Cheval Gauvin

Also Known As: also cheval Gauvain; chevau Gauvin in Jura patois
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology, Swiss Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It passes for an ordinary loose horse until someone mounts it, then carries the rider into deep water or over a drop.
Role in Mythos: A night horse of the Franche-Comté river valleys and the Swiss Jura, and in the Bernese tellings an omen of death within the year.
Relation to Humans: It does its damage only to people who choose to trust it, and the nineteenth-century collectors who wrote it down were told plainly that it was also used to keep children indoors after dark. Farm families along the Loue and the Vernois stream named it to their children the way other places name a drowning pool.

The grass between the graves at Chamblay made good grazing, and on certain nights a horse was standing in it. Nobody in the village owned the animal. It let itself be approached and patted, warm and patient under a stranger’s hand like a plough horse unhitched at the end of a long day. That patience was the whole of its method.

A woman of Chamblay, known locally for nerve, decided that an animal so fine and so ownerless might as well be walked home to her own stable. She got on. The horse began to turn, and turn again, wheeling along the shore by the port in figures she had never managed on anything with a bridle, and the gallop came up under her without a single jolt, smooth as flight. She stopped paying attention. She was enjoying herself. Then the horse put its head towards the Loue and went into the river, and when it reached the middle of the current it was simply no longer there, and she dropped into the deepest water. She got out. How she got out was never told. She died in 1836, and the village settled on fright as the cause.

Désiré Monnier printed that account in 1854, in a chapter given over entirely to the animal, and he had been gathering reports of it since at least 1839, when the librarian at Dôle wrote to tell him that people in the town still spoke of the chevau Gauvin to children. It was known at Montbarrey, at Joux, at Bans near Gillabois, and all along the valley of the Loue.

Monnier’s own interest was in what the thing was not. Franche-Comté kept a whole stable of night horses and most of them were broken in some way. The white courser in the woods of Nancray, above Besançon, ran on three feet. The mare of the sire de Joux had two left and galloped anyway. The horse of Coges and Relans had no head. The Gauvin of the Loue valley, Monnier noted, was missing nothing at all. It was the sound one. That is the only physical description the early record gives, and it is doing real work: nothing about the animal reads as wrong, which is precisely why the trap closes.

Paul Sébillot, assembling French folklore at the turn of the century, gave it a fixed route. Each evening the Gauvin came up along the Vernois stream, showed itself on the village square at Montbarrey, and went off into the forest of Chaux. He set it among its neighbours, which is where the flavour of the region comes through: in the wood at Commenailles a headless horse would sometimes set its two front feet on a walker’s shoulders without a sound, and sometimes come at him flat out, throw him across its back and carry him off through the fields. The three-footed horse near Besançon obeyed anybody who could get a bit into its mouth, and only for as long as the bit stayed there.

Across the watershed, in the Bernese Jura, the animal kept its habits and gained a clearer meaning. The local saying ran that whoever heard the hooves of the Cheval-Gauvin ring out at the Croisée-du-Bas of an evening would get himself brained downstream on the rocks, or drowned in the Grand-Étang. To meet it, or its companion the Blanc-Cheval, tearing off into the dark at full speed was taken as a sign of certain death within the year. Anyone it did carry, it threw into a ravine.

Where it came from, the record does not say. Monnier floated a guess in the middle of the Chamblay story, and without much conviction: perhaps the beast was the war horse of the knight Gauvain, Arthur’s nephew, whose name it wears. He offered a flatter explanation as well, and preferred it, calling the horse a scarecrow used on children to stop them running about in the evening. The Dôle librarian had said the same thing in 1839 and meant it as plain fact rather than theory. The name itself drifts across the old books as cheval Gauvin, cheval Gauvain and the patois chevau Gauvin, and none of them explain how a courtly name came to be fastened to something that drowns people in a river.

Its powers amount to one trick, performed without a flaw. It can pass for an ordinary horse and hold the pose through the approach, the patting and the mounting, for as long as the ride needs to last. It offers a gait smooth enough to be intoxicating and it uses that deliberately, because a frightened rider stays alert and a delighted one does not. It knows the water. It goes in at the point where the bottom falls away, and it can stop existing at the exact moment the current is deepest. In this country that is all the equipment required. The Jura is limestone, riddled with sinkholes and sudden drops, and an animal that can be trusted for the length of one gallop can put a person somewhere they will not climb out of.

The limits are just as narrow. It kills nobody who does not get on. Everything it does turns on a free decision to trust it, which makes it, for all the fear it carried, a curiously mannerly killer. It does not range: it belongs to particular streams, particular squares and particular crossroads, and it keeps to the hours after dark. And it does not always finish. The woman at Chamblay came out of the Loue alive, and the story has to follow her a long way to collect her.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Cheval Gauvin?

The Cheval Gauvin is a malevolent legendary horse from Franche-Comté in eastern France and from the Swiss Jura. It appears as an ordinary, ownerless horse, allows itself to be caught and mounted, and then carries its rider into deep water or over a drop. The earliest full account of it was collected by Désiré Monnier and published in 1854.

How does the Cheval Gauvin kill?

It kills by winning trust first. In the best-known account, from the village of Chamblay, it gave a woman a long and effortless gallop before turning into the river Loue and vanishing from under her at the deepest point of the current. In the Bernese Jura tellings it instead brains its riders on rocks downstream, drowns them in the Grand-Étang, or throws them into a ravine.

What does the Cheval Gauvin look like?

It looks like a fine, healthy, entirely normal horse, and the early sources treat that as its most notable feature. Franche-Comté’s other night horses were conspicuously deformed, with three feet, two feet, or no head, while the Cheval Gauvin was recorded as missing nothing at all.

Where does the Cheval Gauvin appear?

It belongs to the valley of the Loue and the surrounding villages of the Jura, including Chamblay, Montbarrey, Joux and Bans, and it was said to follow the Vernois stream each evening before disappearing into the forest of Chaux. On the Swiss side it is reported in the Bernese Jura, where its hooves were heard at a crossroads called the Croisée-du-Bas.

Is the Cheval Gauvin named after Gawain?

It carries the name of Gauvain, the Gawain of Arthurian romance, but no source explains the connection. Désiré Monnier suggested in passing that the animal might be the knight’s war horse, though he thought it more likely the horse had been invented to keep children indoors after dark.