o the early
Christians, in the midst of the heavens.

I was born with all the instincts and the senses of primitive man,
tempered by the arguments and the feelings of a civilized being. I am
passionately fond of shooting, and the sight of the bleeding animal,
with the blood on its feathers and on my hands, affect my heart so, as
almost to make it stop.

That year the cold weather set in suddenly towards the end of autumn,
and I was invited by one of my cousins, Karl de Rauville, to go with him
and shoot ducks on the marshes, at daybreak.

My cousin, who was a jolly fellow of forty, with red hair, very stout
and bearded, a country gentleman, an amiable semi-brute, of a happy
disposition and endowed with that Gallic wit which makes even mediocrity
agreeable, lived in a house, half farmhouse, half chateau, situated in
a broad valley through which a river ran. The hills right and left were
covered with woods, old seignorial woods where magnificent trees still
remained, and where the rarest feathered game in that part of France was
to be found. Eagles were shot there occasionally, and birds of passage,
those which rarely come into our over-populated part of the country,
almost infallibly stopped amid these branches, which were centuries old,
as if they knew or recognized a little corner of a forest of ancient
times which had remained there to serve them as a shelter during their
short nocturnal halting place.

In the valley there were large meadows watered by trenches and separated
by hedges; then, further on the river, which up to that point had been
canalized, expanded into a vast marsh. That marsh, which was the best
shooting ground which I ever saw, was my cousin's chief care, who kept
it like a park. Among the number of rushes that covered it, and made it
living, rustling and rough, narrow passages had been made, through which
the flat-bottomed boats, which were impelled and steered by poles,
passed along silently over the dead water, brushed up against the reeds
and made the swift fish take refuge among the weeds, and the wild fowl
dive, whose pointed, black heads disappeared suddenly.

I am passionately fond of the water; the sea, although it is too vast,
too full of movement, impossible to hold, the rivers, which are so
beautiful, but which pass on, flee away and go, and above all the
marshes, where the whole unknown existence of aquatic animals
palpitates. The marsh is an entire world to itself on earth, a diff