The Velay is a remarkably beautiful and remote region of France, an extensive volcanic upland of gentle puys, wooded hills that form undulating chains of cones and domes amid grazing cattle and fields of wheat. The soil is rich, but the climate at 1200 metres is harsh. This green and blue plateau, with its felicitous mixture of forests and farms, of wildness and cultivation, long resisted the industrialisation of its agriculture. It was not until the 1960s and early 1970s that animal power finally gave way to tractors, manual labour in the fields diminished, and agriculture became centralised. On my visit in 1981, these changes were still visibly taking place; I would often encounter elderly farmers wearing sabots (clogs) and driving their stock along the roads with their batons. They were generally the only other walkers I met, and they were stunned to see me, especially when they learned I had come from so far away, from Australia, to see their land on foot. There was a souffle of appreciation and a gaping smile. The local teeth were not then in good condition. I had found myself in la France profonde.

‘It was Simone de Beauvoir, that walker extraordinaire, whose writing had brought me there.’

For fifteen days I walked the Velay plateau, camping in pine forests and the corners of farmers’ fields at night, buying baguettes in the villages, and creating a minor sensation whenever I entered a bar for breakfast or a beer. It was July, but it rained a lot. My tent never dried, and the winds blew with unforgiving vigour. It was Simone de Beauvoir, that walker extraordinaire, whose writing had brought me there. Before she became a renowned intellectual, an existentialist, and a famed author, Beauvoir was a walker, driven to astonishing feats of stamina in her quest to lose herself in the landscape and to master country by physical exertion. No one could keep up with her; she left Sartre in a ditch and her sick sister at a bus stop. She had walked the Velay, attracted of course to its most desolate summits. She spent a haunted, uncomfortable night on the highest mountain in central France, Mont Mézenc (1753 metres), and I dutifully followed her footsteps into that bleak world on an unkind evening and suffered in sympathy. I jumped over that most famous of French rivers, the Loire, near its source at Mont Gerbier de Jonc, and washed in and drank from its youthful alpine waters. I dried my socks in a precious shaft of sunlight at the foot of le Gerbier. I ate white nectarines that really did taste like nectar, pressed wildflowers, and snatched siestas beside newly harvested wheatfields. Heralded by dogs, I walked through mysterious stone villages where I saw no people and wondered about the life behind dark windows. I crossed the southern edge of the plateau into a rougher region, the Gévaudan. It felt wild, harsh, and forbidding, and it seemed steeped in melancholy. But it was also redolent of a beckoning mystery. I soon climbed gratefully back to the balance and beauty of the Velay.

On the last night of my journey I walked into the village of Le Monastier, not far south from Le Puy where I had begun, treated myself to a hotel, dined in a local restaurant, and strolled around the outer walls of the settlement on that clear evening, in a celebratory mood. The land dropped sharply away to the Gazeille River below the village, and I could look out towards the circle of puys pricking the horizon at dusk. I had enjoyed a conversation with the young chef at the restaurant and had told him of my walking tour; he considered it unusual and was impressed. I think he was also a little envious. Now the village was quiet and the light was faltering. In the gloom I happened upon a small plaque below the main road. It informed me that, in late September 1878, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson had commenced a twelve-day journey on foot with a donkey from this very village, and that the story of this adventure was told in his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).

I was thrilled and surprised by this revelation; thrilled that I had discovered this region myself (with some help from Beauvoir), completed my walk, and then inadvertently made this discovery on my last night, giving a certain symmetry to the journey, for I was finishing my walk where Stevenson, a century earlier, had begun his. I was surprised that any other foreigner had found the Velay, so secret and forgotten did it seem. It seemed odd that I had not known before of Stevenson’s investment in this place I had grown to love, that I was unfamiliar with his book, and that no one, not even our local chef, had mentioned him along the way. The plaque seemed a lone memorial to his passing, and I was grateful for it. Just as I was leaving the Velay, a new window of promise had been opened onto it. One day, perhaps, I would return to see it through Stevenson’s eyes.

