History had no meaning for me.īut in this dim and old-fashioned world, I had become the hunter. I wouldn't sit by the fire and talk of old wars and the days of the Sun King. And I'd been born restless - the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer. My father's castle, his estate, and the village nearby were my entire universe. My eldest brother, Augustin, who was the rightful heir to all we possessed, had spent his wife's small dowry as soon as he married her. Even in a rich family, it might have been that way for a younger boy, but our wealth had been used up long ago. I had no claim to the title or the land, and no prospects. My father was the Marquis, and I was the seventh son and the youngest of the three who had lived to manhood.
It was the worst winter that I could remember, and the wolves were stealing the sheep from our peasants and even running at night through the streets of the village. This was on my father's land in the Auvergne in France, and these were the last decades before the French Revolution. In the winter of my twenty-first year, I went out alone on horseback to kill a pack of wolves.
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