Eight days after the feast of All Saints, again in the form of a
were-wolf, he had seized another girl, near the meadow land of La
Pouppe, on the territory of Athume and Chastenoy, and was on the point
of slaying and devouring her, when three persons came up, and he was
compelled to escape. On the fourteenth day after All Saints, also as a
wolf, he had attacked a boy of ten years old, a mile from Dôle, between
Gredisans and Menoté, and had strangled him. On that occasion he had
eaten all the flesh off his legs and arms, and had also devoured a
great part of the belly; one of the legs he had rent completely from
the trunk with his fangs.
On the Friday before the last feast of S. Bartholomew, he had seized a
boy of twelve or thirteen, under a large pear-trees near the wood of
the village Perrouze, and had drawn him into the thicket and killed
him, intending to eat him as he had eaten the other children, but the
approach of men hindered him from fulfilling his intention. The boy
was, however, quite dead, and the men who came up declared that Gilles
appeared as a man and not as a wolf. The hermit of S. Bonnot was
sentenced to be dragged to the place of public execution, and there to
be burned alive, a sentence which was rigorously carried out.
In this instance the poor maniac fully believed that actual
transformation into a wolf took place; he was apparently perfectly
reasonable on other points, and quite conscious of the acts he had
committed.
We come now to a more remarkable circumstance, the affliction of a
whole family with the same form of insanity. Our information is derived
from Boguet’s _Discours de Sorciers_, 1603-1610.
Pernette Gandillon was a poor girl in the Jura, who in 1598 ran about
the country on all fours, in the belief that she was a wolf. One day as
she was ranging the country in a fit of lycanthropic madness, she came
upon two children who were plucking wild strawberries. Filled with a
sudden passion for blood, she flew at the little girl and would have
brought her down, had not her brother, a lad of four years old,
defended her lustily with a knife. Pernette, however, wrenched the
weapon from his tiny hand, flung him down and gashed his throat, so
that he died of the wound. Pernette was tom to pieces by the people in
their rage and horror.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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