Illustration by Walter Crane from Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879)

In the three decades since that accidental literary discovery, I returned often to take long walking tours in rural France – in the Vosges mountains, the Dordogne, in Brittany, Roussillon, and the eastern Pyrénées, the Gorges du Tarn, the western Auvergne, and twice, with my children, to the Velay. Aged six and eight, they enthusiastically walked all 183 kilometres of the GR40, the grande randonnée footpath that I followed in 1981 and that circles the plateau. Over the years we observed the slow depopulation of the fields; it became rare to meet with drovers on the path. But the landscape remained captivatingly beautiful and the little villages of basalt stayed much the same; certainly, the local dogs continued to signal my arrival with equal vehemence. The stone houses became less mysterious to me, for we were befriended by a local family.

In 1995 I bought Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, carried it in France in my rucksack, and once even read aloud from its opening chapter or two as we dangled our feet over the river Tarn in the south. But I barely managed to get Stevenson and his donkey more than a couple of kilometres from Le Monastier. Short book though it is, it somehow resisted its first full reading until we were on the trail itself.

Last year, finally, I returned with my grown-up children to walk Stevenson’s route. The book was again slipped into the pack, still unread. We did not know much about our chosen literary companion, except for his aura of fame. He was familiar from childhood, of course, as the author of A Child’s Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and other swashbuckling romantic and gothic tales. His words were known to both children and adults, his renown such that he was instantly recognisable by his initials. To me he was a Victorian figure, eminent, beloved, distant, and probably venerable. But RLS grew younger in our minds as we followed him. With every step the man became disentangled from the legend, and it was the younger Stevenson we came to know. He was twenty-seven at the time of this journey, still establishing himself as a writer; he was experimenting in life and prose; he was ill; he was in love; he was on the brink of the great decision of his life. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was just his second book, and it was a crucible for all this angst.

We began our pilgrimage, of course, at Le Monastier, where Stevenson spent a month of fine days before he bought a donkey and set off on the trail south. It is a mountain town amongst the puys where, as RLS put it: ‘As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hilltop rises and falls behind another.’ He found the landscape Scottish; the people had ‘abrupt, uncouth Fifeshire manners’. In the weeks before his journey, he became an object of considerable interest: every urchin seemed to know his name, his daily walks provoked questions about where he was going, and the local women, sitting in the street making lace, waylaid him to gossip. Stevenson spoke French, but it was his English they wanted to hear, which they regarded as a preposterous kind of patois. To hear him utter words like ‘bread’ was the height of entertainment, causing the younger women to ‘rise from their chairs and stamp about the street in ecstasy’. His novelty was partly due to the fact that he was ‘a man living of his own free will in Le Monastier’, but mostly due to his forthcoming excursion. ‘A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto unheard of in that district,’ he recorded. On account of his projected journey on foot, he was viewed with both contempt and respectful interest – contempt for his ridiculous and doomed ambition, and respectful interest in his courage and foolhardiness.

Map of Robert Louis Stevenson's route (from An Inland Voyage And Travels With A Donkey, ed. James Cloyd Bowman, 1918)

He was determined to have the freedom to camp out. This alone aroused attention and some concern – and a cacophony of warnings about the cold, wolves, robbers, and nocturnal practical jokers. Stevenson was equipped with a revolver. He fashioned a sleeping bag that could be a bed by night and a portmanteau by day; in other words, one that did not advertise his intention to every curious passer-by. This was vital, and we found it vital, too, 134 years later. Stevenson’s sleeping sack was made of green waterproof cloth on the outside and sheepskin on the inside. He could put on a fur cap, fold its hood down over his ears, and envelop himself in the sack. Should it rain, he would make a little tent over his head with his waterproof coat and a bent branch. These were the trappings of true independence on the trail.

‘Modestine was not just essential for Stevenson’s logistics and independence; she was also a literary expedient.’

