¹ Antoine's conclusion was reported in a letter from his associate, the local subdelegate Etienne Lafont, to the intendant of Languedoc, Marie-Joseph de Saint-Priest. See Lafont to Saint-Priest, 27 Sept. 1765, Archives départementales de l’Hérault (hereafter ADH), C 44, Folder “septembre 1765,” no 386.

² Gazette de France, 4 Oct. 1765.

³ Louis Philipon de La Madeleine, Vues patriotiques sur l’éducation du peuple, tant des villes que de la campagne (Paris, 1783), 252. On the epileptic with memories of the beast episode see Samuel Auguste Tissot, Oeuvres de Monsieur Tissot, vol. 8 (Lausanne, 1790), 40.

⁴ Gérard Ménatory, the first in a series of historians of the beast eager to exonerate the wolf, lent new support to the hyena hypothesis in 1976. See La bête du Gévaudan: Histoire, légende, réalité (Mende, 1976). The idea acquired cautious support in Joe Nickell, Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies and More (Amherst, NY, 2011), and it remains a favored theory on popular websites. Most notably, a 2009 History Channel special devoted to the story of the beast informed its viewers that the beast had been positively identified as a hyena. The television special is now available as a DVD titled The Real Wolfman.

⁵ Smith, Jay M., Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Jean-Marc Moriceau, Histoire du méchant loup: 3000 attaques sur l’homme en France, XVe–XXe siècle (Paris, 2007).

⁷ Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have argued that marvels and monsters were “exiled to the hinterlands of vulgarity and learned indifference” by the second half of the eighteenth century. Despite the evidence of increasing eighteenth-century skepticism, however, their formulation of the self-consciously rational character of natural philosophy in the Enlightenment underestimates the degree to which both “popular” and learned science savored mystery for its own sake. See Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katherine, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998), 360Google Scholar. For evidence of the resilient appeal of the marvelous see Michael Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” in Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon, eds., The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago, 1999), 175–217Google Scholar; Caiozzo, Anna and Demartini, Anne-Emmanuelle, eds., Monstre et imaginaire social: Approches historiques (Paris, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. Part III; Curran, Andrew and Graille, Patrick, Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought: A Special Issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (Baltimore, 1997)Google Scholar; Vermeir, Koen, “The ‘Physical Prophet’ and the Powers of the Imagination. Part II: A Case Study on Dowsing and the Naturalisation of the Moral, 1685–1710,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36/1 (2005), 1–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁸ On the intersection of science and wonder in the early Romantic age see especially Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London, 2008)Google Scholar; see also Knight, David M., Science in the Romantic Era (Aldershot, 1998.)Google Scholar

⁹ Dietz, Bettina, “Making Natural History: Doing the Enlightenment,” Central European History, 43/1 (2010), 25–46, at 27, 29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁰ On mesmerism and the attractions of “occult” knowledge see Robert Darnton's classic Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA, 1968). On science as popular spectacle see, in addition to Darnton, Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; and Douthwaite, Julia V., The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For naturalists’ tendency to link the exotic to mysterious intrigue—while in Peru in 1735 the future encylopédist Charles-Marie de La Condamine collected exotic seeds and saplings while he also sought to prove or disprove the existence of the fabled Amazons—see the editors’ introduction to Shiebinger, Londa and Swan, Claudia, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia, 2007), 1–18Google Scholar. On Ossianic poems and their eighteenth-century resonance see Lora Kahn, “James Macpherson's Ossian: Genesis and Response” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, City University of New York, 1989.) On the emergence of the gothic genre see Frank, Frederick S., The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

¹¹ Ballainvilliers to Antoine, 23 Sept. 1765. Archives départementales du Puy-de-Dôme (hereafter ADPD), 1 C 1736.

