New book

Our book, now available from Skyhorse Publishing, features a Foreword by Phil Barnson of dans l'Ombre de la Bête.

March 1766

March 1766 letter from Étienne Lafont.

Second and third pages of Lafont's letter, describing the death of eight-year-old Jean Bergougnoux, “seized and carried off ” while tending cattle.

It seems between sixteen and twenty-two people were set upon during the first half of 1766. In March and April, three children perished: an eight-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and a six-year-old girl. 

In a lighter account from March 1766, Jean-Pierre Pourcher, who would become the great-grandfather of Beast historian Abbé Pierre Pourcher, is said to have been journeying in the vicinity with a fellow named Antony after a fair when the Beast suddenly made an appearance. Pourcher insisted his companion was responding to a necessitous call of nature at the time. The creature left after being smacked with sticks by the two men, but it moved so fast Antony believed he’d been attacked by two beasts.


The estates of the Gévaudan met once more in March 1766, with, to their chagrin, a Beast again monopolizing the agenda. Discussion centered around the government’s directives and strategies concerning wolf poisoning.

"A short truce"

In the vicinity of Mont Mouchet

Sources vary with regard to the number of attacks in 1766. As mentioned, there was much less formal documentation of such incidents now that the official Beast of King Louis XV had been killed the previous September. 

In any case, a February 1766 letter speculates on whether the Beast was the animal killed in 1765, or whether it is “another of the same nature. Either way, the peace of the Gévaudan has proved to be only a short truce.”*

*Pourcher

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.

October 1765: King meets Beast

King Louis XV and his court in Versailles look upon the infamous Beast of the Gévaudan.

At the beginning of October, François Antoine’s immense Chazes wolf was presented at the court of King Louis XV in Versailles, France.

A visitor to the court from England named Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford, wrote about the occasion to an acquaintance named John Chute, Esquire: 

“In the Queen's antechamber we foreigners and the foreign ministers were shown the famous beast of the Gévaudan, just arrived, and covered with a cloth, which two chasseurs [pageboys] lifted up. It is an absolute wolf, but uncommonly large, and the expression of agony and fierceness remains strongly imprinted on its dead jaws.” 

In another letter [Walpole’s many letters are valued for their “slice-of-life” depictions of the eighteenth century], written to the Right Honorable Lady Hervey, he wrote,

“Fortune bestowed on me a much more curious sight than a set of princes; the wild beast of the Gévaudan, which is killed, and actually is in the Queen's antechamber. It is a thought less than a leviathan, and the beast in the Revelations, and has not half so many wings, and yes, and talons, as I believe they have, or will have some time or other; this being possessed but of two eyes, four feet, and no wings at all. It is as fine a wolf as a commissary in the late war, except, notwithstanding all the stories, that it has not devoured near so many persons. In short, Madam, now it is dead and come, a wolf it certainly was, and not more above the common size than Mrs. Cavendish is. It has left a dowager and four young princes.”

Meanwhile in the Gévaudan, royal gunbearer François Antoine spent October tracking down and destroying the Beast’s alleged mate and pups. But did he get them all?

Image credit:"Wolf of Chazes" by Unknown - Unnamed French Periodical. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolf_of_Chazes.jpg#/media/File:Wolf_of_Chazes.jpg

The Chazes Wolf

A mysterious chapel of Saint Mary near the site where the first Beast was killed. There is a Black Virgin within.

September 1765: The deaths of two 12-year-old girls in September, on the 8th and 13th, evidenced that the affair of the Beast was not over. 

A string of attacks took place during the first half of the month, including one in which the Beast attacked a man who’d fired upon it, a first. 

But on the 20th, after a pack of wolves, including an immense male, is reported in the woods around a nunnery, the Abbey of Chazes, near the river Allier, royal gun bearer François Antoine shoots the first Beast, “the Chazes Wolf.” 

The wolf fell, but, true to legend, got up and came at the hunter. A second shot by nephew Rinchard, a royal gamekeeper of the Duke of Orléans, finished the job. 

The ecstatic hunting party contacted the local surgeon, who was to do a complete autopsy. King Louis XV was determined to know exactly what this animal was.

“Then,” said François Antoine, “it is expected at court.”

After this hunt, there is a clear abatement in attacks for weeks. There is also a falling off of the official conversation regarding La Bête du Gévaudan, which means much less documentation of the continuing story.

The king and his court are pleased with François Antoine’s feat, but back in the Gévaudan, there is controversy. Shouldn’t Rinchard be credited since he actually fired the shot that killed the Beast? And is it truly the Beast?

Meanwhile, this Beast is prepped for its close-up in Versailles, to be accompanied by Antoine’s son.

Antoine remained in the Chazes area to hunt down the rest of the pack.