Legends -- Pyrenees; Pyrenees -- Description and travel; Pyrenees -- History
Montréjeau was the capital of the Marquesate of Montespan. The site
is beautiful; and from the terrace, in clear weather, the giants of
the Pyrenees are seen to stand up due south, and the chain stretches
away into the vaporous distance, east and west. The church has a huge
octagonal tower that served as keep to the fortress. The town stands
a little away from the station, to its disadvantage. From it visitors
usually start to see the Grotte de Gargas, the finest in the Pyrenees;
it might be visited equally well from S. Bertrand de Cominges, but that
no carriage can be obtained in that decayed city. The train, moreover,
halts at Aventignan, the station next before reaching Montréjeau, to
allow of a visit to the grotto. The floor bristles with stalagmites,
and the stalactites from the roof have in several places united with
the stalagmites below. The strangest forms have been assumed by the
calcareous deposits, and the custodian points out an organ front, a
cascade, a bear, an altar, and the bed of the savage. A spring rises
in the cave. Excavations made in the floor have exposed two beds of
palæontological deposits of different epochs: human bones, flint tools,
and bones of long extinct animals.
The discovery of this grotto is due to a series of ghastly crimes
committed just ten years before the outbreak of the French Revolution.
A panic terror pervaded the neighbourhood. Among the rocks, somewhere,
none knew exactly where, a monster had his lair, fell upon those who
travelled along the roads, robbed them, maltreated them, carried
them off, and devoured them. And this monster was a man. In 1780
the Parliament of Languedoc was called upon to try and sentence the
cannibal, who was actuated by no other motive than a ravening appetite
for human flesh.
Soon after the first disappearance of his victims every one had come
to the conclusion as to who he was. He was Blaise Ferrage, commonly
known as Seyé, a native of Ceseau, born in 1757. He was a small man,
broad-shouldered, with unusually long arms, and was possessed of
extraordinary strength. By trade he was a stonemason, and had worked at
his trade till aged twenty-two. What induced him, in 1779, to throw up
his work, quit his home and human society, in order to abandon himself
in solitude to his wolfish appetite for blood, is not known; whether
it was originally due to his having committed some criminal act that
impelled him to fly to the rocks for refuge was never ascertained.
High up in a limestone cliff he discovered a cavern, the entrance to
which was at that time so small that it had to be passed through on all
fours. But within it was spacious, and provided with a running stream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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