Note 275 — Chapter III · (continued 3)

Among the indirect proofs of the comparatively recent existence of extensive forests in France, may be mentioned the fact, that wolves were abundant, not very long since, in parts of the empire where there are now neither wolves nor woods to shelter them. Arthur Young more than once speaks of the "innumerable multitudes" of these animals which infested France in 1789, and George Sand states, in the Histoire de ma Vie, that some years after the restoration of the Bourbons, they chased travellers on horseback in the Southern provinces, and literally knocked at the doors of her father-in-law's country seat.