Count d'Erlette published this book in 1703. In this book he told of his membership in Parisian ghoul cult. 

Of the actual manuscript, there is said to be only fourteen copies extant worldwide. Cultes des Goules was originally written and privately printed by a French aristocrat, François-Honoré Balfour, the Comte d’Erlette, about 1703. The print run was supposed to have come to sixty copies of six-hundred pages. Rumors from the time hinted that the nobleman commissioned his three personal copies to be bound in human skin, but no firm evidence of any such request, let alone an actual copy, had ever come to light.

Balfour seemed initially to be a typical loyalist French aristocrat-soldier; he’d been involved in the Great Northern War, in which France supported Sweden against a coalition consisting of Russia, Poland, Saxony, Denmark, and Norway; that is until 1701, when the War of the Spanish Succession began. Dutifully it seemed, Balfour accepted his orders and saw action in the Spanish Netherlands, Italy, and Spain itself.

During all this, his book circulated Paris and brought no little notoriety to him. However, the religious authorities took a grave view of the matter and Balfour escaped from his retreat in rural France to England a few steps ahead of his Catholic pursuers.

In London, the Comte’s reputation preceded him and he swiftly became a socialite at the court of Queen Anne. The Comte even managed to survive the turbulent period of the English Civil War, hiding away during the period of Cromwell’s Republic and coming back to light with the renewal of the monarchy.

In 1718, he fought for the Quadruple Alliance formed by Great Britain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Netherlands when Philip V of Spain sought, by force, to nullify the peace settlements reached after the War of the Spanish Succession. Balfour was among the British fleet that landed Austrian troops in Sicily, which Spain had seized, while French and British forces entered Spain.

However, after Spain yielded to the Alliance in 1720, François-Honoré Balfour disappeared only to surface once more, in 1724, in France at Ardennes where he died. He offered no explanation for his vanishing and no-one had discovered a reason since his death. All that he left behind him were scattered family members and his book, his "masterpiece", the Cultes des Goules; the Comte’s sole legacy to the world. Friends in England believed his French "compatriots" had finally caught up with him despite his undoubted bravery in 1718-1720, while others took the view that he had been claimed by something far worse than the French church.