The Wolf Leader Read online

  Book Description

  One of the first werewolf novels ever written!

  A lost classic from the author of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask.

  * * *

  What’s the next best thing to having a walking wolf grant your wishes? Would it be enough to take revenge on those who oppose you?

  * * *

  To Thibault the shoemaker, that pact is worth more than gold. Or at least more than the single, dark hairs on his handsome, youthful head. What could go wrong when one can simply wish their enemies out of the way? Alexandre Dumas brings us a story of envy so ravenous, it eats its own heart.

  * * *

  “A complex and nuanced novel that, upon repeated readings, yields more insight and entertainment even after more than one hundred and sixty years.”—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of The Wolfman

  The Wolf Leader

  Foreword by Jonathan Maberry

  Alexandre Dumas

  Translated by

  Alfred Allinson

  The Wolf Leader

  Originally published in 1904 in London by Methuen.

  This work is in the Public Domain.

  Foreword copyright © 2020 Jonathan Maberry

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-094-6

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-093-9

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-095-3

  * * *

  Edited by Tracy Leonard Nakatani

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  * * *

  Published by

  WordFire Press, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  WordFire Press eBook Edition 2019

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2019

  WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2019

  Printed in the USA

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  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  1. The Grand Master of His Highness’s Wolf Hounds

  2. The Seigneur Jean and the Sabot Maker

  3. Agnelette

  4. The Black Wolf

  5. The Pact with Satan

  6. The Bedevilled Hair

  7. The Boy at the Mill

  8. Thibault’s Whishes

  9. The Wolf Leader

  10. Maître Magloire

  11. David And Goliath

  12. Wolves in the Sheep Fold

  13. Where It Is Demonstrated That A Woman Never Speaks More Eloquently Than When She Holds Her Tongue

  14. A Village Wedding

  15. The Lord of Vauparfond

  16. My Lady’s Lady

  17. The Baron de Mont-Gobert

  18. Death and Resurrection

  19. The Dead and the Living

  20. True to Tryst

  21. The Genius of Evil

  22. Thibault’s Last Wish

  23. The Anniversary

  24. Hunting Down the Werewolf

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles

  Foreword

  Jonathan Maberry

  Ask most readers about Alexandre Dumas and they’ll smile and mention The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. A few deep divers will talk about The Corsican Brothers or The Prince of Thieves.

  Ask me and now, as when I was a child, the answer will always be The Wolf-Leader.

  Yes, I was a strange little boy and grew up to be, arguably, a strange adult. My writing bears this out. I write about the things that go bump in the night. Vampires, ghosts, demons, and, yes, werewolves. Been a fan of lycanthropes of all kinds since I was a kid. I blame my grandmother.

  Short version is this: Maude Blanche Flavell was born in Alsace-Lorraine. She was forty when she had my mother, and my mom was 41 when I was born in 1958. That meant that my grandmother (we called her Nanny) was born in 1877. In the 19th century, and in rural France. She grew up in an age when spooky stories were much more likely to be believed. Nanny was very much like Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter books, in that she believed in everything. Absolutely everything. That belief in what she called the “larger world” never went away, which made her both the coolest and the creepiest grandmother ever. When I was a kid, she taught me to read tarot cards, listen for voices on the night wind, search for power stones while on walks through the woods, and to keep a very open mind.

  She also encouraged me to read. She sparked that by telling me stories … mostly unnerving, usually involving something weird and bitey. Later, after she began giving me books—novels and short stories—I discovered that some of her stories were her whisper-down-the-lane retellings of classic legends or works of supernatural fiction. This is how I discovered Henry James, Robert W. Chambers, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, William Henry Ireland, Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. Some were translations, such as works by Friedrich von Schiller and Heinrich Zschokke. Names I didn’t know then but treasure now.

  One of the books she gave me—and I remember well because it was my ninth birthday—was a book written by someone whose name I’d heard of, or at least seen—Alexandre Dumas. Less than two months ago the local ABC affiliate in my hometown of Philadelphia played the 1948 Gene Kelly version of The Three Musketeers. I was confused. If Dumas was writing books about swashbuckling swordsmen, why was my creepy grandmother giving me something of his to read?

