August 1766

The summer sun washed over the Massif Central. Granite peaks and limestone plateaus baked beneath the crystalline sky. The wind moved through the grasses in which a flock of goats grazed. Their mistress, a fourteen-year-old girl from Auvers, France, lay in the grass watching the clouds. She stroked her youngest charge’s head. The baby goat butted her hand and twitched its tail. 

Then it stopped.

“What?” asked the girl, sitting up. The little creature was gazing at something behind her.

A family member, come to check on her?

A boy from the village, up to no good?

She turned.

A strange animal was sprinting toward her. The girl stood up, staring, her hand on the little goat’s head.

A dog? Too big.

A wolf? In the day?

Her heart began to pound.

The animal was strange—scrawny, bony, with a rough coat and a long tail. It leered at her with a snaggletooth grin.

And ran faster.

La Bête, she gasped. The Beast.

The shepherdess scrambled to a rock outcropping nearby, where there was a small cave in which she played while the goats grazed. She flung herself through the small opening into the cool darkness.

Snarling, the Beast rushed in behind her. Pebbles scattered, striking the girl. The Beast thrust a misshapen muzzle within the opening, snapping its jaws. She felt its hot breath.

The smell. She clapped her hands to her face and shrank back.

Outside, the Beast paced. The baby goat bleated. There was a pause. The girl’s heart pounded. The Beast seized the kid in its jaws and shook. The little goat cried out piteously for its mistress.

My baby!” shouted the girl. “Let him alone!” Without thinking, she lunged from the cave. “Get away, you devil!” she exclaimed, hurling a stone. The Beast dropped the goat.

Then—according to the 1889 chronicle of Abbé Pierre Pourcher—the Beast, “quick as lightning, jumped on the girl and ate her almost completely.”

And so Madeleine Paschal, a fourteen-year-old shepherdess from Auvers, became the sixty-sixth victim of the Beast of the Gévaudan.