Every Chapter, In Order

Villers-Cotterets, early 1800s — a shoemaker, a pact with a mysterious black wolf, and a wish granted for every hair on his head, in an introduction and twenty-three chapters.

The introduction is real memoir rather than fiction — Dumas reflecting on his own childhood memories of the Villers-Cotterets forest region that gives this rare horror-adjacent novel its specific, lived-in setting. See the full overview page for more on the real regional folklore behind Thibault's Faustian bargain.