The Wolf-Leader

Although the introductory chapters were not signed until May 31st, 1856, The Wolf-Leader is to be associated in conception with the group of romances which Dumas wrote at Brussels between the years 1852 and 1854, that is to say, after his financial failure and the consequent defection of his collaborator Maquet, and before his return to Paris to found his journal Le Mousquetaire. Like Conscience l’Innocent and Catherine Blum, which date from that period of exile, the present story was inspired by reminiscences of our author’s native place--Villers-Cotterets, in the department of the Aisne.

In The Wolf-Leader Dumas, however, allows his imagination and fancy full play. Using a legend told to him nearly half a century before, conjuring up the scenes of his boyhood, and calling into requisition his wonderful gift of improvisation, he contrives in the happiest way to weave a romance in which are combined a weird tale of diablerie and continual delightful glimpses of forest life. Terror, wood-craft, and humour could not be more felicitously intermingled. The reader, while kept under the spell of the main theme of the story, experiences all the charm of an open-air life in the great forest of Villers-Cotterets--the forest in which the little town seemed to occupy a small clearing, and into which the boy Alexandre occasionally escaped for days together from the irksome routine of the school or from the hands of relatives who wanted to make a priest of him.

Thus Dumas, the most impressionable of men, all his life remained grateful to the forest for the poetic fancies derived from its beauty and the mysteries of its recesses, as well as for the hiding-places it afforded him, and for the game and birds which he soon learnt to shoot and snare there. Listen to his indignation at the destruction of the trees in the neighbouring park. We quote from his Memoirs:--“That park, planted by François I., was cut down by Louis Philippe. Beautiful trees! under whose shade once reclined François I. and Madame d’Etampes, Henri II. and Diana of Poitiers, Henri IV. and Gabrielle--you had a right to believe that a Bourbon would have respected you, that you would have lived your long life--the life of beech trees and oaks; that the birds would have warbled on your branches when green and leafy. But over and above your inestimable value of poetry and memories, you had, unhappily, a material value. You beautiful beeches with your polished silvery cases! you beautiful oaks with your sombre wrinkled bark!--you were worth a hundred thousand crowns. The King of France, who, with his six millions of private revenue, was too poor to keep you--the King of France sold you. For my part, had you been my sole fortune, I would have preserved you; for, poet as I am, there is one thing that I would set before all the gold of the earth, and that is the murmur of the wind in your leaves; the shadow that you made to flicker beneath my feet; the sweet visions, the charming phantoms which, at evening time, betwixt the day and night, in twilight’s doubtful hour would glide between your age-long trunks as glide the shadows of the ancient Abencerrages amid the thousand columns of Cordova’s royal mosque.”

The Wolf-Leader was published in 1857, in three volumes (Paris: Cadot). Dumas reprinted it in his journal Le Monte-Cristo in 1860.

R. S. G.

THE WOLF-LEADER

INTRODUCTION

WHO MOCQUET WAS, AND HOW THIS TALE BECAME KNOWN TO THE NARRATOR

I

Why, I ask myself, during those first twenty years of my literary life, from 1827 to 1847, did I so rarely turn my eyes and thoughts towards the little town where I was born, towards the woods amid which it lies embowered, and the villages that cluster round it? How was it that during all that time the world of my youth seemed to me to have disappeared, as if hidden behind a cloud, whilst the future which lay before me shone clear and resplendent, like those magic islands which Columbus and his companions mistook for baskets of flowers floating on the sea?

Alas! simply because during the first twenty years of our life, we have Hope for our guide, and during the last twenty, Reality.

From the hour when, weary with our journey, we ungird ourselves, and dropping the traveller’s staff, sit down by the way-side, we begin to look back over the road that we have traversed; for it is the way ahead that now is dark and misty, and so we turn and gaze into the depths of the past.