Palafox by Eric Chevillard

at last, with horns, after a fruitless morning hunt. A stag? A wild boar? Or, him? The dogs seem out of sorts, a rare disarray in hunting dogs, in which respect they recall the sea horse, similarly nonplussed by you-name-it. But that’s as far as the similarities go, a sea horse is less faithful, more independent, something of the cat in him, perhaps. Some among us recommend sun exposure, others blotting paper, now the conversation turns to the preservation of sea horses, knowing that the sun makes them shrivel and fades their colors but that too often, alas, they rot under the blotter - when no one is willing to alter his position the discussion bogs down. Not another word. The animal approaches, his gallop resounds in the silence, and Franc-Nohain regales us with a similar case of a foreign sovereign preceded in his travels by his drummers. A tree conceals him once again, an oak, one of these enormous oaks from which one would have the right, finally, to expect something other than acorns, better than acorns, acorns, three hundred years of acorns, nothing but acorns, acorns, acorns, why not wise maxims for example - at the foot of which families would unpack their picnics without the slightest regard, worse still without a crumb for the legendary patriarch crouched there, today having abandoned all hope of disengaging his beard from the roots, around which the family now sated dances, and, compelled in order to close their dance circle, it’s sad to say, tear the baby apart.
    A wild boar would have charged. A stag would have been frozen in place and would have devoured us with his eye, incredulous, still full of love, looking to divine our intentions, judging the joke to be infantile and of doubtful taste, nonetheless ready to laugh with us, out of courtesy. Someone then would have shouldered his rifle. The stag would have stared hard for an instant to be certain to have understood, before resolving, too late, to flee. Palafox, upon seeing us, swings around us and forks off into the undergrowth. The pack of hounds takes off after him, the small group of us stays together, womanizers, pipe-smokers, lovers of billiards and old whisky, among other aptitudes. The bushes impede our progress. We move slowly (similarities end there, snails live in bunches on thistle and our efforts in this sense fail without glory one after the other), the movement that frees us from one bramble delivers us to the next and we progress in this manner, as though carried in triumph, but in actual fact skinned by the cutpurses who put on our hats, blow their noses in our handkerchiefs, under the pretext of touching us, and claw at our hands and faces. It was on a similar fine spring afternoon, in identical circumstances, that Franc-Nohain while struggling dropped his rifle and that our friend Chancelade, the father of the present Chancelade, struck right in the heart, crumpled. Among the many hypotheses mentioned in the instance of violent death - sordid settling of affairs, tragic amorous contretemps, inexplicable and momentary madness, bitter battle for power - it was the unfortunate accident model that was maintained and broadcast with a few alterations to key details, Franc-Nohain really only blamed the roe deer. We had been tracking them since dawn, sensitive to butterflies as well (not particularly credible as a metamorphosis from spineless prickly black caterpillars, come now, look elsewhere), to their furtive flight, under the spell of their days (the pretty vanessa morio and its soot-black wings rimmed with yellow which slips a poppy into the midst of its blue bouquet, periwinkle, forget-me-not, is doubtless not the most representative of country people), but stingy with our buckshot. The herd wasn’t far; the bramble presented itself to us as chaperone, and how could we refuse and under what pretext? The roes slipped away from us. In a way, the ex-Chancelade paid for their escape. A few tears, a few scratches, this time the damage isn’t