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At the death of the King, La Varenne retired, very old and very rich, into the country. Birds were much in vogue at that time, and he often amused himself with falconry. One day a magpie perched on one of his trees, and neither sticks nor stones could dislodge it. La Varenne and a number of sportsmen gathered around the tree and tried to drive away the magpie.
Among the other evils which have followed in the train of this fatal invention of gunpowder, the Squire classes the total decline of the noble art of falconry. "Shooting," he says, "is a skulking, treacherous, solitary sport, in comparison; but hawking was a gallant, open, sunshiny recreation; it was the generous sport of hunting carried into the skies."
Why, man, an you had hit me a rough blow, maybe I would rather have taken it from you, than a rough word from another; for you have a good notion of falconry, though you stand up for washing the meat for the eyases. So give us your hand, man, and bear no malice." Roland, though he felt his proud blood rebel at the familiarity of honest Adam's address, could not resist its downright frankness.
In their leisure hours they learned to dance and play on the harp, were instructed in the mysteries of woods and rivers, that is, in hunting, falconry, and fishing, and in wrestling, tilting with spears, and performing other military exercises on horseback. At fourteen the page became an esquire, and began a course of severer and more laborious exercises.
At Corandeuil, in your grandfather's time, there was a falconry, and I have seen gerfauts there, but you I tell you it is a cock, an old French cock; ugly thing! What you take for a coronet and it really does resemble one is a badly drawn cock's comb. How did this horrid creature come to be there? I should like to know if such pretty tricks are permitted at the postoffice.
"You have a knack of painting rural scenes which needs but to be joined with the gift of music to make you a poet," he said, when Denzil had been expatiating upon the landscape amidst which he had enjoyed his last bout of falconry, or his last run with his half-dozen couple of hounds.
I do not blame you, for she who should have been the gardener did not heed and would not heed what was happening. Look, Nefert, so long as I wore the lock of youth, I too did what I fancied I never found any pleasure in dreaming, but in wild games with my brothers, in horses and in falconry; they often said I had the spirit of a boy, and indeed I would willingly have been a boy."
He for a moment ran over in his mind the glorious existence of the surintendant, the crumbling of his fortunes, and the melancholy death that awaited him; and to conclude, "Did M. Fouquet love falconry?" said he. "Oh, passionately, monsieur!" repeated the falconer, with an accent of bitter regret and a sigh that was the funeral oration of Fouquet.
It may be supposed that this train of living was attended with expense. Moreover, he had various other establishments in town and country; besides his almost royal residence in Brussels. He was ardently fond of the chase, particularly of the knightly sport of falconry. In the country he "consoled himself by taking every day a heron in the clouds."
But on the way to the marsh the knight and the Prior paid little attention to the diversion of falconry. They were deep in consideration of the best way to drain the swamp and deal with it generally. Eleanor's heart beat fast as they neared the heronry. It was not a heron, however, which claimed the maiden flight of Mabonde. It was a woodcock flushed in the edge of a copse.
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