Magic is the MOONLIGHT

A night of summer sorcery in the Sancerrois casts a spell over Deborah Nash

- Deborah Nash

Bué, 5km south of Sancerre, rarely makes an appearance in French guidebooks and if it does, it’s usually in connection with the grape. The village lies in the bowl of a valley surrounded by vine-threaded limestone slopes cultivated by its 300 or so inhabitants. The place is steeped in wine. During the Middle Ages, large tracts of land were owned by the monks of Chalivoy Abbey, who celebrated the ‘divin’ of the Holy Communion with goblets filled with their local ‘vin’. Paradoxically, it was a man of the cloth who introduced the first ‘Nuit des Sorciers’ to the village in 1946 and it was this annual August festival I had come to see.

I arrived in Bué on a Friday afternoon, the day before the witches and ghouls came out to spook me. Winemaker Dominique Roger drove me round the hills in a 1940s American jeep, taking me through tunnels spun from sylvan shadows, climbing up to the crossroads of ‘Marloup’ (‘bad wolf’). Here, at what felt like the edge of the world, Dominique told me the story of the witches of Bué.

War wounds

It all began in the 16th century when the kingdom of France was torn apart by the Wars of Religion. The Huguenot population of nearby Sancerre were holed up in their hillside fortress against the king’s army for eight months. “It was interminable,” said Dominique, and many starved.

Against this febrile backdrop, seething with attacks and enmity, a group of village men were accused of practising witchcraft at the Marloup crossroads by a 12-year-old boy. The men were tortured, stood trial at the Château de Beaujeu, found guilty and hanged then burnt at the scene of their crime in 1582.