Jean Grenier

Jean Grenier was born around 1590 in south-western France, in the Landes of Gascony, the son of Pierre Grenier, a poor day-labourer from the village of Saint-Antoine-de-Pizon. He was no orphan: his father was alive and would end up testifying at the trial. What there was, rather, was a home the boy walked out of, and from then on a life of begging and casual work, minding sheep and cattle for whichever farmer would feed him.

The records describe him as small and thin, with black hair and eyes, protruding canine teeth and blackened nails, and above all as slow-witted. He wandered the pine woods and marshes of an isolated, poor district full of real wolves, where attacks on flocks and on children herding alone were not a fantasy but an everyday risk. That is the ground of the case: a boy of the lowest social condition of his time, in a country where the wolf was a literal threat.

Grenier said that a neighbour somewhat older than himself, Pierre de la Tilhaire, took him into the woods one night and introduced him to a tall man dressed in black whom they called the Lord of the Forest. That man marked him with his nail, gave him something to drink and sealed the bargain. Then he handed over what was needed to keep it: a wolf skin and a salve to rub over his body.

That detail is worth pausing on, because it is where the most repeated error about this case creeps in. What Grenier described was a skin and a grease, not a belt. The magic belt belongs to another trial, that of Peter Stumpp at Bedburg, and it has been attached to Grenier so often that it has almost replaced what he actually said. With the skin on and his body anointed, he claimed, he ran on all fours through the pine woods for an hour or two, and became a boy again the moment he took it off.

The case did not begin with a body but with a girl who fought back. In the spring of 1603 Marguerite Poirier, thirteen years old, was minding cattle when a beast threw itself at her and tore her clothes. She kept it off with blows from her iron-shod staff until the animal made away. She told what had happened, and her description was not that of an ordinary wolf: shorter and stockier, with reddish hair and a stubby tail.

Jean Grenier, who had already boasted to other shepherd girls of going out at night in wolf form, claimed the attack for himself. From there he confessed the rest: that he had killed and eaten several children from the nearby villages, and had even entered a house to take an infant from its cradle. Several of those disappearances were real and still unexplained, and it was that overlap between what the boy said and what the district was missing that brought the matter before the judges.

The trial was held before no ecclesiastical court but before the king's justice: the matter went up to the Parlement of Bordeaux, which passed sentence on 6 September 1603 with the magistrates in their red robes. And the sentence is surprising, because it was not a death sentence. The court held that what stood before it was a boy of thirteen, hungry, abandoned and slow-witted, whose head had been filled by the fear of the countryside, and that his confessions were those of a sick child rather than of a sorcerer. It committed him for life to a Franciscan friary at Bordeaux, with express orders that he be instructed and that no harm be done to him.

Seven years later, in 1610, the magistrate Pierre de Lancre went to see him and wrote the scene down. He found a young man of about twenty who ran on all fours, avoided his gaze, barely spoke, and still said he missed raw meat. Grenier died shortly after that visit. De Lancre published the encounter in 1612, and that is why the case has reached us: not as the file of a murderer but as a portrait of what hunger, neglect and a collective belief can do to a child.