Twice ToldProyart, Histoire de Loango (1776): the tracks of an unseen animal
- Language
- French
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
Liévin-Bonaventure Proyart’s Histoire de Loango, Kakongo, et autres royaumes d’Afrique was printed in Paris in 1776. Its title page says it was written up from the memoirs of the apostolic prefects of the French mission. The passage below sits in the first part, in a run of short notes on the animals of the country: rats, frogs, a snail as thick as an arm, elephants and their ivory, then this, then the lion.
Les Missionnaires ont observé, en passant le long d’une forêt, la piste d’un animal qu’ils n’ont pas vu ; mais qui doit être monstrueux : les traces de ses griffes s’appercevoient sur la terre, & y formoient une empreinte d’environ trois pieds de circonférence. En observant la disposition de ses pas, on a reconnu qu’il ne couroit pas dans cet endroit de son passage, & qu’il portoit ses pattes à la distance de sept à huit pieds les unes des autres.
Translation
Passing along the edge of a forest, the missionaries saw the trail of an animal they did not see, but which must be monstrous. The marks of its claws showed on the ground and made a print about three feet round. From the way its steps were set, they could tell that it was not running at that point, and that it put its feet down seven or eight feet apart.
Notes
- Transcription: the long s is printed as s; spelling (s’appercevoient, formoient, couroit, portoit) and the space before the semicolon and colon are as printed. The margin beside the passage reads “Animal monstrueux.”
- The passage begins at the foot of p. 38 (“Les Missionnaires ont observé, en passant le long d’une forêt, la piste”) and ends on p. 39. The next paragraph begins “Le lion ressemble à ceux de la moyenne taille que nous voyons en Europe.”
- Checked against two copies of the 1776 Paris edition: the BnF copy on Gallica and the Wellcome Collection copy (shelfmark EPB/A/42319). The text is the same in both.
- A pied was a French foot. “Trois pieds de circonférence” is the distance around the print, not its width.
- These two sentences are all the book says about the animal. It gives no name, no description of the animal, no place beyond “along a forest”, and no date.
- Proyart himself does not say he was there. The book’s second part names the prefect as M. Belgarde, who sailed from Nantes in June 1766 (pp. 208-209).