The Woodcocks
My dearest, you ask me why I do not come back to Paris; you are amazed, and you are almost angry. The reason that I am going to offer will doubtless disgust you: Can a sportsman return to Paris at the beginning of the woodcock season?
Assuredly, I understand and I am fond of the life of the town, which revolves between house and street, but I prefer a free life, the simple autumn life of the sportsman.
In Paris I feel as if I were never in the open air; for the streets are, after all, no more than vast public apartments, without ceilings. Is a man in the open air, held between two walls, his feet on stone or wooden pavements, his outlook everywhere bounded by buildings, without any prospect of meadow, plain, or wood? Thousands of fellow creatures elbow you, push you, greet you, and talk to you; and the mere fact of receiving the rain on an umbrella when it rains is not enough to give me the impression and the sense of space.
Here I remark very sharply and delightfully the distinction between inside and outside. … But that is not what I want to say to you. …
It is the woodcock season.
I must tell you that I live in a big Norman house, in a valley, near a little stream, and that I get some shooting almost every day.
Other days, I read. I read just the books that Parisians have no time to know, very serious, very profound, very strange, books written by a brilliant and inspired scientist, a foreigner who has spent the whole of his life in studying the one problem, and has observed all the facts relative to the influence on our minds of the functioning of our physical organism.
But I want to tell you about the woodcock. My two friends, then, the d’Orgemol brothers and I, live here during the shooting-season, waiting for the first frost. Then, as soon as it freezes, we set out for their farm at Cannetot, near Fécamp, because there, there is a delightful little wood, a divine little wood, where all the woodcocks halt in their flight.
You know the d’Orgemols, both of them giants, both real early Normans, both of them men of that old powerful race of conquerors who invaded France, took and held England, settled themselves along every coast of the old world, built towns everywhere, passed like a wave over Sicily, leaving behind the monuments of a marvellous art, pulled down kings, pillaged the proudest cities, engaged Popes in priestly intrigues and, craftier than those Italian pontiffs, beat them at their own game; and, more important to the world than all, left children behind them in the beds of every race. The d’Orgemols are two Normans of the purest and oldest stock, they have every Norman characteristic, voice, accent, manner, fair hair, and eyes the hue of the sea.
When we are together, we talk in the dialect, we live, think, and act like Normans, we become landed Normans more peasant-like than our farmers.
Well, fifteen days we have been expecting the woodcock.
Every morning Simon, the eldest, says to me:
“Hullo, the wind’s coming round to the east, it’ll freeze. They’ll be here in two days.”
The younger, Gaspard, more cautious, waits until the frost comes to announce its arrival.
Well, last Friday, he came into my room at daybreak, shouting:
“It’s come, the ground is covered with white! Two more such days, and we go to Cannetot!”
Two days later, as a matter of fact, we do set out for Cannetot. You would have laughed to see us. We move in a strange hunting-coach which my father had constructed some time ago. “Construct” is the only word I can use to speak of this travelling tomb, or rather this moving earthquake. It contains everything: holds for the stores, holds for the weapons, holds for the trunks, boxes with peepholes for the dogs. Everything is in shelter, except the human passengers, perched on railed seats outside as high as a three-storied house and carried on four gigantic wheels. You scramble up there as best you can, using feet, hands, and even teeth on occasion, for no ladder gives access to that erection.
Very well, the two d’Orgemols and I reach this mountain, rigged out like Laplanders. We are clad in sheepskins, we wear enormous woollen stockings over our breeches, and gaiters over our woollen stockings; we have black fur caps and white fur gloves. When we are installed, Jean, my man, throws us up three basset-hounds, Pif, Paf, and Moustouche. Pif belongs to Simon, Paf to Gaspard, and Moustouche to me. They are like three small hairy crocodiles. They are long, low, hollow in the back, and bowlegged, and so shaggy that they look like yellow bushes. Their black eyes are hardly visible under their eyebrows, or their white teeth under their beards. We never shut them in the rolling kennels in the coach. Each of us keeps his own dog under his feet for the sake of warmth.
And so we set off, shaken almost to pieces. It is freezing, freezing hard. We are happy. We arrive about five o’clock. The farmer, Monsieur Picot, is waiting for us in front of the door. He is a jovial fellow, not very tall, but plump, thickset, active as a mastiff, cunning as a fox, always smiling,
