The Wolf-Leader

MP3 Audio CD. 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.

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.