I was born with all the instincts and senses of primitive man but these have been tempered with time by both the reasoning and the sensibilities of his civilized successor. I am passionately fond of hunting yet a bleeding animal, a bird with blood on its feathers, or even the sight of blood on my own hands often makes me feel faint.

One particular year towards the end of autumn, when the cold had set in really early, I got an invitation from one of my cousins, Karl de Rauville, to go duck-shooting with him down on the marshes by dawn. My cousin was a strapping great fellow with red hair and a huge beard, a very hale and hearty outdoor type, a bit of a rough diamond really, but for all his faults extremely good company. He lived in a kind of country-house-cum-farm in a wide river valley. On the slopes to the right and left of it was ancient woodland with magnificent trees where some of the rarest game-birds in that part of France were often to be found. Sometimes eagles had been shot there, and certain birds of passage which almost never visited our overpopulated regions invariably stopped over among its age-old boughs as if they knew or somehow recognized in it a little vestige of primeval forest remaining there to shelter them on their brief, nocturnal landfall.

The valley was made up of wide pastures irrigated by channels and separated by hedges. The river, itself a channel up to this point, spread out here into a vast area of marshland. This marsh, the best hunting-ground in which I have ever shot, was the pride and joy of my cousin who maintained it with as much care as if it were parkland. Through the great masses of rushes with which it was covered and which endowed it with a rustling, turbulent life of its own, narrow passages had been formed where flat-bottomed boats propelled by poles slid silently on the dead water, brushing against bullrushes, causing fish to dart quickly under the tall grass and moorhens, with their pointed black heads, to dive quickly out of sight.