  As it turned out, the book wasn’t anything that would have made a vehicle for Gene Kelly. It was a novel about a werewolf.

  The Wolf-Leader. Published in France in 1857 and translated for a 1904 British edition. The copy she had was the 1904 edition—long lost to time now, alas. It was not the 1950 American edition that was somewhat butchered by a writer who later became a friend and mentor of mine, L. Sprague de Camp. I read and re-read that novel a dozen times over the years, the last time was a few months prior to my grandmother’s death in 1978 at the venerable age of 101. By then the copy was battered and threadbare, with pages held in place by tape. I have no idea what happened to it, or to any of Nanny’s books, following her death. And that’s a great loss, because there were other wonderful works of classic horror in her library.

  The Wolf-Leader is a remarkable book. Entertaining, thought provoking, and influential. The story itself is clearly influenced by Johann Georg Faust, a real-life alchemist and astrologer whose outrageous life and reputed sins have been famously fictionalized by Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Thomas Mann, among others. In each story a man discontented with what he can humanly achieve strikes an unholy deal with the Devil. In the case of Thibault, the wronged shoemaker of The Wolf-Leader, it is revenge rather than knowledge or financial gain that drives him.

  I love me a good revenge story, but even more so I enjoy stories with twists, and Thibault’s quest for vengeance is in no way a straight line. Things seldom go as planned and more often there are other forces at work in both the natural and supernatural fabric of the story’s reality. This is what caught my attention the first time, and on repeated readings over the decades I’ve found fresh nuances to consider, allowing me to “rediscover” the essential elements of the tale anew.

  I read it again before writing this introduction, and since my own life has changed since my last reading, the story was once more different to me. The last time I read it I was still writing nonfiction at night and teaching by day. I hadn’t yet shifted gears to become a writer of fiction. Now I’m a full-time writer and, at this writing, working on my 37th novel. I’ve also written over 150 short stories and hundreds of issues of comic books. That process has changed me on many levels, including substantially deepening my appreciation for a good story well told. I’ve always loved this book, but I think I love it even more now that, as a novelist, I can see the carpentry of how it was constructed.

  I can also see influences of this work on later pieces of fiction. The tragic elements of the werewolf story are vastly different from those of, say, the vampire. Bloodsuckers are more often than not, the true villains of the piece. Sure, there has been a wave of romanticized vampires, including sympathetic takes on Dracula, who was every bit an unredeemable monster in Bram Stoker’s original novel. But, historically, vampires are predator creatures who lust but rarely love.

  Werewolves, on the other hand, despite being more overtly monstrous and demonstrably violent, are often presented in fiction as cursed and deeply torn. These are characters in whose hearts and minds the human “better half” is at war with their beastly natures. We see that even in early werewolf films such as The Werewolf of London and The Wolf Man. T
he thematic homages to The Wolf-Leader are obvious to any scholar of the genre, even if in the 21st century Dumas’ landmark book is often unfairly omitted from Best Of lists of werewolf literature.

  This book echoes through most of the most important works of shapeshifters that followed. Even, dare I say it, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is a werewolf story in everything but length of hair.

  There is a redemptive element of the book that has always touched my heart, and when I did the novelization of the 2010 reimagining of The Wolfman, I drew on the influence of this book when exploring the heart and soul of a creature as conflicted and complex as Thibault. That book was my first New York Times bestseller, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to Alexandre Dumas for writing a complex and nuanced novel that, upon repeated readings, yields more insight and entertainment even after more than one hundred and sixty years. The novel’s themes are timeless and its ability to entertain endless.

  Turn the page, then, and enjoy The Wolf-Leader. Go on … take a bite.

  —Jonathan Maberry

  January 2020

  Prologue

  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 traveler’s staff, sit down by the wayside, 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.

  Then with the wide desert awaiting us in front, we are astonished, as we look along the path which we have left behind, to catch sight of first one and then another of those delicious oases of verdure and shade, beside which we never thought of lingering for a moment, and which, indeed we had passed by almost without notice.

  But, then, how quickly our feet carried us along in those days! We were in such a hurry to reach that goal of happiness, to which no road has ever yet brought any one of us.

