Hunting the wild boar
Above: a scene from a medieval boar hunt from Gaston Phoebus' famous "Livre de Chasse" of 1389.
Chère amie, cher ami,
“Have you seen the lawn?” demanded Monsieur Martyn. I had.
Overnight, the greensward had been uprooted. Turf was tossed into piles. The brown dirt was furrowed, as if tiny plows pulled by erratic fairies had zigzagged over the lawn.
Les sangliers had been at work. While the Chateau slept, a compagnie of wild boars had used their strong snouts and sharp défenses to root around for worms and mushrooms.
The morning after the sangliers' feast. The wild boar uses its strong snout and sharp tusks to dig for worms and mushrooms.
The Chateau de Courtomer is set in the midst of its fields and pastures, at a safe distance from le bourg, the village. A park surrounds the chateau itself. A stream runs through the trees from a spring in one of the pastures over beyond the cour des bovins. It flows across the lawn and into the woods. And beyond the woods, to the east, is le marecage, too boggy and overgrown for walking. Our park is a haven for wildlife.
Nature evokes mixed feelings in the breast of a countryman. Not only had the wild swine rooted up the lawn, they had overturned our recently planted shrubs. Monsieur Martyn spent the day replanting and staking. Meanwhile, Monsieur Yves also had misgivings about the nocturnal activities of sus scrofa. Stopping by on his morning check-in of the cattle, he mentioned that we have young crops in the field, as do our neighbors. Wild boar destroy between 30 and 50 million euro of crops, fences and fields in France every year.
Late in November, I had received the new and the former head of Courtomer’s hunting association in our winter quarters at the Maison de la Ferme. As the fire crackled merrily on the hearth, we enjoyed pâté – made from a boar hunted near the Chateau -- on toast and a little Irish whiskey brought back from our trip across La Manche. Tout naturellement, our conversation turned to hunting. We agreed that two battues a winter would help with the sanglier. And that the Chateau would consider putting in place a plan de chasse.
French law holds hunters responsible for the destruction caused by le grand gibier – stags, deer, and boar. Messieurs Frédéric and Thierry are eager to enlist the Chateau in the collective effort to manage these populations.
Not long afterwards, I heard from Monsieur Frédéric. As he also happens to be our roofer, we see him frequently. Since July, his équipe has been working its way around the domain, replacing roofs, patching those still salvageable, and scraping off the moss that inserts itself into fissures and gaps, destroying tile and slate. He and Monsieur Thierry have also taken a sympathetic interest in stemming the attempt of ragondin to live in the moat.
It was time to organize the first battue.
The bright and plaintive notes of the cors swelled and fell away in the chilly morning air.
These are horns, called trompes de chasse when used in the hunt. The model of the trompe used today, a circular tube turned three and half times, was fixed in about 1815, but like its ancestor, the hollow animal horn, it has only one note. The sonneur – he who blows the horn – varies the tone. Depending on tone and rhythm, a listener knows that the animal has been seen or the hounds have taken the scent, that it has jumped into water, or has jumped out. When, at last, the “hallali” sounds, one knows the beast has been taken.
Marc-Antoine, Marquis de Dampierre, was master of the hunt for Louis XIV and Louis XV. He invented a model of the trompe de chasse, shown above, and wrote hundreds of fanfares (tunes for the trompe) for the hunt and concert hall.
By the end of la chasse, three young sangliers had met their end. Monsieur Thierry brought me a tender filet the next day. Sprinkled with coarse salt, cooked on a hot cast-iron grill, it is delicious.
In days of yore, killing three sanglier in a morning would have been a mythic exploit. The sanglier, like all big game in France, was rare. And wild boar are clever, strong, and aggressive. Hercules had to kill one as the fourth of his ten labors. As the 14th-century huntsman Gaston Phoebus, comte de Foix, and author of one of the first and most widely read hunting manuals in the world, wrote in 1389:
"C’est une orguilleuse et fière beste et périlleuse… Et l’ay veu férir homme dès le genoill jusque au piz, tout fendre et ruer tout mort à un cop sans parler à homme ; et moy meismes a il porté moult de fois à terre moy et mon coursier, et mort le coursier."
"It’s a proud and wild beast and dangerous…and I’ve seen it tear a man from the knee to the chest, split him and stamp on him, dead in a single thrust without a word; and myself, I’ve been thrown down many a time, me and my horse, and dead the horse.”
The first hunt I ever followed in France was a wild boar chase. I was posted behind of a stack of wood, idly looking about at the autumn foliage, when a black shape suddenly charged past the other side of the wood pile like a swift, menacing shadow. Its whole body expressed fierce determination.
“Voila un bien rusé!” commented my alarmed hunting companion.
“That’s one that knows how to outwit the hounds! A good thing he didn’t see us,” he added, with hushed respect.
A compagnie de "bêtes noires," as adult boars are called, from a 17th-century French treatise on hunting. The adult boar has black bristles, unlike juveniles, with are called" bête rousses" for their chestnut brown bristles.
A seasoned boar will lead a pack of hounds back and forth, confusing the trail of scent, wearing them out. It knows safe places to hide and wait, streams and little ponds in the forest to swim across. Like its medieval ancestors, it doesn’t shrink from attacking hounds and their masters, either.
When a wily boar succeeds in evading capture, the sonneurs conclude with the melancholy musical commentary, “La Retraite manquée,” the empty retreat. But the other day, the jaunty air of “La Retraite prise” sounded instead.
These “fanfare,” like the hundreds of others still used today, are attributed to the Marquis de Dampierre. A talented musician, he was also master of the hunt at the court of Versailles during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV from the 1690s to the middle of the 18th century.
