The parliament had formally sanctioned the pursuit of a creature it designated a werewolf. Men were permitted to assemble with pikes, halberds, harquebuses, and cudgels, to hunt it down, seize it, and put it to death without incurring the penalties attached to unlawful game hunting. The children vanishing throughout the environs of Dole had thus introduced a monster into the vocabulary of the court. Before any man had yet been laid by the heels, authority had already given a name to the terror.
This decree of September 13, 1573, is cited by Sabine Baring-Gould in his early treatise on lycanthropy. The text evokes menacing encounters, stolen children, and horsemen set upon in the dusk. Highroads, thickets, and hamlets were suddenly transformed into the parcels of an imperiled domain. This was no fairy tale forest, lying at a convenient remove from human life; it was the very wood one was obliged to cross to reach home.
Hard by Amange lived Gilles Garnier, a native of Lyon, together with his wife, Apolline. Their dwelling bore the name of the Hermitage of Saint-Bonnot. The seclusion of the place would later furnish chroniclers with inexhaustible invention: Baring-Gould was to fashion it into a wretched hovel, endowing its tenant with features wherein every line appeared to foretell his crime. Yet the accusations were not to rest merely upon the cut of a beard or the cast of an eyebrow. They would assume the shape of a succession of assaults against children, bound to precise localities and the feast days of the liturgical calendar.
In the account developed by that author, husbandmen heard the shrieks of a young maid and came running. The creature assailing her fled. The falling darkness prevented any certain recognition; some claimed to have seen a wolf, others believed they knew the features of Garnier. This division of perception forms the true threshold of the case. The selfsame flight carried off a wild beast in the eyes of one witness, and a neighbor in the eyes of another. It would suffice that the two images converge for a man to become suspect of shifting his nature.
Yet another boy vanished. Garnier was seized and conveyed to Dole. The archaeological notice devoted to Saint-Bonnot places his arrest in December 1573. The woodland could shelter him no longer: the prisoner was compelled to answer before a bench that already possessed the word linking the man to animal depredations. In the text of the judgment preserved in early records, the King's Advocate, Henri Camus, prosecuted for homicide. Garnier, held fast in the conciergerie, became the figure to whom every atrocity was inexorably ascribed.
The first charge contained in the record reached back to the days following Michaelmas. A girl of some ten or twelve years had allegedly been taken in a vineyard near the Bois de la Serre, not far from Dole. The decree imputed her death to Garnier, charging him with acts of cannibalism. It went further still: a portion of the remains was said to have been brought home to Apolline, in their solitary retreat. The wife’s name was thus drawn into the horror of the judicial narrative, though the extant copy of the sentence preserves no record of her own testimony.
The second episode was placed after All Saints. Another young victim was said to have suffered an attack, cut short by the sudden arrival of three travelers. Here, living souls interposed before the assailant could accomplish all that was imputed to him. Their intervention constituted a distinct event, not to be confounded with the unexplained disappearances. In the fabric of the prosecution, however, it served the identical chain of reasoning: he who fled became he who was believed to have been glimpsed, and subsequently he who must have committed the remaining outrages.
A third child, a boy of about ten years, was purportedly slain in a vineyard at Grédisans. The scenes multiplied, yet the court gathered them all beneath a single name. It recorded the confessions of Garnier, presenting them as reiterated acknowledgments. His words do not reach us as a living dialogue preserved from the docket; they are already marshaled by the sentence itself, numbered among the legal grounds required to warrant death. The prisoner spoke through the voice of those who condemned him. To human motions the court added, without hesitation, the guise of the beast: hands were described as paws, the murderer as a man transformed into a wolf. This metamorphosis was no mere superstitious gloss upon an otherwise sober proceeding; it was an integral part of the system that claimed to explain the facts.
The final accusation referred to an earlier date, prior to Saint Bartholomew’s Day. A boy of some thirteen years had reportedly been seized beneath a pear tree, hard by the woods of Perrouse. Witnesses arrived too late to save him. On this occasion, the record specified, Garnier appeared in human form. Such a discrepancy might have fractured the single image of the monster; instead, it was absorbed into it. A man in one place, a wolf in another, the selfsame accused answered for all. The anomaly did not dismantle the belief; it became merely another faculty of the culprit.
The court decreed that he be dragged upon a hurdle from the prison to the place of execution, and there burned alive. The costs of justice were levied upon his goods. Following these extraordinary crimes came this thoroughly pedestrian reckoning of expenses, as though the clerk’s ledger could close without friction what the imagination had unloosed. Garnier was delivered to the flames. The chronology adopted by archaeological scholarship places this end on January 18, 1574; several early transcriptions record another year.
The stake concluded the trial, but rendered it almost impossible ever to dismantle the persona constructed around the condemned man. To victims denied a voice there answered henceforth an accused reduced to his recorded confessions. The werewolf was free to pursue its career through the printed page. Even in the nineteenth century, Baring-Gould claimed to discern in Garnier an alienated wretch convinced of his own lycanthropy. The judicial finding of witchcraft was thus supplanted by a retrospective medical diagnosis, pronounced with an assurance that the surviving record by no means warrants.
At Saint-Bonnot, centuries later, excavations encountered something other than a legendary shadow. Beneath the briars, stone foundations came to light, followed by domestic wares: cooking pots, porringers, storage vessels, and shards of glass. The artifacts examined proved consistent with occupation in the latter half of the sixteenth century; the attribution of these remnants to the couple remained a scholarly conjecture, not an absolute certainty. The putative dwelling of Garnier contained the ordinary implements of household life. Not a single shard bore witness to the crimes, nor offered proof of any metamorphosis.
There remain, then, two separate realities that the flames failed to reconcile: the accusations of murdered children, and the certitude with which magistrates assigned them a supernatural origin. The name of Garnier binds them together still. One may strip the wolf of its dreadful prestige, and cleanse the hermit’s portrait of its theatrical gloom; yet this will not restore their lost childhood to the victims named in the sentence. Nor will it transform an ancient conviction into proof of all that it affirms.