The Woman and the Beast of Gévandan

You’re looking at an 18th-century illustration from one Marie-Jeanne Valet, aka “the Amazon”, aka “the Maid of Gévandan”, showing her getting attacked by a monstrous creature. The 19- or 20- year old Marie got these creds for having successfully fought off the enormous and bloodthirsty animal, which was something that as many as 100 people living in south-central France were sadly unable to do.

The mysterious animal provoked widespread fear in the region between 1764-1767, when the attacks occurred. Victims were usually children or lone men and women, and they reported that although the creature looked like a wolf, it was unusually large (the size of a cow, some asserted), and it’s tail was ultra long, with a round tuft of fur at the end. The “Beast of Gévandan,” as it came to be called, was by all accounts brutal, aiming for their victims’ throats, mauling them, and only sometimes eating them — other times, it was content to merely kill its human prey.

Even the French king got involved, offering an enormous sum for the time of 6,000 livres to the one who could kill the monster. Louis XV ended up sending three different groups of professional hunters to do the task before the 71-year old Francois Antoire, Lieutenant of the Hunt, killed a large grey wolf that he (and some survivors) claimed was the beast. Antoire got the reward, but a few months later the killings resumed again. It was finally a local hunter named Jean Chastel who took down a wolf on June 19, 1767, which put a stop to the killings.

Wolf attacks were a serious problem for humans living in Europe at the time, but there has remained a mystery about the nature of the Beast of Gévandan. Was there actually a pack of unusually fierce animals? Was rabies involved? Did Jean Chastel actually rear the monster as a hybrid wolf-dog that then got rabies? The speculation has been fun but always inconclusive. The fictitious literature inspired by the attacks often paint the Beast of Gévandan as a werewolf.