  It is at this point that we begin to see how blind and ungrateful we have been; it is now that we say to ourselves, if we could but once more come across such a green and wooded resting place, we would stay there for the rest of our lives, would pitch our tent there, and there end our days.

  But the body cannot go back and renew its existence, and so memory has to make its pious pilgrimage alone; back to the early days and fresh beginnings of life it travels, like those light vessels that are borne upward by their white sails against the current of a river. Then the body once more pursues its journey; but the body without memory is as the night without stars, as the lamp without its flame … And so body and memory go their several ways.

  The body, with chance for its guide, moves towards the unknown.

  Memory, that bright will-o’-the-wisp, hovers over the landmarks that are left behind; and memory, we may be sure, will not lose her way. Every oasis is revisited, every association recalled, and then with a rapid flight she returns to the body that grows ever more and more weary, and like the humming of a bee, like the song of a bird, like the murmur of a stream, tells the tale of all that she has seen.

  And as the tired traveler listens, his eyes grow bright again, his mouth smiles, and a light steals over his face. For Providence in kindness, seeing that he cannot return to youth, allows youth to return to him. And ever after he loves to repeat aloud what Memory tells, him in her soft, low voice.

  And is our life, then, bounded by a circle like the earth? Do we, unconsciously, continue to walk towards the spot from which we started? And as we travel nearer and nearer to the grave, do we again draw closer, ever closer, to the cradle?

  II

  I cannot say. But what happened to myself, that much at any rate I know. At my first halt along the road of life, my first glance backwards, I began by relating the tale of Bernard and his uncle Berthelin, then the story of Ange Pitou, his fair fiancé, and of Aunt Angélique; after that I told of Conscience and Mariette; and lastly of Catherine Blum and Father Vatrin.

  I am now going to tell you the story of Thibault and his wolves, and of the Lord of Vez. And how, you will ask, did I become acquainted with the events which I am now about to bring before you? I will tell you.

  Have you read my memoirs, and do you remember one, by name Mocquet, who was a friend of my father’s?

  If you have read them, you will have some vague recollection of this personage. If you have not read them, you will not remember anything about him at all.

  In either case, then, it is of the first importance that I should bring Mocquet clearly before your mind’s eye.

  As far back as I can remember, that is when I was about three years of age, we lived, my father and mother and I, in a little Château called Les Fossés, situated on the boundary that separates the departments of Aisne and Oise, between Haramont and Longpré. The little house in question had doubtless been named Les Fossés on account of the deep and broad moat, filled with water, with which it was surrounded.

  I do not mention my sister, for she was at school in Paris, and we only saw her once a year, when she was home for a month’s holiday.

  The household, apart from my father, mother, and myself, consisted—firstly: of a large black dog, called Truffe, who was a privileged animal and made welcome wherever he appeared, more especially as I regularly went about on his back; secondly: of a gardener, named Pierre, who kept me amply provided with frogs and snakes, two species of living creatures in which I was particularly interested; thirdly: of a negro, a valet of my father’s, named Hippolyte, a sort of black merry-andrew, whom my father, I believe, only kept that he might be well primed with anecdotes wherewith to gain the advantage in his encounters with Brunel, and beat his wonderful stories; fourthly: of a keeper named Mocquet, for whom I had a great admiration, seeing that he had magnificent stories to tell of ghosts and werewolves, to which I listened every evening, and which were abruptly broken off the instant the General—as my father was usually called—appeared on the scene; fifthly: of a cook, who answered to the name of Marie, but this figure I can no longer recall, it is lost to me in the misty twilight of life; I remember only the name, as given to someone of whom but a shadowy outline remains in my memory, and about whom, as far as I recollect, there was nothing of a very poetic character.

  Mocquet, however, is the only person that need occupy our attention for the present. Let me try to make him known to you, both as regards his personal appearance and his character.

  III

  Mocquet was a man of about forty years of age, short, thick-set, broad of shoulder, and sturdy of leg. His skin was burnt brown by the sun, his eyes were small and piercing, his hair grizzled, and his black whiskers met under his chin in a half circle.