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.

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.