But Stevenson was dependent on a beast of burden to carry this sleeping sack, along with his spirit lamp, lantern, candles, two changes of clothing, books, railway rug, cakes of chocolate, tins of Bologna sausage, a leg of cold mutton, bottle of Beaujolais, and an egg whisk with which to prepare his favourite morning tonic, the brandy egg-nog. He chose a donkey as his companion just before setting off. She was, at first sight, ‘a love’, ‘a darling’. He couldn’t stop reporting to friends at home that she was the colour of ‘an ideal mouse’. He bought her for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy and named her Modestine. He did not think of introducing Modestine to her load until the morning of their departure. Thus it was not from robbers or wolves that he would suffer, but from the pack and the donkey.

Modestine was not just essential for Stevenson’s logistics and independence; she was also a literary expedient. His letters home from Le Monastier reveal that it was always going to be a journey with a donkey, and he would later refer to it as his ‘donkey book’ or simply as Donkey. He judged perhaps that a donkey would give him good copy, and the opening chapters do indeed gain much of their drama and humour from his struggles with Modestine and her load. Modestine was docile, then she was wily; Stevenson was innocent, then he was brutish; Modestine would not be hurried; Stevenson wielded his staff with guilty vigour; the pair was condemned to a painful intimacy and an aching progress. On the way to Goudet and beyond, the pack on her back slewed left, then it slewed right, then it hung from her belly, then it exploded its contents all over the road. Onlookers laughed at him and gave advice.

Finally, the despairing Stevenson surrendered: he took on more of the weight himself and threw away some of his provisions. Out went the cold leg of mutton; out went the egg whisk. As the evening shadows of that first day fell on the distant heights of Mont Mézenc, Stevenson and Modestine found an uneasy truce and a moderate pace. The next morning the hotelier at Le Bouchet-Saint-Nicolas would fashion for Stevenson a ‘goad’ with which he could prick Modestine’s rump and propel her forward. The writer’s companion would provide more good copy the next day. And the donkey proved a good marketing strategy for Stevenson’s modest little book over the following century and more. But it was a different beast that was to stalk his imagination.

On the morning we were to walk into the forests of the Gévaudan, our host in the medieval town of Pradelles handed me the local newspaper with a photograph and headline that declared Le loup est arrivé! (The wolf has arrived!). It cited evidence that the wolf, which had verged on local extinction in the 1930s and then returned to France via the Italian Alps in the 1990s, was back in the Gévaudan, one of its most notorious former realms. Our host was stirring us by eagerly brandishing this news; he knew we had a tent and were determined to camp. As the owner of a chambres d’hôtes, it was not in his interest to encourage anyone to camp. Le loup has always had its human uses.

By morning the cold north wind that had swept us into town the evening before had become even stronger and colder. It was as if it were confirming our arrival in a new, harsher region. We were abruptly leaving the beautiful Velay and plunging off the plateau into the desolate lands of the Gévaudan. From Pradelles, sitting high above the Allier River, one gazes down onto forested ridges beneath glowering skies. This is the territory of ‘La Bête du Gévaudan’, a wolf or wolves that terrorised the populace in the mid-eighteenth century, killing about one hundred people between 1764 and 1767, mostly children and young women tending sheep and cattle.

La bête du Gévaudan, artist unknown, c.1762–64 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie)

‘The beast’ did not just attack, it devoured. It lunged for the neck, gored and mauled its victims, and wrenched heads from bodies. One woman’s crushed skull was carried to the edge of a wood some distance from her body and was not found until a week after her death. Another was killed just a few steps from her door. Twenty thousand peasants from one hundred parishes were drafted to comb the countryside and run it to ground in February 1765, and they failed. It teased and eluded a succession of royal hunters and kept on killing. La bête became a national sensation, securing the attention of the king and attracting commentaries from Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Frederick the Great, and Horace Walpole.

‘Stevenson – the nomadic representative of worldly modernity – seemed to stare impatiently over the cottage threshold into a rural past of superstition and fear.’

