The Gazette presents him as a monster who perhaps had no equal, recounting matters concerning him that shall not be transcribed here. We shall retain only that which best conveys the dread that seized an entire province.
Blaise Ferrage, known as Seyé, was a mason by trade, a native of Cescau in the County of Comminges—diminutive in stature, yet endowed with extraordinary strength. In dread of the law, he fled at the age of eleven into the mountains of Aure, bordering his native parish, choosing for his lair, after the manner of bears, a hollow in the rock atop a high peak. From this eyrie he would descend upon the countryside, becoming its most dreadful scourge: he plundered cattle and poultry, and preyed above all upon women, whom he hunted down with musket fire. It was even whispered that he had turned cannibal.
He murdered a Spanish millstone merchant whom he had lured to his retreat under the pretext of guiding him into France. He set torch to the barn, packed with livestock, of a proprietor who had sought his arrest, and calmly watched the conflagration. He walked abroad bristling with arms—a belt of pistols, a double-barrelled gun, and a dagger—and would saunter down to the nearest town to purchase his powder and ball; the maréchaussée dared not lay hands upon him.
Legend had already taken up the tale. It was said that he carried woven into his hair an herb that could gnaw through iron, known only to a single bird, the woodpecker; to procure it, men said, one had only to nail a plank over the hollow tree where the bird nested, and wait for its return, herb in beak, to file away the nails.
He was captured at last through the treachery of a false companion who had feigned to take flight with him into the mountains; this man had been promised his pardon, and several parish communities had pooled their purses to reward whoever should deliver the fugitive. Seyé slipped their grasp once, but was taken again, having lost his way by night in his own mountains.
The châtelain judge of Castillon condemned him to be broken upon the wheel and his body cast into the flames. On the 12th of December, the Parlement of Languedoc affirmed the decree, sparing only the fire: his corpse was to be exposed upon the patibulary forks, and the judgment posted in Cescau, in Castillon, and in Toulouse. He was put to death on the 15th, at four o'clock in the afternoon; the watch had been tripled, and the entire city was gathered to look on.
One does not forget the child of eleven who once fled into the mountain wilderness, nor the countryside that, for years on end, bolted its doors at nightfall.
Gazette des tribunaux, Parlement of Languedoc, decree of 12 December (Blaise Ferrage, known as Seyé).