In the month of January we are told that it devoured a great many persons, chiefly children and young girls. It was said by those who escaped to be larger than a wolf, but that previous to springing on its victim, by crouching on the ground, it seemed no longer than a fox. "At the distance of one or two fathoms it rises on its hind legs, and leaps upon its prey, which it seizes by the neck or throat, but is afraid of horned cattle, from which it runs away."
It was alleged by some to be the cub of a tiger and lioness; by others, of a panther and hyena, which had escaped from a private menagerie belonging to Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy. A peasant of Marvejols, who wounded it by a musket shot, found a handful of its hair, "which stank very much;" he averred it to "be the bigness of a year-old calf, the head a foot in length, the chest large as that of a horse, his howling in the night resembled the braying of an ass." According to collated statements, the beast was seen within the same hour at different places, in one instance twenty-four miles apart; hence many persons naturally maintained that there were two.
On the 27th December, 1764, a young woman, in her nineteenth year, was torn to pieces by it at Bounesal, near Mende. Next day it appeared in the wood of St. Martin de Born, and was about to spring upon a girl of twelve years, when her father rushed to her protection. The woodman, a bold and hardy fellow, rendered desperate by the danger of his child, kept it at bay for a quarter of an hour, "the beast all the while endeavouring to fly at the girl, and they would both inevitably have become its prey if some horned cattle which the father kept in the wood had not fortunately come up, on which the beast was terrified and ran away."
This account was attested on oath by the woodman, before the mayor and other civil authorities of Mende, an episcopal city in Languedoc.
On the 9th of January an entire troop of the 10th Light Horse (the Volontaires Etrangers de Clermont-Prince), then stationed at St. Chely, was despatched under Captain Duhamel in quest of the animal, which had just torn and disembowelled a man midway between their quarters and La Garge. On this occasion the Bishop of Mende said a solemn mass, and the consecrated Host was elevated in the cathedral, which was thronged by the devout for the entire day; but the beast still defied all efforts for his capture or destruction, and soon after, "in the wood of St. Colme, four leagues from Rhodez, it devoured a shepherdess of eighteen years of age, celebrated for her beauty."
The English papers began to treat the affair of "the wild beast" as a jest or allegory invented by the Jesuits to render the Protestants odious and absurd, as it was said to have escaped from the Duke of Savoy's collection; and "this circumstance is designed," says one journal, "to point out the Protestants who are supposed to derive their principles from the ancient Waldensee, who inhabited the valleys of Piedmont, and were the earliest promoters of the Reformation."
A writer in a Scottish newspaper of the period goes still farther, and announces his firm belief that this tormentor of the Gévaudanois was nothing more or less than the wild beast prophesied in the Apocalypse of St. John, whereon the scarlet lady was mounted. Another asserts that it was typical of the whole Romish clergy, and that its voracious appetite answered to another part of Scripture, "conceived in the words eating up my people as they eat bread,"—his favourite food being generally little boys and girls of Protestant parentage.*
* Edinburgh Advertiser, 1764.
After a long and fruitless chase, Captain Duhamel, before returning to quarters at St. Chely, resolved to make a vigorous attempt to destroy this mysterious scourge of Languedoc; but his extreme ardour caused his plans to miscarry.
Posting his volontaires, some on horseback, and some on foot, at all the avenues of a wood to which it had been traced, it was soon roused from its lair by the explosion of pistols and sound of trumpets. There was a cry raised of "Voilà ! Gardez la-Bête!" and Duhamel, an officer of great courage, who had dismounted, rushed forward to assail it sword in hand, but had the mortification to see it, with a terrible roar, spring past the very place he had just quitted.