It was said to attack with formidable teeth and claws, and appeared to be the size of a calf or cow and seemed to fly or bound across fields towards its victims.

The Kingdom of France used a considerable amount of wealth and manpower to hunt the animals responsible, including the resources of several nobles, soldiers, royal huntsmen, and civilians.

Shortly afterwards, on 30 June, the beast's first official victim was recorded: 14-year-old Jeanne Boulet was killed near the village of Les Hubacs near Langogne.

However, the burial certificate specifies that she was killed by "the ferocious beast" (French: la bette [sic] féroce), which suggests that she is not the first victim but only the first declared.

Very soon, terror gripped the populace because the beast was repeatedly preying on lone men, women, and children as they tended livestock in the forests around Gévaudan.

[10] He quoted Saint Augustine in evoking the "justice of God", as well as the Bible and the divine threats uttered by Moses: "I will arm the teeth of wild beasts against them".

[3] On 11 February, in the parish of Le Malzieu, was buried a little girl "about twelve years old who had been partly devoured on the present day by a man-eating beast that has been ravaging this country for nearly three months".

[12][13] Meanwhile, the local bishop and the intendants had to deal with an influx of mail; people from all over France suggesting more or less eccentric methods to overcome the beast.

When Louis XV agreed to send two professional wolf hunters, Jean Charles Marc Antoine Vaumesle d'Enneval and his son Jean-François, Captain Duhamel was forced to stand down and return to his headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand.

In a letter to Saint-Florentin, Minister of the King's House, comparing Marie-Jeanne to Joan of Arc, he nicknamed her the "Maid of Gévaudan".

[20] On 20 or 21 September, Antoine killed a large grey wolf measuring 80 cm (31 in) high, 1.7 m (5 ft 7 in) long and weighing 60 kg (130 lb).

Meanwhile, François Antoine and his gamekeepers stayed in the Auvergne woods to chase down the beast's female partner and her two grown pups, which had been reported near the Abbey of Chazes.

At the examination of the pup, it appeared to have a double set of dewclaws, a hereditary malformation found in the Bas-Rouge or Beauceron dog breed.

[8] Antoine returned to Paris on 3 November and received a large sum of money (over 9,000 livres) as well as fame, titles, and awards.

In a letter from 26 November, the syndic Étienne Lafont affirmed to the intendant of Languedoc: "We no longer hear of anything relating to the beast".

[27] The intendant alerted the king, but Louis XV no longer wanted to hear about a ferocious beast that his arquebus bearer had overcome.

Étienne Lafont and the young Marquis d'Apcher, a local nobleman, recommend poisoning the corpses of dogs and carrying them to the usual passages of the beast.

But its mode of operation had changed: it seemed less enterprising and much more cautious, as revealed by various correspondence, including that of Canon Ollier, parish priest of Lorcières, to Étienne Lafont.

[5] The killing of the creature that eventually marked the end of the attacks is credited to a local hunter named Jean Chastel, who shot it at the slopes of Mont Mouchet (now called la Sogne d'Auvers) during a hunt organised by the Marquis d'Apcher on 19 June 1767.

[3] In 1889, Abbot Pourcher told the edifying oral tradition which said that the pious hero Chastel shot the creature after reciting his prayers but the historical accounts do not report any such thing.

[30][31][32][33] The story about the large-caliber bullets, home-made with Virgin Mary's medals, is a literary invention by the French writer Henri Pourrat.

[34] The body was then loaded onto a horse and brought to the Château de Besque of the Marquis d'Apchier, located in Charraix, where it was necropsied by Dr. Boulanger, a surgeon at Saugues.

According to an oral tradition reported by Abbot Pourcher[40] and repeated by several authors,[41][42] Jean Chastel would have been on the trip, but Louis XV would have disdainfully rejected him because the remains, summarily stuffed by an apothecary who had contented himself with replacing the entrails with straw, gave off a stench that the heat made even more unbearable.

However, this version is called into question by the testimony of the servant of the Marquis d'Apcher, collected in 1809: Gibert finally arrived in Paris, went to stay at the hôtel particulier of Mr. de la Rochefoucault to whom he at the same time gave a letter in which Mr. d'Apchier begged the lord to inform the king of the happy deliverance of the monster (...) The king was at Compiègne at the time and, according to the news he was told, he gave orders to Mr. de Buffon to visit and examine this animal.

This naturalist, in spite of the dilapidation to which the worms had reduced it and the fall of all the hairs, following the heat of the end of July and the beginning of August, in spite of still the bad odor which it gave off, after a serious examination, judged that it was only a big wolf (...) As soon as Mr. de Buffon had made the examination of this animal, Gibert hastened to have it buried because of its great stench and he said he had been so inconvenienced by it that he was sick and bedridden for more than 15 days in Paris.

In terms of morphology, although none of the killed animals have been preserved, the beast was generally described as a wolf-like canine with a tall, lean frame capable of taking great strides.

[2] It had an elongated head similar to that of a greyhound, with a flattened snout, pointed ears, and a wide mouth sitting atop a broad chest.

The beast's fur was described as tawny or russet in colour but its back was streaked with black, and a white heart-shaped pattern was noted on its underbelly.

On 20 June 1767, the day after the death of the animal killed by Jean Chastel, the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin wrote an autopsy report at the Marquis d'Apcher's Château de Besque in Charraix.

[57][58] In a 2021 talk by François-Louis Pelissier, based on the described appearance of the animal and specific details of behaviour and what can be inferred about historical distribution, he argued that beast encounters could most probably be blamed on the Italian wolf Canis lupus italicus.