The Cat’s Tooth above the Lac du Bourget

The Lac du Bourget is a glacier lake : a good forty-four square kilometres of dark water, a hundred and forty-seven metres deep, scoured out when the great Alpine glacier withdrew some nineteen thousand years ago. People often call it the largest natural lake in France, and that is not quite right. What is right is that it is deep, and that the people of the shore always spoke of it as of a neighbour you had better not cross.

They tell that a fisherman of Le Bourget went out one morning and caught nothing. The hours passed, and at last the man promised God his first catch. The promise was heard. The net came up heavy, full of a fine fish. But the man was hungry, and the fish stayed lying in the bottom of the boat.

The second cast brought a finer fish still, and he kept that one as well, for the third he would give away. At the third cast the net grew so heavy that the boat leaned over and the water came in across the rail. It was not a fish. It was a black kitten, soaked through, no bigger than a fist, looking at him without fear. A sensible man would have given it back to the lake. This one put it in his pocket and carried it home.

The kitten grew. It grew faster than a cat is allowed to grow, and when it no longer fitted through the door it left the fisherman’s house and climbed the slope. Above the western shore it found what it was looking for : a rocky point above the pass, with a cave in the flank and a view over the whole road. There it lay down.

What happened next depends on who is telling it. In the oldest written version the beast first devours the whole family of the fisherman and then falls upon travellers, until King Arthur, helped by Merlin, challenges it and strikes it down. The people of Savoy kept things nearer home : with them it is two brothers who attack the animal with a siege engine and finish it with a knife, or a soldier from Le Bourget who brings it down with his arquebus.

In 1619 the Franciscan Jacques Fodéré copied the story out and made of it a cat the size of a tiger. He also brought in two knights of Arthur, Berius and Melianus, who received a field and a mountain as their reward ; Chambéry and Montmélian carry their names for that reason, says the legend. In 1899 Émile Freymond recorded what the old people still told : that the cat, from its cave near the Col du Chat, ate every tenth traveller. Of the animal only one canine tooth was left, up there in the air.

The archives tell a soberer story, and it is older than the cat. In a charter of 1209 the mountain is already called montis Catti, and the thirteenth century yields Mons Catus, Mons Catti and Ultra montem Felis besides. The place-name scholar Adolphe Gros pointed out that Catus or Cattus may also have been a personal name. More than that, Gros thought it was not the cat that had named the mountain but the mountain that had named the cat : first the name, then the story that explained it. He also pointed to the nearby village of Chevelu by the pass, which to French ears sounds like chat velu, hairy cat. Roger Brunet proposed a third derivation in 2016, from cha, akin to calm, a bald ridge. Believe the mapmaker and you are looking at a bare limestone crest. Believe the fisherman and you are looking at a tooth.

Below, the lake is still there. On the far shore stands the royal abbey of Hautecombe, founded by the Cistercians in 1125 and for centuries the burial church of the House of Savoy. In 1820 Le Lac by Alphonse de Lamartine appeared, written for this shore. In Le Bourget-du-Lac itself lies the old Cluniac priory with its Romanesque crypt, its gothic church of Saint-Laurent and its formal terraced gardens. And then the correction : this is not the largest natural lake in France. Lake Geneva is larger but half Swiss, and the Lac de Grand-Lieu near Nantes covers more surface. The Lac du Bourget is, however, the largest glacier lake lying entirely in France, and the deepest.