The Wolf-Leader

Alexandre Dumas's The Wolf-Leader (1857) is the great adventure-novelist at his darkest and strangest — a supernatural folk-tale of a soul sold by the strand, drawn from the forest of his own boyhood and told in the hushed voice of firelit legend. Far from the swordplay and intrigue of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, this is a devil's-bargain fable: gentler in length, but blacker at heart than anything in his famous romances.

Thibault is a poor sabot-maker living at the edge of the woods, soured by envy of the great lord who rides past and of every man more fortunate than himself. Into his bitterness steps a creature out of the oldest nightmares of the forest — a great black wolf who speaks, who reasons, and who offers a pact. The wolf will grant Thibault's every wish. The price seems almost nothing: a single hair of his head for each wish fulfilled. But the hairs turn a burning blood-red, and with every wish the diabolic bargain tightens its hold.

Each wish is granted with a cruel literalness that turns the gift to a curse, and as Thibault grows more monstrous the gentle Agnelette, the girl he loves, slips further from him. In exchange for his diminishing humanity the wolf grants him one dreadful power — mastery over the wolves of the forest, who come at his call and run at his heel — until the envious shoemaker becomes at last the Wolf-Leader himself, a man half-turned to beast, lord of a pack and slave of a devil. A taut fable of envy, the corruption of wishing, and the ancient legend of the man who runs with wolves, The Wolf-Leader reads the damnation of a soul off the colour of a man's hair.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation of Dumas's 1857 tale in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.