Sometimes they told stories: that of the Black Pig which guarded a treasure with a red key in its mouth; or that of the Orleans beast, which had a man's face and bat's wings, with hair down to the ground, two horns, and two tails (one to lay hold with and the other to kill with), which monster had devoured a Rouen traveller, of whom nothing remained but his hat and boots.
At other times they told tales about the wolves which, for centuries, had devastated La Beauce. In days of old, when La Beauce, now stripped and bare, had a few clumps of trees left out of its primeval forests, countless packs of wolves, urged by hunger, issued forth in winter time to prey upon the flocks. Women and children were devoured, and the old country-folk remembered how, in heavy falls of snow, the wolves would enter the towns. At Cloyes, they would be heard howling in the Place Saint-Georges; at Rognes, they would sniff round the imperfectly closed doors of the cow-houses and sheep-pens. Then came a succession of hackneyed anecdotes: of the miller surprised by five large wolves, and putting them to flight by lighting a match; of the little girl chased for two leagues by a she-wolf, and eaten up just at her own door, where she tripped and fell; legends upon legends of wer-wolves, men changed to animals, who leaped upon the necks of belated travellers, and ran them to death.
But what froze the blood of the girls gathered round the slim candle, what made them take wildly to flight and scan the darkness apprehensively as they left the house, was the villany of the _Chauffeurs_,[4] the notorious Orgères band of sixty years ago, at the thought of which the whole country-side still trembled.
There were hundreds of them, tramps, beggars, deserters, spurious pedlars--men, women, and children, all living by robbery, murder, and debauchery. They were the descendants of the old armed and disciplined troops of brigands, and, taking advantage of the revolutionary disturbances, they laid formal siege to lonely houses, into which they burst like bomb-shells, breaking the doors in with battering-rams. When night came on, they issued forth like wolves from the forest of Dourdan and the copses of La Conie, the wooded lairs wherein they lurked; and, with the darkening shadows, terror fell upon the farmers of La Beauce, from Etampes to Châteaudun, and from Chartres to Orleans.