Stevenson carried a revolver, perhaps as much out of wariness of wolves as of bandits. If wolves survived anywhere in Europe in the late nineteenth century, he reasoned, it would be here: ‘For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves … he ate women and children and “shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty”; he pursued armed horsemen …’ Stevenson, keen for adventure, hoped he would meet a descendant of the creature. He even began to consider the beast as an ally. Following an encounter with a pair of girls near Fouzilhic who giggled and teased him (one stuck out her tongue), refusing him directions and bidding him to follow the cows, Stevenson exploded in his journal: ‘The Beast of Gévaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I began to think of him with sympathy.’

Stevenson also observed that the terror it had inspired remained active even a hundred years later. He encountered a man who would not venture out of his door at night, though Stevenson was lost and begged him for assistance on the road. The man stubbornly repeated the local logic: ‘It is night … I will not cross the door.’ Stevenson – the nomadic representative of worldly modernity – seemed to stare impatiently over the cottage threshold into a rural past of superstition and fear. He reflected that ‘if all the wolves had been as this wolf, they would have changed the history of man’.

But what if all the wolves had been as this wolf? Almost all the histories and stories of La Bête du Gévaudan rely on the belief that this was a singular wolf. It was extraordinarily large; it was deviantly fierce; it had a corrupted lust for blood; it was a werewolf. It was an unknown species; it was a hybrid; it was a hyena; it was a savage survivor from the prehistoric world. Its eyes had a satanic glow; it leapt gorges in a single bound; it was supernatural; it was an instrument of divine retribution. It was bred with malice; it was trained with purpose; it was manipulated by a psychotic human; it was a man in a wolf skin. All of these theories have been generated across the centuries, and most of them made their appearance within months of the first attacks. They continue today, feeding the modern hunger for forensic drama that focuses on analysing victims’ bodies to find the identity of the killer.

But what if the attacks were simply an intense but normal outbreak of predation by wolves moving through the district? The key question then becomes: why did this particular outbreak become a national sensation and whose interests did such a legend serve? This is the subject of a convincing new history of Monsters of the Gévaudan (2011) by the American scholar Jay M. Smith, whose work contributes to an exciting tradition of European micro-history, in which historians like Carlo Ginzburg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Alain Corbin make a single life or village or event historically luminous. Although fearing that his academic colleagues might disdain his book-length scrutiny of the phenomenon of la Bête, Smith fruitfully directs our attention away from infatuation with the character of the beast itself towards deeper questions about the social, historical, and environmental context of the making of the legend.

‘Historian Jean-Marc Moriceau has documented about 3000 fatal wolf attacks in France from the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, and estimates that the true number may have been three times that.’

Before pursuing this line of reasoning, though, we have to ask ourselves whether we are able to accept that normal wolves attack, lunge, gore, and decapitate. This is an important question for a walker with a tent at dusk in the Gévaudan. This was also the question posed by our teasing host in Pradelles as he farewelled us into the forest. The day was gloomy and the wind malevolent; the afternoon was closing in. The question seemed vital. Was the rough, untutored peasant who irked Stevenson by not venturing beyond his threshold at night a superstitious coward, as Stevenson thought, or was he actually a rational man steeped in remembered local experience?

Fatal wolf attacks were reasonably common in eighteenth-century France. Historian Jean-Marc Moriceau has documented about 3000 fatal wolf attacks in France from the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, and estimates that the true number may have been three times that. Intense and gruesome outbreaks of killing similar to that in the Gévaudan had occurred before: in the Gâtinais in the 1650s, the Limousin in the 1690s, the Touraine in the 1690s and 1740s, and the Auxerrois in the 1730s. Moriceau estimates that in mid-eighteenth-century France there was an average of one hundred fatal wolf attacks each year. Just a few years before the Gévaudan outbreak, a traveller passing through the Cévennes recorded his encounter with a threatening ‘legion’ of wolves that he thought ‘were coming to eat me’. He dispersed them with a shot from his pistol.

