49Today the lake receives 200 000 annual visitors and is
still lauded, through guidebooks and other touristic mate-
rial, for its excellent fi sh and its nice circular pathway
around the shore where one can see the devil’s chair and a
sketch of the city of Besse , sunk into the lake for its tres-
passing. Pavin’s rich history and recent degassing contro-
versy (see Sect. 1.8 ) remain absent from geography
textbooks (Charbonnier et al. 2011 ). However the general
attitude about Pavin is now changing. Plane’s guidebook
( 2011 ) is the fi rst one to mention the uniqueness of Pavin’s
deep waters as well as the seriousness with which its degas-
sing risks are now taken. The town of Besse is now offering
visitors to Pavin a remarkable permanent exhibit on the
lake, its surroundings and Creux de Soucy, and on the most
recent scientifi c results. Belleforest and Lecoq’s descrip-
tions are presented in panel on the legends. The recent fi nd-
ings on past catastrophic spillover events near 600 AD and
1300 AD by paleolimnologists and geologists (Chapron
et al. 2012 ; Chassiot et al. 2016 ; chapter 23) confi rm that
past Pavin spillover events have occurred. They probably
will change the attitude of the many Pavin actors (historians,
scientists, tourism industry representatives, risk-manage-
ment authorities and the media).
2.5.4 Past Pavin Degassing Events and Past
Pavin State
There are at least three accounts of sudden Pavin’s misbe-
haviour events of various intensities at Pavin, reported by
Vassivière pilgrims in 1551, Godivel IV in 1783 and Joanny
in 1936. They are fully contextualized with an exact date,
identifi cation and position of witnesses as well as detailed
descriptions. They come from local and educated people
from Besse who voluntarily record what they have experi-
enced. None of them are apparently aware of the previous
events. All witnesses are familiar with Pavin and are com-
mon visitors to this area. As such they are more prone to
notice disorders that can either be missed by occasional visi-
tors or left un-reported by uneducated local people. For
instance, the 1783 events that have occurred several times
during this summer remained un-reported until they were
mentioned on August 21 to chatelain Godivel, a jurist. In
addition to these events, other descriptions of Pavin’s state at
the sixteenth–seventeeth centuries feature extended degas-
sing periods of various types and intensity (Jouan 1566 ;
Belleforest 1575 ; Banc 1605 ; Godivel II manuscript, 1650s).
The occasional visits to Pavin by outside visitors such as de
Frêtat ( 1672 ), Chevalier ( 1770 ) and their many followers
provide information on the state of the lake the day of their
visit: with the exception of the 1783 and 1936 event, none
report unusual Pavin behavior after mid-seventeenth century.
But witnesses of possible occasional Pavin disorders – so
marvelous - may have withheld their observations as for the
1936 event, only disclosed in 1986.
There are many other sources about Pavin, although so
far un-attributed to the terrifying lake, such as local reli-
gious history and iconography, a fantastical dragon story
published in 1632 in Paris and pagan times’ dragons and
fairies legends collected during the nineteenth century. They
are fully detailed and discussed in the next chapter in com-
parison with similar myths, legends and beliefs found in
other European maar-lakes. Even if they are less contextual-
ized and can be hypothetical, they still enrich our analysis of
Pavin’s history and confi rm the latent fear surrounding the
lake since pagan times, i.e. before the fourth-fi fth
centuries.
Acknowledgments for chapters 1 and 2 are combined
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