THE EMPIRE AND THE REPUBLIC 273 



half-hound or pointer animal — which was a capital tufter ; 

 but he goes on to say that he never saw a tufter speak to a 

 line at three o'clock on a hot afternoon which was not ' a 

 highly and a nobly ' bred one. The French judges do not 

 like our catlike feet — a Saintonge hound has a hare's foot — 

 and the lameness which besets English hounds after four 

 or five seasons' work in France is attributed to the shape 

 of our foxhounds' feet. After all, if they get four or five 

 seasons out of a hound, he owes very little at the price 

 Wilton sold him ' to go abroad.' 



M. de Couteulx is a great believer in the assured future 

 of tlie French hound. In his Manuel de Venerie he says : 

 ' Nous commen^ons a ne plus etre tributaires de I'Angleterre,. 

 et je vois avant peu le moment ou celle-ci pourra bien nous 

 prendre plus de chiens que nous ne lui en prendrons.' This 

 is a comfortable and patriotic conjecture, but still in the 

 region of prophecy. 



x\t Chantilly they still hunt with relays. This leads to 

 hounds getting scattered, semes as they say, over a wide 

 area. Like Virgil's seamen, apparent rari, all over the 

 place and quite unexpectedly, many of them taking but a 

 partial interest in the chase. 



In this country we had given up relays as far back as 

 the seventeenth century. M. de Ligniville cites this with 

 approval as a point of acute difference between English and 

 French hunting principles of his day. At Chantilly they 

 are rather a pale survival of more splendid Bourbon days, 

 when relays of hounds with their gaily dressed valets, led 

 horses with their attendants, gamekeepers and foresters, all 

 contributed pomp and circumstance, purple and gold to the 

 scenic display. Under the Empire they were still popular 

 stage properties. Valets de chiens, in their grey-blue worsted 

 stockings and buckle shoes ; extra horses, in check cotton 

 quarter-sheets, for the swells and the hunt-servants, military- 



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