It was illegal for peasant tenants to possess firearms. The women and children of the wild and sparsely populated Gévaudan had only their batons with which to defend themselves and their herds and flocks. Though vulnerable, they had little choice but to play their roles in the desperate family economy. They were out there on the edge of the forests protecting one of their few assets – the stock they owned or controlled – while their husbands and fathers worked in the fields, gathered wood, or walked the roads looking for work. Sheep and cattle were precious resources; they fertilised the fields, provided milk, cheese, and cloth, and shared living quarters with the people, keeping them warm in the harsh winters of the Massif Central. These peasant families were exploited by their feudal-style landlords and benefited least from the small grain harvests of an agriculturally marginal district. In the late spring and summer, when the autumn harvest was still some months away, the migration of stock to the mountain pastures took their carers into more remote country. The women and children would have been isolated, scared, undernourished. They were hungry – and so were the wolves.

As we walked the melancholy forest paths of the Gévaudan and contemplated our evening camp, we discussed la Bête and what might be real and what might be imagined (although it was only on our return that we were able to find, and hungrily devour, Jay M. Smith’s book). The wind was icy and the country as desolate as Stevenson had found it. We encountered the same brusque rudeness in the tiny settlement of Fouzilhac (very close to Fouzilhic) where Stevenson had met the man who would not cross the door. A woman who was undoubtedly his descendant seemed startled by our presence and waved us dismissively away. Nightfall was briskly upon us and a rare grassy sward under pines just off the track was welcome. We did not want to be seen by either beast or man.

We spent that night listening to the same wind in the same pines as Stevenson had – the ‘concert of the wind among the woods’ was his ‘lullaby’, as it was ours – but we had a slightly better idea of where we were. Although he had spent the evening lost and stumbling in the dark, by morning he was exhilarated by his survival and feeling of renewal. ‘I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan – not knowing north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway – was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised.’ It was not just the wind, the mist, the dark, and the mud that disoriented Stevenson, say locals today, but also a renowned regional disturbance of the earth’s magnetic field. It was perfectly understandable that he didn’t know north from south or Fouzilhic from Fouzilhac.

If wolf predation was so much a part of remote rural life, why did the attacks in the Gévaudan become a national sensation? The first attacks in the summer of 1764, however shocking, were probably accepted locally as a natural hazard. But they continued, and several factors then worked towards presenting the killings as the work of one extraordinary beast. Local superstitions about werewolves, witches, and demons were probably the least of the exacerbations. More influential, argues Smith, were the opinions and purposes of urban, educated élites: scientists, journalists, noblemen, the bishop, and the king. Scientists were beginning to take a strong interest in natural exotica, in analysing hybrid species, and in separating real from imagined monsters. Journalists were creating a national audience for sensational stories, and printed newspapers were winning a new and broader audience. The beast went viral because of a new kind of media. The Seven Years’ War had finished just the year before its appearance, leaving newspaper columnists seeking local tales of blood and battle. Returned French veterans, having tasted humiliating defeat abroad, were desperate to redeem their honour at home, and eagerly led hunting parties in search of an enemy they might hope to vanquish (and whose singular and legendary qualities they were keen to exaggerate).

‘The beast went viral because of a new kind of media. The Seven Years’ War had finished just the year before its appearance, leaving newspaper columnists seeking local tales of blood and battle.’

The bishop and the king also saw an opportunity to manipulate their pawns. The bishop of Mende, the cathedral city of the region, called for public prayers and issued an official circular – ‘a masterpiece of provocation’, says Smith – invoking the beast as the wrath of God and blaming ‘this extraordinary scourge’ on the spiritual waywardness of the people themselves. ‘A ferocious beast, unknown in our latitudes, appears all of a sudden as if miraculously, without anyone knowing from whence it came … it is because you have offended GOD … What dissolution and what disorder in the youth of our day!’ Louis XV, experiencing political difficulties, saw an opportunity to foster both fear and loyalty with his personal interest in the peasants’ sufferings and his offer of a reward for the killing of ‘the beast’. Identifying and vilifying an enemy and waging a phoney war have long been the strategies of politicians in domestic trouble.

