26 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
foreseeing clianges of weather. I am obliged to say it, but it is 
the ignorance of the vulgar that nearly always makes the lie of 
the hunter. 
When I say that I have shot flying a superb salmon, of several 
pounds weight, I relate with all possible simplicity a true fact, but 
I do not therefore pretend to insinuate that salmon have wings ; it 
is only the whimsical imagination of the auditor which has imputed 
this design to me. I employ a figure of rhetoric, an ellipse, to sa^^ 
that I have shot flying at a sea-eagle, which has experienced so 
much emotion at the whistling of my ball, as to have let the prey 
he held in his claws fall into my game-bag. I have not lied, since 
I shot flying — since the fish has fallen from the air. And yet how 
often have I not seen a frivolous audience explode with hilarity 
and universal incredulity, at the simple announcement of such 
a shot. You are liable every day to shoot flying, a chamois 
bounding over an abyss — a roebuck leaping over a thicket : relate 
in company, in the simplest manner, the accident that has befallen 
you, and suddenly you shall see a fine talker rise to thank you 
for teaching him that chamois and roebucks have wings, a pecu- 
liarity, he will add, with an air full of malice, of which he had, 
until then, been completely ignorant. For my own part, I declare 
all conversation impossible in a saloon where one cannot have 
killed a deer or a salmon flying. The lie, in matters of hunting, 
should commence only beyond the limits of the possible. 
The hunter, I have said, adorns truth because he loves it. There 
is no harm in that. The hunter is human — he has felt cold on 
the shoulders of the poor goddess — he has understood that it was 
necessary to dress her a little, to produce her to better effect in a 
world where false modesty reigns — where the corruption of the 
soul leads man to blush at the most charminsf creations of his God. 
But how the respect of the hunter for truth reveals itself through 
the slightest details of those ornaments with which he has decked 
his idol 1 How gracefully the waving folds of her silken, pearl- 
embroidered mantle lend themselves to delineate the most delicious 
curves at the least motion of the breeze ! How ill they keep the 
secret which the artist has confided to them. I swear to you, it 
would not have been the moralists of the puritan school that would 
