Footsteps. Richard Holmes
of the Gévaudan lapsed into a state of superstitious panic; farming went neglected and almost no one would cross their doorsteps after dark.
The end when it came was curiously muted. One late June evening in 1767, Jean Chastel, a local woodsman, out hunting for the Beast, was attacked in a forest clearing by a large wolf which he shot at point-blank range with a single musket-ball. The kill really did bring the reign of terror to an end, and Chastel became a folk hero. Yet this second wolf was a common enough animal, with a tatty pelt, and weighing two stone less than its predecessor. The mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan always remained, and continued to haunt the region even in Stevenson’s time. He read a novel on the subject by Elie Berthet at Langogne.
“If all wolves had been as this wolf,” Stevenson remarked thoughtfully, “they would have changed the history of man.”
Modern studies of the subject, rich in explanations, were each more fantastic than the last. One school followed a vampire theory; another proposed a sadistic Gévaudan landowner who terrorised his tenants with a trained pack of hunting wolves; and a third, deeply psychological, produced Jean Chastel himself as a pathological killer dressed up in wolf-hides. But my favourite had a sinister simplicity. It proposed, as a strict zoological possibility, a rogue family of three wolves (like The Three Bears) who, ostracised from the main pack, had tasted the delights of human flesh, and thereafter attacked in combination. Hence the inexplicable ferocity of the Beast; and also its ability to be in two places at once. This theory had the great attraction of leaving one wolf still unaccounted for. I liked this very much.
It was sheer coincidence that on the final leg of my walk over the hills to Langogne, I had my first brush with a Cévennes storm. These storms are peculiar to this highland region, local and intense, fast-moving from one hilltop to the next, and teethed with forked lightning that terrified me. It overtook me rapidly from the west, and seemed to chase me over the bare pastures, until to my immense relief I came upon a hamlet in the fold of the hill, with a tiny café-épicerie where I took shelter for an hour, while the storm passed, banging and snarling and flashing overhead.
The cafe-owner, a small man in an extravagantly dirty apron, polished glasses philosophically in the doorway. The rain beat on the green awning while we talked disjointedly of Stevenson and storms.
“It is not always wise to go over the hills,” he observed, while cigarette ash from his yellow papier-maïs fell on his apron in the hot damp wind. There was something lugubrious about his down-turned mouth. He craned his head outside, looked sharply up at the lowering clouds and shrugged. “There, he is clearing away now.” He returned to the little zinc-topped bar, flapped at the thunder flies, coughed, shook his head (more ash) and wished me well in his own fashion. “So, you are going into Gévaudan. You will see him again, alors.”
I departed, draped in my waterproof sheet, my hat at a combative angle. The sun came out, and I made the last descent to Langogne, through drenched fields of grass full of gleaming buttercups. I felt oddly elated.
At a little after eight in the evening I at last crossed the bridge over the Allier into Langogne, the shadows lengthening along the streets. The shopkeepers were closing up their stalls, and the air was full of the smell of crushed fruit and frying garlic. It was the biggest place I’d been in for days, with a fine eleventh-century church and a medieval covered market. It was cheerful and bustling, with family groups sitting out on the pavements, couples strolling arm in arm along the river and children fishing for minnows with pink and yellow nets.
But here something strange happened. The feeling that Stevenson was actually waiting for me, in person, grew overwhelmingly strong. It was almost like a hallucination. I began to look for him in the crowds, in the faces at the cafe doors, at hotel windows. I went back to the bridge, took off my hat, rather formally as if to meet a friend, and paced up and down, waiting for some sort of sign. People glanced at me: I felt an oddity, not knowing quite what I was doing, or looking for. The twilight thickened; bats began to dart over the river. I watched their flickering flight over the gleaming surface, from one bank to the other.
And then I saw it, quite clearly against the western sky, the old bridge of Langogne. It was about fifty yards downstream, and it was broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy. So Stevenson had crossed there, not on this modern bridge. There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this was the true sad sign.
The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful. I could not bear to stay in Langogne, and after a distracted supper I climbed the steep hill of rustling plane trees towards St Flour and Fouzilhac. It was pitch-black (my eyes had lost their “country” vision by dining under bright lights) but I was anxious to plunge into the Gévaudan. Below, to my left, I could hear a small river running through what I took to be a gentle-sloping water-meadow, and I fancied I would camp there. Turning off through the plane trees I jumped over a low stone wall and seemed to drop into a bottomless pit.
In fact, it was a fifteen-foot, stone-banked wall ending in a mass of thorn briars; below them, the ground shelved away directly into the river and, skidding and cursing through the blackness, I went with it. An hour later, wet to the waist, I was signing myself into the only hotel in Langogne that would take a doubtful traveller after midnight. Le Brun did his best, but the joke was thin. In my pocket I found my pipe broken off at the stem.
As I dropped off to sleep in my luxurious broom-cupboard I thought I would give the whole damn thing up.
I had mad dreams about children dancing round me in a mocking circle. They were waving nets and singing:
Sur le pont d’Avignon
On y danse, on y danse …
I thought a good deal about this dream. It seemed, in part, to be a projection of Stevenson’s own experiences, when, the following night, he was lost on the paths between Fouzilhac and Fouzilhic. He could find nowhere to stay as the darkness came on, and no one to give him directions. Instead he too met strange and dreamlike children.
As I came out on the skirts of the woods, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were all silently following each other round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences … at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold.
Partly also I came to think that my dream was a warning: a warning not to be so childish and literal-minded in my pursuit of Stevenson. The children were dancing and singing of the old bridge of Avignon: the bridge that is broken, just like the old bridge of Langogne. You could not cross such bridges any more, just as one could not cross literally into the past.
Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognised; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance—the critical distance, the historical distance—had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic.
Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called “biography” really means. I had never thought about it before. “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.
I awoke next morning in a different mood, and climbed the same hill in bright sunlight, in the company of a shepherd with his small black-and-white