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Updated: June 12, 2025
This sight reminded me of falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be called: but I care not for its name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed.
To these details was added another, which threw an additional interest over the story, that Talbot had a pair of beautiful English hawks, such as were most prized in the sport of falconry, and that these were the companions of his exile, and were trained by him to pursue and strike the wild duck that abounded, then as now, on this part of the river; and he thus found amusement to beguile his solitude, as well as sustenance in a luxurious article of food, which is yet the pride of gastronomic science, and the envy of bons vivants throughout this continent.
His stables vied with palaces, and his falconry was furnished at immense expense; but in his private life he was characterized by gross ignorance and vice, and his public character was marked by ingratitude and instability. The life of Lady Pembroke was embittered by this man for near twenty years, and she was at length compelled to separate from him.
He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales. He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the catalogue of a small library.
Still further would your surprise at such a consequence have diminished if you had gone on to the falconry, and seen on the perches the goshawk and her tercel, the sparrowhawk and her musket, under the care of the ostringer; and further on the falcon-gentle, the gerfalcon, the lanner, the merlin, and the hobby, all of which were attended to by the head falconer.
Such, however, was fated to be the case. Charles de Luynes had not been long at Court before he ascertained the passion of the young King for falconry, and having carefully trained two of his miniature hawks, he caused them to be offered in his name to his royal master.
Once arrived, the brothers went into the garden of the palace, where Gonzalo, who was a devotee of falconry, was engaged in bathing his favorite hawk, when suddenly, without warning, one of Doña Lambra's slaves rushed upon him and threw in his face a gourd filled with blood. In mediæval Spain this was a most deadly insult, and all the brothers drew their swords and rushed after the offender.
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.
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."
Ever earnest for right, Louis XIII never exhibited any personal energy to secure it, and consequently could effect nothing of himself; readily prejudiced, alike by his own caprices and by the representations of others, his very anxiety to act as became a monarch rendered him vulnerable to the intrigues of those whose interests tended to mislead his judgment; and as De Luynes, while sharing in his superstitious acts of overstrained devotion, or amusing his idleness by the futilities of falconry and other even less dignified sports, did not fail occasionally and cautiously to allude to more serious subjects, the boy-King listened eagerly to the recitals and opinions of his chosen friend, and finished by adopting all his views.
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