¹² On the division of labor between Buffon and Daubenton in the research for the Histoire Naturelle see Loveland, Jeff, “Another Daubenton, Another Histoire Naturelle,” Journal of the History of Biology, 39/3 (2006), 457–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Buffon as stylist see Loveland, Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context (Oxford, 2001). Buffon was fully aware of the power of his prose. See Clerc, Georges-Louis Le, comte de Buffon, Discours sur le style, prononcé à l’Académie Française par Buffon le jour de sa réception (Paris, 1881), 28.Google Scholar

¹³ Ballainvilliers to the ministers L’Averdy, Saint-Florentin, Bertin, Maupeou, and Choiseul (24 Sept. 1765), ADPD 1 C 1736. The correction was written in the margins of the same letter.

¹⁴ Le Clerc, Georges-Louis, comte de Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière: Avec la Description du Cabinet du Roi, vol. 9 (Paris, 1761), 292–3Google Scholar; Ballainvilliers to L’Averdy, Saint-Florentin, Bertin, Maupeou, and Choiseul (24 Sept. 1765), ADPD 1 C 1736.

¹⁵ The beast had famously eluded skilled huntsmen in December of 1764, for example, when it leapt over an “extremely elevated wall” that horses would not even attempt to cross. See Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan, 114.

¹⁶ Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, 280.

¹⁷ Ballainvilliers to L’Averdy, Saint-Florentin, Bertin, Maupeou, and Choiseul (24 Sept. 1765), ADPD 1 C 1736.

¹⁸ Edelstien, Dan, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2010), 49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Joannes Jonstonus, Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri: cum aeneis figuris, 6 vols. (Amsterdam, 1657). On the continent, Johnstone was most often identified as Jonstonus.

²⁰ Tolomas refers to the archive of a société littéraire in Lyon, and it seems likely that he referred to the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts, formed in 1704.

²¹ [Charles-Pierre-Xavier Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, à l’occasion de celle qui a paru dans le Lyonnois & les Provinces voisines, vers les derniers mois de 1754, pendant 1755 & 1756 (Paris, 1756), ii. It is possible that the Dissertation was written by Jean-Louis Alléon-Dulac, as Jean-Marc Moriceau suggests in Histoire du méchant loup, 334. Alléon-Dulac would later publish Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire Naturelle des Provinces de Lyonnois, Forez, et Beaujolais (Lyon, 1765), a text that quoted a lengthy extract of the Dissertation (see 52–4.) Alléon-Dulac was a native of Lyon, and he came from the parlementaire milieu that prized the Classics and the modern fashion for natural history. The author of the 1756 text was left unidentified on the title page, however, and Alléon-Dulac passed up the opportunity to identify himself as the author of the earlier text in his 1765 Mémoires, where he also disavowed the hypothesis that the beast in the Lyonnais could have been a hyena. It would seem that authorship of the Dissertation remains a mystery.

²² [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyene, ii.

²³ Ibid., 48.

²⁴ Ibid., 22, 36.

²⁵ Ibid., ii.

²⁶ Ibid., iii, v.

²⁷ Ibid., 2, 9. La Condamine had guessed that “Eskimos” or other Arctic dwellers had been pressed into slavery by merchant seamen, taken to the Antilles, and sold or traded to planters who had then decided to sell two of them—Marie-Angélique and a lost companion—to someone in the Netherlands. From there, La Condamine surmised, they escaped to France. See Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, trouvé dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans (Paris, 1755), 42–6. For Leblanc's story see Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster, 29–53.

²⁸ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 2.

²⁹ Ibid., 10. “Les grands Maîtres sont faits pour tracer les routes des sciences: mais il faut quelquefois chercher les avenuës, & s’y arrêter, avant que de s’engager à suivre les chemins ouverts par ces guides si excellens.”

³⁰ The Dissertation thus provides an explicit example of the etymological link between “error” and “errancy.” The French verb errer meant not only “to make a mistake” but also “to roam” or wander, and the author of the Dissertation combined these two possibilities in the prospect of his own conceptual meandering (see Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 1694 edn). For incisive discussion of error “as a kind of motion” that the philosophes incorporated into their quest for truth see David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 20.

³¹ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 12–13.

³² Ibid., 54–5.

