Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/90

88 France of 1573 was in no condition to police her country districts. The long and devastating wars between Huguenots and Catholics had made a sort of no man’s land of large districts; Charles IX, the king, was a man of wax, molded now by this favorite, now that, and giving no thought to the welfare of his people. Every available sou that taxation could wring from rich or poor was spent to gratify or further the ambitions of the most corrupt and conscienceless politician who ever debased a government, the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.

In these circumstances, the Court of Parliament at Dôle might pass as many enactments as it chose, but, lacking force with which to make its mandates effective, its acts were but mere scraps of unavailing paper. One power still remained to the court. This was a levee en masse—a general calling to arms of the countryside.

Tradesmen and residents of the towns of those days stood bareheaded when titled swaggerers rode forth, and the agricultural classes were little more important to the nobility than the earth they tilled. For one not holding a patent of nobility to engage in the gentlemanly sport of hunting was to court immediate and merciless punishment. Game must be preserved for the nobles to hunt, though the peasant's stomach went empty and his flocks and herds were depleted by wolves till poverty crushed him to the ground.

Now was a chance to declare an "open season," give the peasants the thrill of engaging in the noble pastime of the chase, rid the country of the dreaded werewolves and save the sorely needed public funds, all at once. Accordingly, the following proclamation was issued by the Court of Parliament at Dôle:

""According to the advertisement made to the sovereign Court of Parliament at Dôle, that in the territories of Epagny, Salvange, Courchapon and the neighboring 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 to divers horsemen in the country, who kept him off only with great difficulty and danger to their persons and lives, the said Court, desiring to prevent any greater danger, has permitted, and by these presents does hereby permit all those who are now abiding and dwelling in said places and others, notwithstanding all and any edicts concerning the chase, to assemble with pikes, halberts, arquebuses and other weapons, to chase and to pursue the said werewolf in every place where they may find him; to seize him, to tie him, or, if necessary, to kill him without incurring any pains or penalties of any sort, kind or nature whatsoever.

"Given at the convocation of the said Court on the Thirteenth Day of the month of September, 1573.""

Mounted heralds were despatched throughout the territory adjacent to Dôle, and within a few days the court's proclamation was known to every dweller in the vicinity.

Soon quaint processions were seen issuing from all the villages in the neighborhood. Headed by their parish priests, with sacred statues borne before them, the people sallied forth to hunt down the dreaded loup-garou. Solemn high mass had been sung, the weapons of the huntsmen had been formally laid in the chancels of their churches and blessed by the curés; and now the hunt commenced.

Separating into parties of two, the peasants ranged the fields and woods, seeking everywhere for their accursed prey. It must be admitted that many of them had no stomach for their task, and would have dropped their weapons and fled incontinently at the first sight of anything resembling a werewolf in the most remote way. Others so far forgot the sacred and official duty with which they were charged as to devote themselves to the hunting of edible game, and many a luckless bunny found its way into the pouches (and later to the kettles) of the werewolf hunters. Still others routed forest wolves from their lairs and killed them, so not a few wolves' scalps were brought before the provincial authorities.

But these were all natural wolves, as incapable of assuming human shape as the peasants were of becoming wolves, and, though their deaths doubtless added greatly to the safety of the neighborhood sheepfolds, they brought the werewolf menace no nearer a termination than when the Court of Parliament first issued its proclamation.

Interest in the hunt began to slacken. The peasants had their farmlets to attend, and the great landed proprietors were heartily sick of having their game preserves raided by those supposedly bent on public service. Except among those who had lost children or sheep, the loup-garou became little more than a hazy recollection.

And then suddenly, unexpectedly, he was found. On the eighth of November, 1573, when the fields were all but bare of vegetation and the last leaves were reluctantly parting company with the trees, three laborers, hurrying from their work to their homes at Chastenoy by a woodland short-cut, heard the screams of a little girl issuing from a dense tangle of vines and undergrowth. And with the child’s screams mingled the baying of a wolf.

Swinging their stout billhooks, cutting a path for themselves through the tangled wildwood, the laborers hastened toward the sounds. In a little clearing they beheld a terrifying sight. Backed against a tree, defending herself with a shepherd’s crook, was a ten-year-old girl, bleeding from a half-dozen wounds, while before her was a monstrous creature which never ceased its infernal baying and howling as it attacked her, tooth and nail.

As the peasants ran forward to the child’s rescue the thing fled off into the forest on all fours, disappearing almost instantly in the darkness. The men would have followed, but the child demanded all their attention, for, weakened by loss of blood and exhausted with terror, she fell fainting before they could reach her.

The child was carried home and the workmen reported their adventure to the authorities. Their astonishment had been too great and the night too dark for them to make accurate observations, so there was a conflict in their testimony. Two affirmed the thing possessed the body of a wolf, the third swore positively it was a man, and, what was more to the point, he recognized him.

The clerical authorities cast their vote with the peasants, asserting the child's assailant a wolf, and there the matter rested for a time.

N the fourteenth of the month the disappearance of a little boy about eight years old was reported. The child had last been seen within an arrow's flight of the gates of Dôle, yet he had vanished as completely as though swallowed by the earth.

Now the civil authorities decided on action. They were not inclined to discount the werewolf theory entirely, for to deny the existence of such monsters in those days was treading dangerously close to the skirts of heresy. But neither were they minded to overlook any clue which pointed a natural explanation to the mystery. The Frenchman is curiously logical and direct, even in matters of superstition.

Two days after the little boy’s disappearance was reported, a sergeant de