Beaugrand's "The Werwolves”

I'd promised some further thoughts on the story, and while I have a longer piece on the subject in the works, here are some before it gets too much more past Christmas (hey, Spectrum's Music Choice channel is still playing Christmas songs!):

Certainly from my perspective Corporal Baptiste Tranchemontagne got more or less what was coming to him. I’d say the same of my (adoptive) maternal ancestor Colonel William Crawford (1722-1782) who died a somewhat similar death in reality to Baptiste’s fictional one.

The frame tale’s Christmas eve setting of storytelling, the unreliable narrators, the self-serving narrators, the critical remarks about the "fool or poltroon" of a watchman (who's punished), the trapper “evidently proud to have the occasion to recite his exploits,” and the listeners, “a crowd of superstitious adventurers, whose credulous curiosity was instantly awakened by the promise of a story that would appeal to their love of the supernatural," and Sergeant Bellehumeur who relates a story in which the key events are things he did not witness but heard second or third-hand - that all seems to me to make a case for Beaugrand as the author not meaning that we his readers (of 1898 or today) are supposed to automatically take the side of the soldiers in the story and believe what they say. He gave us many reasons not to believe them.

I’m not convinced that it is a given that there were any werewolves in the story, just that the possibility is open for the reader's interpretation. Uncertainty, an unresolved tension between the uncanny (the seemingly supernatural explained by the natural) and the marvelous (genuinely supernatural) is very characteristic of ghost stories in general - Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw being an oft-cited example.

Beaugrand was a folklorist, and after the story’s initial appearance in The Century magazine, it was reprinted in his anthology La Chasse Galerie: Légendes Canadiennes /La Chasse Galerie And Other Canadian Stories following the titular Christmas ghost story. Regarding the content, one historian has written “though Beaugrand was credited as the author, many of these stories had been around for generations—maybe centuries—and were preserved with various regional inflections across the province.” https://querythepast.com/french-canad...

Beaugrand was widely-traveled, across "Europe, the United States, Mexico, Japan, China, India and the northern part of Africa" and actively interested in other cultures. A number of details regarding his studies and travels can be found in Frank M. Guttman's Honoré Beaugrand: a Traditional “Rouge”? Rev. Ed. Xlibris US, 2019. Guttman also described at least one short story Beaugrand wrote with sympathetic Native American people in a central role, “Liowata, épisode de 1759.” L’Écho du Canada [Fall River]. August-September 1873. And for what it's worth, the book also includes a photograph of Beaugrand with "Chief Crowfoot [of the Siksika Nation, Blackfoot Confederacy] and his adopted brother Three Bulls," the possible date of which may be suggested by a short international news item I'd found:

AN INDIAN INTERVIEWED.
—
Crowfoot, the Blackfoot Chief, Gives His Experience of the Rebellion.
MONTREAL.—Oct. 1.—Crowfoot, the Blackfoot chief who was loyal to the [Dominion?] government during the recent rebellion, has arrived here, accompanied by his brother Three Bulls, and was presented with an address by Mayor Beaugrand.
Daily Evening Bulletin [Mayville, KY]. October 1, 1886: 1 col 3.

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None of which is to say that Beaugrand was necessarily free of racist beliefs or actions. However, he seems to have been relatively decent for his time (the story being published in 1898), and I don't think characters in one of his stories with episodes set during 1705-1706 and "many years prior" can in isolation be taken to have been voicing his own beliefs. Rather, the characters might reasonably accurately reflect the time in which they were set?

Including the story was also part of my desire not to interpret my charge of finding "American Victorian Christmas ghost stories" overly narrowly, but to go with North America (I'd have included a Mexican story too, had I found one).

One writer had observed, "the fiction of French Canada has traditionally been slighted by American and English critics. 19th century French Canadian genre fiction has been particularly ignored." Nevins, Jess. “QUAINT #30: ‘The Werwolves’ by Honoré Beaugrand.” QUAINT: The Quest for Unusual & Adventurous International Notations & Tales. September 7, 2011. https://beyondvictoriana.com/2011/09/...

I didn't care to number myself among those slighting or ignoring the contributions of that literature.

Nevin's article is one of several examples of the story being given some critical attention, others including:
Scott, Shannon. "Female werewolf as monstrous other in Honoré Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’." She-Wolf: A Cultural History of Wemale Werewolves, edited by Hannah Priest. Manchester UP, 2015.
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray (2002) Upright Citizens on All Fours: Nineteenth-Century Identity and the Image of the Werewolf, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24:1, 1-16, DOI: 10.1080/08905490290031767
Franck, Kaja. “‘The Worst Loups-Garous That One Can Meet’: Reading the Werewolf in the Canadian ‘Wilderness.’” Gothic Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 64–80. doi:10.3366/gothic.2020.0038 . https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/ful...
Thomas, G. W. "The Strangest Northerns: Henry Beaugrand Style." Darkworlds Quarterly: The Culture of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror. May 3, 2020. https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas....

None focused much on the Christmas aspect, the idea of the story fitting in the Christmas ghost story tradition. I thought it was worth considering that way. But, of course, not everyone will agree!