Using a legend told to him nearly half a century before, conjuring up the scenes of his boyhood, and calling into requisition his wonderful gift of improvisation, Dumas weaves a romance combining a weird tale of diablerie and continual delightful glimpses of forest life. Terror, wood-craft, and humour could not be more felicitously intermingled. The reader, while kept under the spell of the main theme of the story, experiences all the charm of an open-air life in the great forest of Villers-Cotterets -- the forest in which the little town seemed to occupy a small clearing, and into which the boy Alexandre occasionally escaped for days together from the routine of the school or from the hands of relatives who wanted to make a priest of him.