The deaths were in the Gévaudan, the old country that is now mostly Lozère, and they spilled into the Velay, the Vivarais, and the southern Auvergne. The ground was the Margeride: scattered farms, poor tracks, and children and old people out with the stock because the winters were long and the fodder had to be saved. The kingdom already had wolves. What the papers named the Beast was a run of attacks on people, mostly fatal, mostly women and children in the pastures. Modern counts of the dead run from the high eighties to about 120. The reports say the animal went for the person rather than the herd, and often for the face, the head, or the throat.

The first burial that names it is Jeanne Boulet, fourteen. She was killed on 30 June 1764 near the hamlet of Les Hubacs, in the parish of Saint-Étienne-de-Lugdarès, by Langogne. She was buried the next day without the sacraments, because she had not been able to confess, and the register says she was killed by the ferocious beast. The wording treats the name as already in use. Earlier that June a cowherd near Langogne had come home with her clothes torn, after her oxen drove an animal off. A second girl, fourteen, at Masméjean, was killed on 8 August. Through the autumn the attacks moved onto the Margeride. Hunters said they hit the animal and watched it fall and get up. Those are the hunters’ reports.

On 14 October 1764 the comte de Moncan ordered local officers to help Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel destroy “the monster or leopard” in those mountains. Duhamel was a captain in the Légion de Clermont-Prince, a light regiment left over from the Seven Years’ War, not a troop of royal dragoons. He took 56 men out of Langogne. Snow held the first hunt until 11 November. The Estates of Languedoc offered 2,000 livres in December. The bishop of Mende, Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, on 31 December called the attacks a punishment from God and ordered prayers. The kills went on. On 12 January 1765, at Villaret in the parish of Chanaleilles, seven children between eight and twelve held the animal off with the blades on their sticks. Jacques Portefaix, born in 1752, kept them from running when it dragged Joseph Panafieu away, and they got the boy back. The king paid for Portefaix’s schooling. On 14 March, at Saint-Alban, Jeanne Jouve fought it in front of her house after it came over a wall and took her six-year-old son, Jean-Pierre. He died of the wounds five days later. She was given 300 livres.

The Norman wolf-hunter Jean-Charles d’Enneval and his son arrived at the start of March 1765, claiming the hunts for themselves. Duhamel and his men were sent away on 8 April. The d’Ennevals’ own hunts did not kill it. On 8 June the king sent his gun-bearer, François Antoine, called Monsieur Antoine, with his son, hounds, and gamekeepers. Antoine wrote that the tracks were no different from those of a large wolf. On 11 August Marie-Jeanne Vallet, about twenty, servant of the parish priest at Paulhac, put a lance into the animal’s chest on a footbridge. Antoine found blood on the lance and called her the Maid of the Gévaudan. On 16 August his keepers had Jean Chastel and his sons locked in the jail at Saugues after a quarrel in a bog on Montchauvet. They were not to be let out until four days after Antoine left the province.

Around 20 September 1765, in the wood of Pommier by the royal abbey of Les Chazes, Antoine shot a large wolf at fifty paces. It rose and came at him. His nephew Rinchard shot it again, and it died twenty-five paces on. The surgeon Boulanger of Saugues opened it at the château du Besset. Antoine’s report calls it a large wolf of 130 livres, about 64 kilograms. Marie-Jeanne Vallet was among the people who said it was the animal that had attacked them. His son took the body to Versailles. It was stuffed, shown to the court on 1 October in the rooms of Queen Marie Leszczyńska, and treated as the beast. Antoine left on 3 November. In 1770 he was allowed a dying wolf on his coat of arms for that kill.

November was quiet. Étienne Lafont, syndic of the diocese of Mende, wrote on 26 November that nothing more was being said of the beast. Then came talk of attacks again around Saugues and Lorcières. On 1 January 1766 the subdelegate Montluc wrote that he believed it was back. The king did not want the matter reopened. The papers dropped it. By March 1766 the local letters describe the attacks as numerous again, though the animal seemed warier and was keeping to the country of the three mounts, Mouchet, Grand, and Chauvet. The gentlemen on the spot were told not to expect another party from court.

On 17 June 1767 it killed Jeanne Bastide at Lesbinières, in the parish of Desges. The marquis d’Apcher, nineteen, took the news the next day and beat the woods of Mont Mouchet that night with about a dozen armed men. On the morning of 19 June, in the wood of La Ténazeyre, at the place called La Sogne d’Auvers, Jean Chastel shot a large wolf-like animal in the shoulder. The marquis’s dogs were on it at once. It was loaded on a horse and carried to his château at Besque, in Charraix. The story that Chastel finished a prayer and fired a silver bullet is not in the papers of 1767. It comes from a pious telling collected in the nineteenth century, and the silver bullet from a novel of 1946.

The next day, 20 June, the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin wrote a description at Besque, with Boulanger and the physician d’Agulhon de la Mothe. Marin’s line was that the animal seemed to them a wolf, but extraordinary, and different in shape and proportions from the wolves of that country. From the root of the tail to the top of the head he measured three feet, about a meter. The tooth count is a canid’s: twenty teeth above, twenty-two below. Several people said they recognized it. The body was shown at the château for about twelve days, badly stuffed with straw. A servant, Gibert, was sent toward Paris with it. The carcass rotted on the road. In a recollection taken down in 1809, Gibert said the naturalist Buffon looked at what was left and judged it a large wolf, and that it was then buried. Buffon left no paper of his own on it. No fatal attack of this series is recorded in the province after 19 June. On 25 June a hunter shot a she-wolf that witnesses said had been with the animal; she was found dead the next day with five cubs.

Louis XV had already posted a reward of 6,000 livres, on 4 February 1765, on the account of the generality of Auvergne. Chastel was paid 72 livres by the diocese of Mende that September, a share of later local bounties, and, after he claimed the royal sum, 1,500 livres. He was still owed 4,500 when he died in 1789. His son was still trying to collect it in 1797. The historians who have worked the parish books and the intendants’ letters, Jean-Marc Moriceau among them, read the three years as more than one wolf that had turned to people, in a country where other “beasts” had done the same. The two animals that were opened were both called wolves by the men who opened them. What the gazettes sold, a single creature that no shot could kill, is the part the court had already declared finished in October 1765, and that the burials did not support.