ation. Forms of insanity in which the afflicted persons imagine
themselves to be brute animals are not perhaps very common, but they are
not unknown. I once knew a poor demented old man who believed himself
to be a horse, and would stand by the hour together before a manger,
nibbling hay, or deluding himself with the presence of so doing. Many
of the cannibals whose cases are related by Mr. Baring-Gould, in
his chapter of horrors, actually believed themselves to have been
transformed into wolves or other wild animals. Jean Grenier was a boy of
thirteen, partially idiotic, and of strongly marked canine physiognomy;
his jaws were large and projected forward, and his canine teeth were
unnaturally long, so as to protrude beyond the lower lip. He believed
himself to be a werewolf. One evening, meeting half a dozen young girls,
he scared them out of their wits by telling them that as soon as the sun
had set he would turn into a wolf and eat them for supper. A few days
later, one little girl, having gone out at nightfall to look after the
sheep, was attacked by some creature which in her terror she mistook for
a wolf, but which afterwards proved to be none other than Jean Grenier.
She beat him off with her sheep-staff, and fled home. As several
children had mysteriously disappeared from the neighbourhood, Grenier
was at once suspected. Being brought before the parliament of Bordeaux,
he stated that two years ago he had met the Devil one night in the woods
and had signed a compact with him and received from him a wolf-skin.
Since then he had roamed about as a wolf after dark, resuming his human
shape by daylight. He had killed and eaten several children whom he had
found alone in the fields, and on one occasion he had entered a house
while the family were out and taken the baby from its cradle. A careful
investigation proved the truth of these statements, so far as the
cannibalism was concerned. There is no doubt that the missing children
were eaten by Jean Grenier, and there is no doubt that in his own mind
the halfwitted boy was firmly convinced that he was a wolf. Here the
lycanthropy was complete.

In the year 1598, "in a wild and unfrequented spot near Caude, some
countrymen came one day upon the corpse of a boy of fifteen, horribly
mutilated and bespattered with blood. As the men approached, two wolves,
which had been rending the body, bounded away into the thicket. The men
gave chase immediately, following their bloody tr