Thus there was a mentalité in the 1760s where, as Smith puts it, ‘many could accept, and even expect, the presence of a monster’. A single beast had to be found and killed; a single, extraordinary beast had to be presented to the king. But the creature proved strangely elusive, especially for the royal hunters, and so its legend grew. And when a wolf was trophied, stuffed, embalmed, and taken to the royal court in Versailles, it was disappointingly normal in size … and soon the killings in the Gévaudan continued. It was now that the very élites who had whipped up the sense of crisis began to feel some embarrassment at inciting popular belief in a monster, and thus they began to attribute the legend to rural superstition. Meanwhile, the beleaguered peasants of the Gévaudan continued to shelter anxiously behind their portals at night.

Figure du Monstre qui désole le Gévaudan, artist unknown c.1762–64 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie)

What is intriguing about the legend of la Bête is the way it emanates from a moment in Western history when we were on the brink of modernity. The ancien régime is tottering, the French Revolution is brewing, the birth of the modern world is imminent. It is exactly this kind of knowing hindsight that has shaped the legend of the beast. In post-revolutionary France, the beast of the Gévaudan came to represent the traditional, rural, superstitious world from which rational modernity freed itself. The beast was the creation of ignorant peasants and credulous women, explained nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban males. It was part of the world we had to leave behind to become who we are, a world where such a monster might be thought to exist. It was thus both fantastical and necessary. It was a childhood nightmare, a rite of passage from which adult consciousness emerged. In this way, the singularity of the beast and its legendary qualities were strengthened in storytelling even by rational moderns, and the real historical context further suppressed. There is an archaeology of forgetfulness at the heart of modernity.

Could the beast have seeded France’s revolutionary fervour? Surely not. Yet this is an argument made by Simon Schama in his passionate narrative history of the French Revolution, Citizens (1989). One of this book’s earliest illustrations is a contemporary drawing of ‘The hyena of the Gévaudan’. Schama’s purpose in Citizens is to move away from a focus on structures and inexorable forces of social change and back towards the unforeseen influences of events and personalities – to opt for ‘chaotic authenticity’. He begins the book with a pen portrait of Gilbert de Lafayette, who figured in both the American and French Revolutions. Where did this revolutionary hero’s deeply felt allegiance to the cause of Liberty come from? Schama’s answer is that Lafayette spent his childhood in the ‘craggy, forested uplands of the Auvergne’ where his ‘Romantic imagination was left to run happily wild’. He was eight years old when ‘the beast’ was wreaking full terror, and its wildness penetrated his consciousness. The boy identified with the animal and, together with a friend, roamed the woods in the hope of a chance encounter. ‘Even at the age of eight,’ wrote Lafayette, ‘my heart beat in sympathy with the hyena.’ Schama concludes that ‘what began with childish acts of sympathy for recalcitrant animals would not long after flower in a generalised preference for liberty over authority, spontaneity over calculation, candour over artifice, friendship over hierarchy, heart over head and nature over culture. That was the making of a revolutionary temper.’

Romanticism, suggests Schama, ‘supplied a crucial ingredient in the mentality of the revolutionary elite: its association of liberty with wildness.’ And also of wildness with violence, for in Schama’s history violence was not just an unpleasant ‘aspect’ of the Revolution, an unfortunate by-product of politics. Rather, ‘violence was the Revolution itself’. From its beginning, the Revolution was ‘powered by brutality’; it was both sublime and terrible. Schama concludes that ‘What began with Lafayette’s infatuation with the hyena of the Gévaudan surely ended in the ceremonies of the pike-stuck heads.’

‘To our postmodern sensibilities, the traditional world looks more rational than we thought and our own times more superstitious.’

