Maurice Sand & the Lubins

Grove Koger

In my July 1, 2018, post about the winter that French writer George Sand and Polish composer Frédéric Chopin spent on the island of Majorca, I mentioned that the couple were accompanied by Sand’s son, Maurice, and reproduced his drawing of one of the houses that the party leased. It was while researching the subject further that I realized I was actually familiar with another of Maurice’s works.

One of my purchases at Boise’s Book Shop when I was young was The Werewolf by Montague Summers (1880-1948), an exhaustive investigation of what Summers called “that most terrible and depraved of all the bond slaves of Satan.” I actually found Summers’ book a little dry—fun to dip into but not the kind of thing I cared to read from cover to cover. However, it contained a frontispiece that has remained in my mind’s eye for decades.

The black-and-white image was labeled “Les Lupins” and was credited to one Maurice Sand. Well, that name meant nothing to me all those decades ago, but now it does. Born on June 30, 1823, and known formally as Jean-Françoise-Maurice-Arnauld, Baron Dudevant, he grew up to be a lepidopterist and writer, producing novels, now completely forgotten, and a detailed study of the commedia dell’arte. Having studied for a time under famous French painter Eugene Delacroix, he also worked as an illustrator.

One of the books that Maurice illustrated was his mother’s Légendes rustiques. (rustic legends), an 1858 collection of twelve peasants’ legends from province of Berry in central France. Maurice prepared an atmospheric engraving to accompany each one, and his contribution to the last—“Lubins ou Lupins”—shows nearly a dozen wolf-like creatures standing on hind legs and leaning casually against a cemetery wall at night.

According to George Sand’s text, which I’m adapting from a machine translation, lubins aren’t quite werewolves. “Sorrowful, dreamy and stupid spirits,” she writes, “they spend their lives chatting in an unknown language along the walls of cemeteries. In some places they are accused of breaking into the field of rest and gnawing on bones. In the latter case, they belong to the race of lycanthropes and werewolves, and must be called lupins. But in the case of lubins, manners soften with the name. They do no harm and escape at the slightest sound.”

As I’ve mentioned, Sand’s engraving is labeled “Les Lupins,” suggesting that he himself wasn’t paying too much attention to the distinction his mother was making. But as students of the field are wont to remind us, the study of lycanthropy isn’t an exact science.

The most striking aspect of Maurice’s engraving is that it’s not just ominous and unnerving, but funny as well. I grin every time I look at it. It’s a commonplace that tragedy and farce have much in common, and, in depicting these bizarre but timid creatures, the artist shows that the same is true of horror and humor.

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Montague Summers (1880-1948) was an English clergyman who claimed to believe that werewolves, vampires and the like were real. He converted to Catholicism in 1909 and began to pass himself off as the Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, although it’s not clear that he ever took orders. A colorful, puzzling and controversial individual, he deserves an entry of his own, which I’ll be putting together this year or next.