In other respects his tale was identical with the experiences he had related before the court.
De Lancre thought that the name Grenier or Garnier was a fatal name in connection with wer-wolves.
Evidence was given as to the times, places, and number of murders, and many of the facts were proved incontestably.
Jean's evidence as to the part his father had played in his misdeeds was hazy. He said that on one occasion his father had accompanied him, also wearing a wolf-skin, and that together they had killed a young girl dressed in white, and that they had devoured her flesh, the month being May of 1601.
He also added curious details regarding the Lord of the Forest, who had forbidden him to bite the thumbnail of his left hand, which was thicker and longer than the others, and that if he lost sight of it while in the form of a wolf he would quickly recover his human shape.
When confronted with his father Jean altered some of the details of his story, and it was agreed that long imprisonment and extended cross-examination had worn out his already feeble intellect.
It is worth pointing out that in the cases of Rollet, the tailor of Châlons, and the Gandillon family, the prisoners were accused of murder and cannibalism, but not of association with wolves, and that in the trial of Garnier evidence was given as to the depredations of the wolf rather than of the accused. There was doubtless a difficulty in proving the identity of the perpetrator of the murders.
A new era in these trials begins with that of Jean Grenier, for from that time onward medical men became more enlightened, and the belief spread that lycanthropy was a mental malady, with cannibalistic tendencies which had developed under diseased conditions.
In his "Dæmonologie," 1597, a reply to Reginald Scott's "Discovery of Witchcraft," James I of England declared that wer-wolves were victims of a delusion induced by a state of melancholia, and about the same period wolves became practically extinct in England, and only harmless creatures such as the cat, hare, and weasel were left for the sorcerer to change into with any possibility of a safe and natural disguise.
For many years afterwards the confessions of witches, who were executed for their crimes, bore striking resemblance to those made by wer-wolves, and many strange facts which were published at these trials have never been, and may never be, satisfactorily explained on a purely materialistic basis.