³³ Ibid., 56. The text cited is: [Robert James], Dictionnaire universel de médecine, de chirurgie, de chymie, de botanique, d’anatomie, de pharmacie et d’histoire naturelle, etc., précédé d’un Discours historique sur l’origine et les progrès de la médecine, traduit de l’anglois de M. James par Mrs. Diderot, Eidous et Toussaint, 6 vols. (Paris, 1746–8).

³⁴ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 51–60.

³⁵ Ibid., 15.

³⁶ Ibid., 16.

³⁷ For the debates between Hill and the Royal Society, and the remark by Walpole, see Fraser, Kevin J., “John Hill and the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48/1 (1994), 43–67, at 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁸ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 24. The Dissertation drew liberally from John Hill, A general natural history, or, New and accurate descriptions of the animals, vegetables, and minerals, of the different parts of the world, 3 vols. (London, 1748–52).

³⁹ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 25–6.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 27–8.

⁴¹ Ibid., 30.

⁴² Ibid., 5, 7.

⁴³ Ibid., 31–2.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 38.

⁴⁵ Journal des sciences et beaux arts, 1 (July 1765), 183.

⁴⁶ [Tolomas], Dissertation sur l’Hyène, 14.

⁴⁷ In the Touraine and the Limousin, for example. See Moriceau, Histoire du Méchant Loup, 118–51. Ballainvilliers himself had recently reported on scores of wolf attacks caused by rabies. See, for example, Ballainvilliers to Charles-François L’Averdy, 15 March 1764, ADPD 1 C 1730.

⁴⁸ On earlier efforts to prove or disprove the basilisk legend see Copenhaver, Brian P., “A Tale of Two Fishes: Magical Objects in Natural History from Antiquity through the Scientific Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 52/3 (1991), 373–98, at 374.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁴⁹ Dictionnaire de la langue française, ancienne et moderne, de Pierre Richelet (Lyon, 1759), vol. 2, 661.

⁵⁰ Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet, Considérations philosophiques de la gradation naturelle des formes de l’être (Paris, 1768), 198.

⁵¹ As cited in Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” 210. Hagner provides an illuminating discussion of the changing role of the monster in eighteenth-century elite culture.

⁵² Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 1694 and 1762 edns.

⁵³ Entry for “Monstre,” in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 edn), ed. Robert Morrissey, at http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu.libproxy.lib.unc.edu.

⁵⁴ Marie-Hélène Huet has cleverly argued, in Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1993), that Romantic art in the early nineteenth century inverted the relationship between imagination and the monstrous; whereas maternal imaginations were often held responsible for monstrous births through the end of the eighteenth century, the monstrous provided fuel for, and helped to explain, the creative imagination in later generations. The earlier history laid out here shows, however, that long before the monster had colonized the fictional literature of the nineteenth century—as in Shelley's Frankenstein—learned minds dedicated a portion of their cognitive space to imaginings of the enigmatic.

⁵⁵ , Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(London, 1770), 59, 95–6.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., 58, 97–9.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 274–5.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 101.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 95.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 99.

⁶¹ As cited in Lawrence Kerslake, Essays on the Sublime: Analyses of French Writings on the Sublime from Boileau to La Harpe (Bern, 2000), 349. The reference to the “agreeable sensation” caused by awesome beauty, from the Lettre sur les sourds et les muets of 1751, actually pre-dates Burke. On Diderot's later debt to Burke see May, Gita, “Diderot and Burke: A Study in Aesthetic Affinity,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 75/5 (1960), 527–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶² Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 53–4.

⁶³ For books of wonders and medieval bestiaries see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Jones, Timothy S. and Sprunger, David A., Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations (Kalamazoo, MA, 2002)Google Scholar; Michel Pastoureau, L’hermine et le sinople: Etudes d’héraldique médiévales (Paris, 1982); Josy Marty-Dufaux, Les animaux du Moyen Age: Réels et mythiques (Marseille, 2005).

⁶⁴ The account appeared in a letter from Marvejols in January of 1765. See Année littéraire, 1 (1765), 314.

⁶⁵ Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, 278–9.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 278: “Si l’on en croit tous les Naturalistes, son cri ressemble aux sanglots d’un homme qui vomiroit avec effort.”

⁶⁷ Ibid., 277.

