December 1765

Winter in the Gévaudan

Seventy-two days after the Chazes’s wolf’s demise, little Vidal Tourneyre, six or seven years old, was taken by an animal while with his family’s livestock. Teenager Jean Couret, nearby, charged after the predator and stabbed it with his spear until it released the herdboy. Three more attacks occurred that last month of the year. On December 21, an 11-year-old girl from Lorcières was decapitated. Two days later, a 13-year-old Julianges girl was eaten “with such voracity, ” says priest-historian Abbé Pierre Pourcher, that, according to one document, they could only find her two hands, and according to another, the two hands, the two legs, and some remnants of her clothes. Either way, so much of her was eaten that the Prior of Julianges considered the remains were insufficient for a burial service to be carried out.”

Author Richard Thompson speculates as to whether the “new” Beast was a wolf wounded during Antoine’s hunt in October and now recovered, or the offspring of the “old” Beast, somehow overlooked. An outspoken area priest, Jean-Baptiste Ollier, wrote many letters trying to convince authorities that the Beast was not a wolf, but a monster of some kind. In faraway Versailles, the case was officially closed and king and court had moved on. Still, over the coming months, new directives would be communicated to distant provinces to help them in the self-management of nuisance wolves.

In the Gévaudan, locals and officials had come to realize that getting rid of the new Beast would have to be a do-it-yourself project.