That threshold over which Stevenson gazed – that defended doorway in Fouzilhac beyond which the local farmer would not step – was not, after all, a clear boundary between archaic and modern, between superstition and reason. To our postmodern sensibilities, the traditional world looks more rational than we thought and our own times more superstitious. The rural farmer at that door was unkind but rational, and the urban traveller who confronted him was dreamy and lost. In Australia in the 1980s, intelligent citizens disdained the testimony of Aboriginal people and refused to accept that a dingo could take a baby from a tent in a national park. They preferred to believe that Azaria, the name of the baby, meant ‘Sacrifice in the Wilderness’ and that spray paint and milk under a car dashboard were infant blood. They found a monster in a Seventh-day Adventist woman who refused to cry for the television cameras. Monsters, like Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, often erupt uncontrollably from inside ourselves, and are projections of our anxieties whipped up by opinion-makers, politicians, bishops and radio shock jocks.

'Stevenson and the Lair of the Beast': a poster advertising a museum in Pradelles

Environmentalists are among the latest to fuel the legend of the beast of the Gévaudan, arguing that a normal wolf could not have killed like that. Gérard Ménatory, promoter of a wolf park in the region and keen to rehabilitate the reputation of the wolf, argues from his knowledge of wolves today that the beast of the 1760s was a hyena, probably trained by a human. Another wolf advocate favours the theory of a wolf–dog hybrid also led by a sinister trainer, and another in 2004 identified the beast as a ‘hemicyon’, a species of dog-bear thought to have become extinct over five million years ago, but one specimen of which remarkably survived until the eighteenth century in the remote Gévaudan.

A few weeks after our walk, in October 2012, the newspapers Midi Libre and La Lozère Nouvelle reported from the town of Pont-de-Montvert the first convincing evidence that the wolf had returned, finally, to the slopes of Mont Lozère. Some footprints had been photographed and identified with ‘near certainty’. Several attacks on livestock had been reported. A blurred night-time silhouette of the creature was published. There had been local meetings to consider the threat and possible responses. It was pronounced a scourge (un fléau) that must be removed and defeated or else society and economy in the region would be in peril … c’est un combat pour vivre! Sheep and wolves don’t go together, said farmers. The wolf does not just threaten lives, it threatens livelihoods, they argued, for the economy and heritage of the Cévennes depends on a history of transhumance pastoralism, on a humanised landscape, not on wild nature. But is there not a place for wild species in our lives, ask the naturalists of the Lozère?

In July, in a little village in the Velay, a horse was killed and found partly devoured. Its head and neck were especially attacked, its eyes and ears eaten. ‘I grew up with horses but I’ve never seen anything so horrible,’ confessed a villager to Paris Match. Locals wondered: ‘What kind of beast could attack with such savagery? What are the thickening forests of the mountains hiding?’ Last year the local mayor saw a big cat with a long tawny tail. Some think it is a puma from South America, never before seen on the European continent.

I think it is a curious and disabling dimension of our humanity that we are often simply unable to accept the power of nature. We constantly underestimate nature, and think we can control, tame, and master it, whether it be wolf or dingo. When it takes us unawares, we strive to find an extraordinary explanation rather than an ordinary one. Rather than be humble and respectful in the face of wild nature, we look to implicate humanity or circumstance in a singular explanation.

It is the same with the wild beast of the Australian forests – fire – which regularly roars out of the bush and consumes people. Our research focuses on ‘the beast’, on fire itself – on its physical attributes, the way it moves and consumes, and its effect on victims – but less often on the social, ecological, and historical context of its making. Rather than accepting its certain return as part of the ecological cycle of the forest, we look instead to blame an errant human – a distracted leader, a negligent power company, a sinister arsonist – for its exceptional appearance. Thus we are unprepared when, inevitably, the beast returns.

The author descending from Mount Lozère (photograph by Billy Griffiths)

On the barren summit of Mont Lozère, you are on the threshold of new country, if only you can see it. The stark granite standing stones of the old transhumance trail march you through the mist to the top, then release you into a landscape that is at once prettier and more imposing. As we descended into the valley of Pont-de-Montvert, the brutal north wind dropped and the Mediterranean sun strengthened. Soon we were bathing in a deep, dark pool of the Mimente River, a tributary of the Tarn that drains the mountains of the Cévennes. Historian Napoléon Peyrat wrote in 1842 that these waters ran purple with the blood of the Camisards, the French Protestants who from 1702 to 1705 fought a guerrilla war against the oppression of their religion by the king. Peyrat walked here in 1837 in search of their history and gazed with reverence at the peaks above our remote swimming hole; those rugged summits had been the stronghold of the Camisards, and the forest glades through which we walked had been their church.

