Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
His father was kneeling on the floor with his arms around her and his head lying on the pillow close to hers. "Come, father," he said softly, as he tried to raise him. There was no reply. He bent over and peered into the two quiet faces. The legend of the loup-garou had no place in the land they had entered. A Christmas Adventure.
The fire was burning high and clear, lighting rafters and their curious brown tassels of smoked meat, and making the crucifix over the bed shine out the whitest spot in a smoke-stained room. "Father Gaspard," inquired Sainte-Hélène suddenly, "did you ever hear of such a thing as a loup-garou?"
"I will say this for a loup-garou, Father Gaspard: a loup-garou may have a harder time in this world than the other beasts, but he is no coward; he can make a good death." Ashes spun out over the floor, and smoke rolled up around the joists, as Sainte-Hélène shut himself into the darkness. Not satisfied with barring the door, the old habitant pushed his chest against it.
The Countess whispered: "She has seen the sunbeams slanting through the trees." "Vrai, c’est moi, Anne Le Bihan, qui vous dites cela, mon Capitaine! And, in the Woods of Aulnes the werewolf prowls. I have seen him, gallant gentleman. He walks upright, and, in his head, he has only eyes; no mouth, no teeth, no nostrils, and no hair the Loup-Garou!
Did not all the village folk talk about it, and regret that someone had not met the beast before it was drowned, and drawn blood from it so as to release Arsene? Has he ever been seen since? We have known of others like him who have disappeared and have never been seen again. How can we deceive ourselves and say there is no loup-garou?
It was as if the forest nymphs had made of this their bedchamber, sheltered through all the seasons of the year from wind and rain and snow; or else that the were-wolf people the loup-garou had chosen it as their hiding-place and from its weird and gloomy fastnesses went forth on their ghostly missions among the sons of men. Not a bird twittered in the trees.
It flitted like a shadow from one trunk to the other so swiftly that De Catinat could not have told whether it were beast or human. And then again he saw it, and yet again, sometimes one shadow, sometimes two shadows, silent, furtive, like the loup-garou with which his nurse had scared him in his childhood.
He did not exactly believe the werewolf story, although it had so impressed him that he could not help making the picture; but he did not like to think of it in connection with the mysterious absence of Brother Basil. A priest of the Church might be able to defy a loup-garou, but if the wolves were real ones they might not know him from any ordinary man.
I need not enter into the details of a hundred devices that I employed to circumvent this 'loup-garou'; there was no combination of strychnine, arsenic, cyanide, or prussic acid, that I did not essay; there was no manner of flesh that I did not try as bait; but morning after morning, as I rode forth to learn the result, I found that all my efforts had been useless.
Marie de France in her "Lays" included the Breton romance of Bisclaveret, the loup-garou. The nerves of the weaker ones began to play them tricks. It was less and less easy to keep unbroken the orderly round of monastic life. This little religious community, toiling earnestly and faithfully under wise direction, might in time bring some comfort and prosperity into a desolate land.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking