The Abbot Pierre Pourcher

Download information for the original French version of Pourcher's Book
View for free

HISTORICAL MEMORIES On the Provence of GÉvaudan and the City of Mende, Collected Works By: R.P.
L' ouvreleul, Priest Of the Christian Doctrines

Follow-ups Of Corrections, By l' abbot P. Pourcher, priest of Saint-Martin-in Boubaux, diocese of Mende.
WITH APPROVAL SAINT-MARTIN-DE-BOUBAUX AT L' EDITOR 1899.

ABBÉ PIERRE POURCHER, Pierre Pourcher was born on the 8th December 1831. He became Curate of St. Martin de Boubaux in 1873 and held this office until 1900, in 1899 the Pourcher book was printed consisting of many documents from the time period of La bete.

Pourcher wrote several historical books of which La Bete du Gevaudan is the most well known. In it he makes several references to direct family experiences with La Bete.

The book took Derek Brockis a long time to painstakingly and accuractely translate and is the best documentation to date about the mysteries of la bete.

Derek Brockis was kind enough to send to me the original book of la bete in the French. It took him FIFTEEN years to find this book. For the first time (to our knowledge) this book is to be made public in its original form. A few of the pages printed lightly (It was printed on an old block style press after all!).

For a small download fee (just to cover the cost of the bandwidth - these are large photography files!) you can have ALL the photos of the orignal pagesin a handy .ZIP file or .PDF file.

All pages were painstakingly photographed, cropped, color corrected, straightened and then assembled. This is a large file - so be patient while it downloads.

Want to view it for free? I have all the images uploaded to an online gallery.

About the Book Itself

Rik Verwaest (courtesy of Amazon.com review)

As an historian, I was really interested in this particular subject. It's a litteraly translation and transcription of the work of abbé Pourcher who wrote this book in the nineteenth century, using all available contemporary sources and should not be seen as a book on it's own. 

What you get then is a mash-up of many letters from the hunters to the king, mayors to local nobles and much more correspondance between all the parties involved. Sometimes quite interesting, sometimes a terrible dull read when they are just discussing their expenses or their petty quarrels among themselves in these letters. 

If you are expecting a thrilling book about this subject, written by today's literature standards, you might become terribly disappointed, but if you'e a scientist or an experienced history reader you might find this a very interesting document.