From Mont Lozère, Stevenson gazed down into the country of the Camisards with keen anticipation. He had grown up on the ‘blood-curdling tales’ of the persecution of the Scottish Calvinists by the English king in the seventeenth century, and now he had come to the Cévennes to learn about their French cousins, the Calvinists of the South. Squeezed into Modestine’s unwieldy packroll (and not thrown out with the egg whisk) were the two volumes of the 1842 edition of Peyrat’s romantic history of the war of the Cévennes, all one thousand pages of them. Stevenson grumpily stubbed his toe on Volume Two when it was lurking at the bottom of his sleeping bag during his camp in the dark near Fouzilhic.

‘[Stevenson] walked to lose himself in the rhythm and exhilaration of day-long exercise, and to allow pure feeling to ambush his thoughts.’

I knew from the start that we were on a pilgrimage, but it took me a while to understand that he was on one, too. We followed Stevenson, who followed Peyrat, who himself retraced the secret paths of the Camisards, who were suffering a reprise of the Wars of Religion that upset French society from the mid-sixteenth century. Thus does the layered past deepen and disturb the ephemeral present. The bishop of Mende, who invoked the Beast of Gévaudan as God’s punishment and who stirred religious fear among his Catholic flock, had been a young man at the time of the Camisard revolt. He was ever after on guard against spiritual enemies storming the valleys from mountain forests.

It was early evening when we left the village of Bleymard and began to climb Mont Lozère, hoping to find a flat patch of earth for our tent before nightfall. We scouted the forest and found a glade of pines that opened northwards towards the valley we had just crossed. As the sun set, we ate our picnic of cheese, sausage, and baguette. After dark we read some more pages of Stevenson’s Travels by the light of a torch. It was important not to read too far ahead of ourselves, but to let the book be our daily, surprising companion. How would our friend’s day finish here under the pines on the southern edges of the Gévaudan?

The light had also been fading for Stevenson as he began this same climb towards the summit that would take him into the country of the Camisards. He had come on this journey to experience this landscape and learn its history, but also to take ‘the walking cure’. He walked to lose himself in the rhythm and exhilaration of day-long exercise, and to allow pure feeling to ambush his thoughts. A few weeks earlier, his American lover, Fanny Osbourne, had suddenly left him to rejoin her estranged husband in California. Did Stevenson and Osbourne have a future together? Would he pursue her across the Atlantic?

Below the crest of the mountain, he found a dell of green turf under the pines, fed Modestine, buckled himself into his sack, and fell asleep. At two in the morning, an ‘inaudible summons’ woke him. It was the magic time of night ‘when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere’. His mind was clear and his heart at peace: ‘I have never tasted a more perfect hour of life.’ All was silent about him except for the sound of Modestine browsing and a stream running over stones. As he lazily smoked a cigarette and gazed at the stars through the trees, and as he contemplated the country through which he had travelled, Stevenson felt exaltation at his solitude. But in that very same moment he also knew that something was lacking – ‘For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.’ Something inside him quietly shifted. The path lay before him. There was a summit still to reach, and beyond that a new world beckoned.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My thanks to Simone de Beauvoir for The Prime of Life (Penguin, 1965), Jay M. Smith for Monsters of the Gévaudan (Harvard University Press, 2011), Jean-Marc Moriceau for Histoire du Méchant Loup (Fayard, 2007), Simon Schama for Citizens (Penguin, 1989), Richard Holmes for his own pilgrimage in Footsteps (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), Napoléon Peyrat for Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert (two volumes, Librairie de Marc Aurel Frères, 1842), to the wonderful Guillot family, and to RLS himself.