Friday, December 5, 2008

Jean Grenier (c. 1589 -1610)

In 1610, Pierre de Lancre, a noted judge of Bordeaux, France, visited the Monastery of the Cordeliers personally to investigate a werewolf that had been confined to a cloister cell for seven years. The werewolf, Jean Grenier, had viciously atacked several victims, and eyewitnesses to the assault sworn that Grenier had been in the form of a wolf when he made the atacks.

In his L'inconstance (1612), Lancre writes of Grenier that he possessed glittering, deep-set eyes, long, black fingernails and sharpe, protruding teeth. According to the jurist's account, Grenier freely confessed to having been a werewolf, and it was apparent that he walked on all fours with much greater ease than he could walk erect. The judge writes that he was horrified when Grenier told him that he still craved human flesh, especially that of little girls, and he hoped that he might once again savor such fine meat.

The nights and days as a werewolf began for Jean Grenier in the spring of 1603 in the Gasconey region of France when small children began to disappear. Then, during a full moon, witnesses watched in horror as a 13-year-old girl named Marguerite Poirer was attacked by a monstrous creature resembling a wolf.

When the fear of a stalking werewolf was reaching fever pitch in the villages of Gascony, a teenage boy whome everyone had believed to be mentally dificient began to boast of having the ability to transform himself into a wolf, As if that announcement was not disturbing enough to his neighbors, 13-year-old Jean Grenier also confessed to having eaten the missing children and having attacked Marguerite.

When he was questioned by the authorities, Grenier told of having been given the magical wolf's belt that could transform him into a wolf. The awasome gift had been presented to him by the Master of the Forest, who revealed himself as a large man dressed in entirely in black. Although Grenier was content merely to accompish such a powerful transformation, the very act of doing so caused him to crave the tender, rawflesh of plump children. He tried to stifle the perverse hunger by killing dogs and drinking their warm blood, but such measures were only temporary. He was driven to steel children and eat there flesh.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the case of Jean Grenier is that the court elected not to have him burned at the stake for being a werewolf, but, insted, assessed his claim as the result of him being mentally defective. They dicided that his supposed powers of transformation were the lycanthropic dilusions, and because the young man was therefor insane, could not be held accountable for his terrible crimes. Rather than enduring tortures of the Inquisition and the usual transformation into ashes at the stake, Grenier was given a life sentence to a cell in a monastery in Bordeaux.

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