Sometimes, these loup-garoux are madmen, whose insanity has taken this monomaniacal form; as in the instance of the vintager near Padua, in the sixteenth century, who was apprehended on a charge of furiously biting his neighbours on pretence of his lycanthropic propensities. When reminded that his face was unchanged, while the real loup-garoux have always a wolfish physiognony, he asserted that he was permitted to wear his wolf-skin inwards; whereupon the barbarous village tribunal by which he was tried, ordered his hands to be amputated and skinned, to ascertain the truth of the assertion!
Inflammation ensued, and the wretched lunatic died of his wounds!—
CHAPTER L.
APOCRYPHAL ANIMALS.
The tarantula is a spider about the size of a nut; the head being surmounted by two horns charged with venomous matter. It has also antennæ which become violently agitated at the sight of its prey; with eight legs, and the same number of eyes, usually of a grey colour, but occasionally marked with livid spots upon a blueish ground. This variety is considered the most dangerous. The tarantula is hairy in the body, and lies torpid in the earth during winter. It revives at the return of spring, when the inhabitants of the district wear half boots for the protection of their legs.
In the month of June which is their breeding season, their venom acquires more virulence. The part wounded by this animal becomes livid, yellow, or black; and the victim sinks into despondency, as in cases of hydrophobia. The following account of the bite of a tarantula is borrowed from the letters of the physician St. André.
A Neapolitan soldier who had been bitten by a tarantula, though apparently cured, suffered from an annual attack of delirium, after which he used to sink into a state of profound melancholy; his face becoming livid, his sight obscure, his power of breathing checked, accompanied by sighs and heavings. Sometimes he fell senseless, and devoid of pulsation; ejecting blood from his nose and mouth, and apparently dying. Recourse was had to the influence of music; and the patient began to revive at the sound, his hands marking the measure, and the feet being similarly affected. Suddenly rising and laying hold of a bystander, he began to dance with the greatest agility during an uninterrupted course of four-and-twenty hours. His strength was supported by administering to him wine, milk, and fresh eggs. If he appeared to relapse; the music was repeated, on which he resumed his dancing. This unfortunate being used to fall prostrate if the music accidentally stopped, and imagine that the tarantula had again stung him. After a few years he died, in one of these annual attacks of delirium.
St. André is not the only man of science who attributes awful effects to the bite of the tarantula. Baglini, a man of considerable eminence, maintains that not only the bite causes the patient to dance, but that the insect itself is readily excitable by music.