⁶⁸ Even if the gothic was a “far from stable genre,” as James Watt has noted, all concur in tracing its origins to 1764 and the publication of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto. See James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge, 1999), 12.

⁶⁹ Savérien, Alexandre, Histoire des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain dans les Sciences et dans les Arts qui en Dépendent (Paris, 1778), 286–87.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ de Bomare, Jacques-Christophe Valmont, Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle, vol. 3 (Paris, 1768), 392–3.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Duchesne, Antoine Nicolas, Manuel du Naturaliste (Paris, 1771), 263.Google Scholar

⁷² Paulian, Aimé-Henri, Dictionnaire de physique portatif, vol. 2 (Nîmes, 1773) 450–2.Google Scholar

⁷³ Gazette Littéraire de l’Europe (Amsterdam, 1768), 424–6.

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Journal des beaux-arts et des sciences, 1 (Feb. 1768), 256–69.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 266–9.

⁷⁷ de Moncel, Jean-Baptiste Claude Delisle, Dictionnaire Théorique et Pratique de la Chasse et de Pêche, vol. 2 (Paris, 1769), 33.Google Scholar

⁷⁸ As cited in Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, ed. L. Pearce Williams, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 292.

⁷⁹ In a 1766 essay on error and superstition, Jean-Louis Castilhon had opposed “natural enlightenment” to a “shadowy labyrinth . . . full of prejudices and errors” (as cited in Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations, 32.) In Castilhon's formulation, error stood as the opponent to a single, if still-emergent, “truth.” But shadows could serve another purpose as well: they impelled a continuing search for the line separating the still-incredible from the firmly established.

⁸⁰ Delisle de Moncel, Dictionnaire Théorique et Pratique de la Chasse. Delisle de Moncel had earlier drawn attention for his Méthodes et projets pour parvenir à la destruction des loups dans le royaume (Paris, 1768). He would later publish Résultats d’expériences sur les moyens les plus efficaces et les moins onéreux au peuple, pour détruire dans le royaume l’espèce des bêtes voraces (Paris, 1771).

⁸¹ Delisle de Moncel, Dictionnaire Théorique et Pratique, 34.

⁸² Ibid., 36–36 bis.

⁸³ Encyclopédie Méthodique: Histoire Naturelle des Animaux (Paris, 1782), 141.

⁸⁴ Journal Politique de Bruxelles, July 1786, 222–3.

⁸⁵ Encyclopédie Méthodique: Dictionnaire de toutes les espèces de chasses (Paris, Year III of the Republic), vii, 256–7.

⁸⁶ The standard account of the Museum of Natural History's founding is Spary, Emma C., Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Richard W. Burkhardt Jr has explored the “gravitational pull” exerted by the museum from the 1790s to the 1820s. See Burkhardt, Richard W. Jr, “The Leopard in the Garden: Life at Close Quarters in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle,” Isis, 98/4 (2007), 675–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 677. Also see Burkhardt, “Constructing the Zoo: Science, Society, and Animal Nature at the Paris Menagerie, 1794–1838,” in Henninger-Voss, Mary J., ed., Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture (Rochester, NY, 2002), 231–57.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ Georges Cuvier, “Sur les Ossemens Fossiles d’Hyènes,” in Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, 6 (Paris, 1805), 127–44, at 128, 138, 140–43.

⁸⁸ Delisle de Moncel, Dictionnaire Théorique et Pratique, 33.

⁸⁹ Bibliothèque centrale du muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Y1 3893. The discovery of this guidebook was reported in Franz Jullien, La deuxième mort de la bête du Gévaudan (Le Havre, 1998), though I draw on the discussion of Guy Crouzet, La grande peur du Gévaudan (Saint-Amond-Montrond, 2001), 175.

⁹⁰ “This savage and solitary animal lives in the caverns of mountains and the clefts of rocks, and even in dens that it digs underground . . . Its eyes shine in the dark and they say that it sees better at night than in day . . . [It] tears to shreds the cadavers of animals and men.” Notice des Animaux Vivants actuellement à la Ménagerie du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (Paris, 1802), 14.