The Werewolf Megapack: 22 Classic and Modern Tales of Shape-Shifters! by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: shapeshifters, wolfman, twilight, monster, werewolf
ISBN: 9781434447012
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE WOLF LEADER, by Alexandre Dumas

Translated by Alfred Allinson

INTRODUCTION

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 V. 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 Memoires: “That park, planted by Francois I., was put down by Louis Philippe. Beautiful trees under whose shade once reclined Francois I. and Madame d’Etarrpes, 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

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