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WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
in a Word, whatever the most Celebrated Authors have written in favour
of a great many Superstitious Practices. 6
In the first misadventure that befalls M. Oufle as a result of his
credulous approach to such material, he believes he has been transformed
into a wolf after a drunken Carnival celebration, and runs
howling through the streets dressed in a bear skin. By presenting the
folly of superstition and the virtue of reason through such episodes,
Bordelon clearly anticipated the concerns taken up by the Enlightenment
philosophers.
The satirizing of irrational or superstitious behaviour was, however,
only part of Bordelon’s project. His emphasis on the uncritical reading
practices of M. Oufle and his son (the Abbot Doudou) constitutes
the more important aspect of his work. Chapter two of the novel is a
catalogue of the books in M. Oufle’s library, annotated with satirical
comments; of the French demonologist Jean Bodin’s De la Demonomanie
des Sorciers (1580), for example, Bordelon wrote that ‘’tis a
Collection made with more Application than Judgment’. 7 Similarly,
the Abbot Doudou is described as a man who ‘religiously believ’d that
all he met with extraordinary in Books was true, not being able to
persuade himself that their Authors would have been so unjust as to
have printed such wonderful things, if they had not been true’. 8 The
principal message of Bordelon’s novel, then, is that all that is published
is not necessarily true, and that the cultivation of an independent and
critical approach to reading and learning is therefore essential.
Bordelon’s choice of lycanthropy as the theme for M. Oufle’s inaugural
adventure suggests that he found the subject ideal for his
caution against imprudent faith in the claims made in books. In
the context of late-eighteenth-century science, the possibility of a
human’s transformation into a wolf seemed unlikely, and yet a considerable
body of literature testifying to or at least debating just that
possibility might have seemed to confirm the reality of werewolves
for many readers. By recognizing that the mythology and imagery of
lycanthropy had been primarily elaborated in various textual contexts,
Bordelon also presaged the manner in which the myth would be duly
elaborated.
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