. . . and in the Castle of Besques, the marquess of Apcher showed us this animal who looked like a wolf but with a very different face and different proportions. Three hundred people may certify this.
Many hunters and a lot of experts made us remark that only the tail and the posterior of this animal is of a wolf. Its head is monstrous; its eyes have a particular membrane that can conceal the eye-socket. Its neck is covered with thick reddish hairs, crossed with some black stripes; it has a white mark shaped as a heart on its breast. Its legs have four fingers with longer nails than wolves. They are thick, especially the front legs, and their color is the one of a deer. This was remarkable because all hunters said they had never seen a wolf with such colors. Some also noticed its ribs did not look like the ones of a wolf, therefore this animal could turn around more easily than a wolf that has sidelong ribs.
When Louis returned to his room, stuffed under the door, and with a cover now creased, was a pamphlet accompanied by a map of the region. The title shrieked: La Bête du Gévaudan! It looked to be a text cobbled together from various 18th-century reprints, the main body of which were the words of the royal notary Roche-Etienne Marin who described the second beast killed in June of 1767.
Louis had read about all of this before, on ferry crossing the Channel, if his memory was correct. One of a handful of sensational magazines lying about the boat recounting sordid histories of foreign lands. He’d picked it up as a brief escape from whatever torturous composition he was writing at the time, and ended up reading the thing cover to cover.
La Bête du Gévaudan was the collective name of perhaps more than one beast said to have terrorized the poor people of the département of Gévaudan—renamed Lozère after the Revolution—and areas of Haute-Loire. The first sighting was in early June 1764, when a Langogne woman was charged by what was described as a large wolf. She was saved by bulls from the farm. But by the end of the month Jeanne Boulet, fourteen years of age, was not so lucky.
The attacks continued, long and terrible enough to attract the attention of King Louis XV. It was he who hired the wolf-hunters Jean Charles and his son Jean-François, to track and kill the monster. In February of 1765, the two men brought with them eight bloodhounds and proceeded to thin the Gévaudan forests of wolves, large and small. But Surrel had his facts mixed up—it was not the father-son team d’Enneval that slayed La Bête, but François Antoine, harquebusbearer to the King, and Lieutenant of the Hunt. The old pamphleteer had his dates correct, though, as Antoine proved his mettle on September 21st of that same year, and announced, “We declare by the present report signed from our hand, we never saw a big wolf that could be compared to this one. Which is why we estimate that this could be the fearsome beast that caused so much damage.” La Bête was then stuffed—hopefully better than the poor specimen at le café du loup—and sent to Versailles, along with Antoine, who’d received a hero’s welcome, not to mention many medals and a large monetary reward.
However, by December, the attacks had resumed. Finally, a local hunter, Jean Chastel, on June 19, 1767, once again killed La Bête. And the region hoped this would be the last. La Bête de Chastel’s stomach contained human remains, and therefore confirmed that this was, indeed, one of the monsters that had been attacking villagers in the area. Chastel family tradition claimed that Jean, with his hunting party, sat down to read his Bible and pray, and as he prayed, La Bête emerged from the trees, staring at Chastel as if listening. Chastel finished his prayer and then shot La Bête dead.
Together, it was estimated that two hundred ten people were attacked over three years, one hundred thirteen dead, ninety-eight of whom seemed to have been devoured. But none of the accounts that Louis had read ever mentioned the idea of le loup-garou—a werewolf. Surely, this must be an invention of Surrel, local pamphleteer, to sell more wares. And it would make sense that the entire village believed it—those four Frenchman probably grew up reading Surrel’s imaginative leaflets.
Louis smiled and tossed the werewolfenalia toward the table by the bed with dramatic flourish, but then retrieved the map from the floor. Surrel was, at least, good for this one practical thing.
Once Louis was out of Monastier, he expected he would hear no more of the legendary Bête du Gévaudan. Perhaps he might hear of other creatures and mountain lore, perhaps he might hear the click of a rosary behind him as he passed through a village, but he found it unlikely that something so silly, from so long ago, still lived in this region, outside of this backwards enclave of drunken Frenchmen.
But enough of this! He had a donkey to pilot and a journey to begin!
Lee Harper Oswald 
Sock it to me...