively against females, the army arranged for soldiers to dress as poverty-stricken peasant women to bait it with the promise of an easy target. The infantry had attributed amusingly human-like characteristics to the beast, assuming it would sense automatically that a woman was more vulnerable than a man and that it would know the difference between an aristocrat and a peasant. Unsurprisingly, these efforts to trap it failed.