The Bête du Cinglais: the man-eater of the Forest of Cinglais, Normandy, 1632-1633

France had a new voice. Théophraste Renaudot's Gazette, the country's first weekly newspaper, carried dispatches from across the kingdom. One arrived from Caen, in Normandy. It was dated 10 March 1632. It began plainly. A wild beast had been discovered a month earlier in the "forêt de Singlaiz", between Caen and Falaise. It had already eaten fifteen people.

The Forest of Cinglais lies about 15 km south of Caen. Today it is some 1,500 hectares of beech and oak, at the edge of the small commune of Boulon. In 1632 it was the hunting ground of something no one could catch.

The survivors spoke through the Gazette's correspondent. "Those who escaped its teeth report that this wild animal has the shape of a great mastiff, so fast that it cannot be overtaken by running, and so extraordinarily agile that they have seen it leap our river in several places." The riverside people and the forest guards took aim. They fired several arquebus shots. Not one wounded it.

The correspondent wrote again in 1633. "This furious beast I wrote to you about last year, having in the last two months devoured more than thirty people in this forest, was taken by everyone to be a sorcery." No victim's name survives. Only the count. Fifteen in the first month. More than thirty by 1633.

June 1633. On the orders of "our lieutenant général", the Comte de la Suze assembled 5,000 to 6,000 people. They pursued the beast so well that after three days it was killed by a single arquebus shot.

Then they looked at it. "It turns out to be a kind of wolf, longer, redder, with a more pointed tail and a wider rump than usual." The attacks reportedly stopped.

For the Gazette, the kill settled the matter. A wolf, not a spell. Later readers have been less sure. The stress on length, colour and build points to an unusual animal, and some modern writers raise the possibility of a wolf and dog hybrid. The Bestiaire d'Ysengrin titles its page on the case "Pan sur le métis !". The blogger John Knifton goes further. He argues the French bêtes were "a species of canine completely unknown to science", a wolf type animal now extinct, and suggests the activity may have continued to 1672. No primary source seen backs that date.

Even the calendar is slippery. The hunt report is cited as the Gazette of 17 June 1633, yet it describes men gathered on "the 21st of this month". Knifton gives the kill as 23 June 1633. Only the original scan can settle it.

More than 130 years before the Beast of Gévaudan, Normandy had its own man-eater and its own vast organised hunt. The case also travels as the Bête de Caen and the Bête d'Évreux, though Évreux lies far from Cinglais and no source explains that name.

The legend lingers. In 2013 Tendance Ouest reported forum talk from an internet user whose wife had crossed paths with "un étrange animal" near the forest. The paper asked whether this was "une sorte de Gévaudan à la sauce normande".