Courtaut, the tailless wolf of Paris

Paris in the 1430s was worn down by the Hundred Years' War. Villages stood abandoned. Famine gripped the region from 1437 to 1439, and the winters were severe.

An anonymous Parisian kept a diary through these years, now known as the Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris. It runs from 1405 to 1449. In July 1421 the diarist recorded starving wolves digging up buried bodies. In 1423 they came into Paris every night. In December 1438 they came in by the river and took the dogs. Behind the cemetery of the Innocents, at night, they ate a child.

Then came the autumn of 1439. The wolves were, in the chronicler's words, "si esragez de menger cher de homme, de femme ou d'enfens", so mad to eat the flesh of man, woman or child. In the last week of September they strangled and ate 14 people, young and old, between Montmartre and the Porte Saint-Antoine. In the vineyards and in the marshes. When they found a herd, they attacked the herdsman and left the animals alone.

One wolf stood above the rest. People believed it alone had done more harm than all the others. It had no tail, and so it was called Courtaut. Parisians spoke of it as they would of a forest bandit or a cruel captain, and warned each other: "Gardez vous de Courtaut." Beware of Courtaut.

The eve of St Martin, 10 November 1439. The terrible wolf was hunted down, though the Journal does not say how. It does say what came next. Courtaut was put in a wheelbarrow, mouth open, and taken through Paris. People left their work, their meals and their errands to see it, and the collection came to more than ten francs.

The danger did not end with it. On 16 December the wolves came suddenly and strangled four housewives. The following Friday they attacked 17 people around Paris. Eleven died of their bites.

In 1937 Ernest Thompson Seton retold the story as "Courtaud, the King Wolf of France". By Seton's own admission, it was "embellished and expanded with the utmost freedom." The climax moved to the Parvis of Notre-Dame. Twenty slaughtered cattle served as bait, the gates were shut, and Courtaud and Captain Boisselier of the city guard killed each other at the cathedral door. Daniel P. Mannix kept the cattle trap in the 1978 novel The Wolves of Paris.

From about 2010, web retellings moved the date to the winter of 1450. A pack was trapped, speared and stoned in front of Notre-Dame, with about 40 dead. Later tolls rose to "dozens" and then "several hundred". None of these versions cites a medieval source. The Journal records no such scene.

The animal itself is no mystery. Historians, among them Jean-Marc Moriceau of the University of Caen, treat the attacks as real. They point to war, famine, unburied dead and vulnerable people. The wolves digging up graves in 1421 suggest scavenging that turned into predation. Guesses about an Iberian wolf or a hybrid rest on a reddish coat the chronicle never mentions.

In 1461, under Louis XI, 227 wolves were officially killed in the viscounty of Paris over six months. Courtaut now stands beside the Beast of Gévaudan in the long history of French wolf terrors. Its true record is brief. A tailless wolf, a hunt on the eve of St Martin, and a wheelbarrow rolling through the streets.