In those days, la vénerie, the art and practice of the hunt, was part of the aura of kings.
Yet hunting has never been only about taking animals or culling wild populations. Perhaps as long as humans have chased wild prey, it has been the object of rituals that unite the life of man and animals with the divine. The paintings of hunters and hunted in the caves of the South of France are just one of the most ancient examples. And, despite bad weather, inconvenience, and the ready availability of steak haché these days, la chasse still exercises a powerful fascination. Its history entwines with the origins of France itself.
A lifesize bronze boar from the 2nd or 1st century B.C. found buried in the sands of the Loiret River, south of Normandy, 1861. It was part of a trove of bronze animals, the "Trésor de Neuvy en Sullias." It is thought to be a religious artefact used in a temple of the Gauls.
Clovis, first king of the French, won his key battle in 507 because a mystic doe led him to a ford in the woods where his army could cross to meet the enemy. In the late 600s, Saint Hubert, patron of hunters, was converted to the holy life when a stag with a crucifix floating between its antlers appeared to him during the hunt. The emperor Charlemagne was not called “great” because of his conquests, according to his biographer, but because he had killed a bear in one-on-one combat. And about 900 years later, Louis XIII was called “le juste” because he was a crack shot, not because he was fair-minded.
Under powerful kings, especially during the heyday of absolute monarchy during the 17th and 18th centuries, la vénerie was a setting for royal display. Versailles, Louis XIV’s great palace, had been a hunting lodge. It was still surrounded by thousands of acres of woods.
While his forebears had hunted with their “compagnons d’armes,” their comrades in arms, noble soldiers, Louis XIV expected all his courtiers to join him. Hunts departed almost daily from the cour Ovale at the château and followed wide allées cut through the trees. Ladies followed on horseback or in carriages.
There were hundreds of horses in the royal stables and at least a thousand hounds in the royal kennels at Versailles. These, like their masters, were of noble race: the lop-eared “grand saint-hubert” had been used by Charlemagne and the Carolingian kings; the “gris de Saint-Louis” had been brought to France by Louis IX during the Crusades.
Florissand and Pompée, two of Louis XV's favorite hounds. The king commissioned their portrait from François de Troy in 1739 for his apartments in the palace of Compiègne. Today, they hang in the Louvre.
Caring for the horses and hounds, managing game, the forest, and the hunt itself engaged 200 people under Louis XIV and 300 during the reign of Louis XV. The post of Grand Veneur, the Royal Huntsman who managed the ensemble, was coveted by the greatest peers of the realm. The Grand Veneur controlled a vast budget. He could award favors and posts. And he spent hours in the king’s company.
Like so many other aspects of social life during this period – from table manners and dance, to playwriting and spelling -- hunting became increasingly codified. Today, les chasseurs observe many of the rituals and even the pronunciations of the Ancien Régime. We never pronounce the “r” at the end of piqueur, explained one of my friends. This is because before the French Revolution, the “r” was silent.
The boar hunt was long reserved, in custom if not always by law, for the aristocracy or at least the wealthiest strata of society. You needed an équipage of vautrait, hounds bred and trained to follow boar and give voice, limiers, silent hounds bred to find and attack big game, piqueux, professional huntsmen to manage the kennels and the hunt itself, and dedicated enthusiasts to pay for it all. You needed plenty of land, since hunting rights in France are part of la jouissance, the happiness, of owning property.
During the French Revolution, vast private forests were confiscated by the new République. These are today’s forêts domaniales, which grant hunting concessions for deer, stag, and sanglier. Near Courtomer, le vautrait, as the équipage that hunts wild boar is also known, chases the bête noire in the Forêt d’Ecouves. The Vautrait du Perche follows the boar on horseback. If the hounds finally succeed in cornering it, a huntsman armed with a long, sharp dague or a spear called an épieu strikes it in the heart.
Humane but dangerous, this killing act is to “servir,” to serve, l’animal. It’s a verb that is also used in the church liturgy and that means to honor as well as to obey. In feudal times, servir also had the sense of fulfilling the obligations of one’s fief.
These meanings – to honor, to fulfill an obligation, and to give death – are part of what elevates hunting from a mere “blood sport” to its role as social ritual connecting man to his primitive origins and to nature itself. Today, culling wildlife is also part of a hunter’s obligation in France.
Starting in the 1970s, the wild boar population in France began to explode. The decline of small farms in remote areas and the depopulation of the countryside has given more space to the wild boar. Cross-breeding with the modern domestic pig is also blamed. Escaped sows bring heightened fertility to the wild strain. Instead of two or three marcassin, or wild boarlets a year, many laies now give birth to six or seven young. Two years ago, a pair of wild boar strolled through the town center of Nîmes. It’s not just farmers who complain these days.
Nowadays, as befits the proliferation of wild boar and the necessity of limiting it, hunting boar has become a less elaborate occupation. Our Association de la chasse eschews horses and spears. Each hunter carries a shotgun. Instead of caps and coats with gilded buttons, our équipe wears fluorescent orange jackets. But despite the difference of arm and apparel, a happy complicity unites all hunters.
The Association de la Chasse at Courtomer and three fine "bêtes noires."
“Donc dis je que veneurs s’en vont en paradis, quant ils meurent, et vivent en ce monde plus joyeusement que nulle autre gent,” wrote Gaston Phoebus.
“Thus say I, hunters go to heaven when they die, and live in this world more joyfully than any other men.”
A bientôt, au château,
Elisabeth
P.S. Click to hear the Marquis de Dampierre's fanfare, La Retraite prise.