Drac of Beaucaire

The Drac of Beaucaire is a shape-shifting water dragon of Provençal legend that lived beneath the Rhône, lured people with floating treasures, and kidnapped a woman of Beaucaire to nurse its child.

The Story

Around 1210-1214 the English scholar Gervase of Tilbury, then living in Provence, wrote a book of marvels for the Emperor Otto IV called the Otia Imperialia. In it he describes the dracs, creatures that live in deep places of the Rhône. They can take human form, and they tempt people by floating on the surface of the water in the shape of gold cups or rings. Whoever reaches for the prize is dragged under.

Gervase tells of a woman of Beaucaire who was washing clothes by the river when she was taken this way. Beneath the water she was made to nurse the drac's child for seven years. While there, she touched one of her eyes with fingers greasy from an eel pasty she had been given, and from then on that eye could see clearly under the water. She was allowed to go home. Some time later she saw her captor walking in the market of Beaucaire and greeted him. Startled, he asked which eye she saw him with, and when she pointed to it, he thrust his finger into it and vanished from her sight.

Appearance and Powers

Gervase's dracs are water spirits more than reptiles: they take human form, walk among people in the towns, and live in a world under the river. The name comes from Latin draco, so the creature was understood as a dragon, and in Beaucaire's later tradition the Drac is pictured as a winged dragon. In wider Occitan folklore a drac can also be a mischievous house sprite.

Origins and Sources

The tale of the nurse and the magic ointment is a version of a type folklorists call "the fairy midwife," found across Europe, where a human woman serves supernatural beings and is punished for seeing too much. Gervase's account is one of the earliest written examples, and it attaches the type to a river dragon instead of fairies.

Legacy

Beaucaire has adopted the Drac as its emblem, with a statue in the town and an annual festival. It is a close neighbor of the Tarasque, whose town of Tarascon lies directly across the Rhône. See Western dragons.

Related

• Tarasque: The Tarasque is a river dragon of Provençal legend, a monstrous hybrid said to be the offspring of Leviathan, which Saint Martha tamed at Tarascon on the Rhône and which the town still parades in its festival.
• Melusine: Melusine is a fairy of medieval French legend who becomes a serpent from the waist down every Saturday, founds the house of Lusignan, and flies away in the form of a great serpent when her husband betrays her secret.
• Vouivre: The Vouivre is a flying serpent of French folklore, especially in Franche-Comté and the Jura, that carries a glowing gem as its eye and sets it aside when it bathes, tempting thieves.
• Western Dragons
• Dragon Legends

Sources and Further Reading

• Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford Medieval Texts, Clarendon Press, 2002)
• Paul Sébillot, Le Folk-lore de France, 4 vols. (Paris, 1904-1907)

Cite this entry: “Drac of Beaucaire,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/drac.