Ferdinand Gregorovius, who traveled in Corsica in 1852, mentions an entomologist from Dresden whom he met in the hills above Sartène, and who told him that the island had struck him as a paradise garden on his first visit, particularly because of the small size of its fauna species, and indeed, writes Gregorovius, soon after he met the Saxon entomologist he had several sightings in the forest of Bavella of the Tyrrhenian red deer, Cervus elaphus corsicanus, now long since extinct, an animal of dwarfish stature and almost oriental appearance, with a head much too large for the rest of its body, and eyes wide with fear in constant expectation of death.
Although the game that once lived in such abundance in the forests of the island has been eradicated almost without trace today, the fever of the chase still breaks out on Corsica every September. During my excursions into the interior of the island I repeatedly felt as if the entire male population were participating in a ritual of destruction which long ago became pointless. The older men, usually wearing blue dungarees, are posted beside the road all the way up into the mountains; the young men, in a kind of paramilitary gear, drive around in jeeps and cross-country vehicles as if they thought the countryside were occupied, or they were expecting an enemy invasion. Unshaven, carrying heavy rifles, menacing in their manner, they look like those Croatian and Serbian militiamen who destroyed their native land in their deranged belligerence; and, like those Marlboro-style heroes of the Yugoslavian civil war, the Corsican hunters are not to be trifled with if you happen to stray into their territory.
More than once on such meetings they plainly indicated that they did not want to talk to some chance-come hiker about their sanguinary business, and sent me on my way with a gesture making it clear that anyone who did not get out of the danger zone very quickly might easily be shot down. Once, a little way below Evisa, I tried to strike up a conversation with one of the hunters posted beside the road and obviously taking his task very seriously, a short man of around sixty who was sitting, his double-barreled shotgun across his knees, on the low stone balustrade which fences off the road at that point from the ravine of the Gorges de Spelunca, where it drops to two hundred meters below. The cartridges he had with him were very large, and the belt carrying them was so broad that it reached like a leather jerkin from his belly to halfway up his chest. When I asked him what he was looking for, he simply replied sangliers (wild boars), as if that alone must suffice to send me packing. He would not have his photograph taken, but warded me off with his outspread hand just as guerrillas do in front of the camera.
In the Corsican newspapers, the so-called ouverture de la chasse (the start of the hunting season) is one of the main subjects of reporting in September, together with the never-ending accounts of the bombing of police stations, local authority tax offices, and other public institutions, and it even casts into the shade the excitement over the start of the new school year which seizes annually upon the entire French nation. Articles are published about the state of the game preserves in the various regions, last season’s hunting, prospects for the present campaign, and indeed hunting in general in every imaginable form. And the papers print photographs of men of martial appearance emerging from the maquis with their guns over their shoulders, or posing around a dead boar. The main subject, however, is the lamentable fact that fewer and fewer hares and partridges can be found every year.
Mon mari, complains the wife of a hunter from Vissavona to a Corse-Matin reporter, for instance, mon mari, qui rentrait toujours avec cinq ou six perdrix, on a tout juste pris une.[5] In a way the contempt she expresses for the husband coming home empty-handed from his foray into the wilderness, the indisputably ludicrous appearance of the ultimately unsuccessful hunter in the eyes of his wife, women always having been excluded from the hunt, is the closing episode of a story that looks far back into our dark past, and that even in my childhood filled me with uneasy premonitions.
I remember, for instance, how on my way to school I once passed the yard of Wohlfahrt the butcher on a frosty autumn morning, just as a dozen deer were being unloaded from a cart and tipped out on the paving stones. I could not move from the spot for a long time, so spellbound was I by the sight of the dead animals. Even then the fuss made by the hunters about sprigs of fir, and the palms arranged in the butcher’s empty white-tiled shopwindow on Sundays, seemed to me somehow dubious. Bakers obviously needed no such decorations.
Later, in England, I saw rows of little green plastic trees hardly an inch high surrounding cuts of meat and offal displayed in the shopwindows of “family butchers.” The obvious fact that these evergreen plastic ornaments must be mass-produced somewhere for the sole purpose of alleviating our sense of guilt about the bloodshed seemed to me, in its very absurdity, to show how strongly we desire absolution and how cheap we have always bought it.
All this was going through my head again one afternoon as I sat at the window of my hotel room in Piana. I had found an old volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in the drawer of the bedside table, and I began to read Flaubert’s version of the Legend of Saint Julian, which I had not known before, that strange tale in which an insatiable passion for hunting and a vocation for sainthood do battle in the same heart. I was both fascinated and disturbed by the story, which in itself I approached with reluctance.
Even the episode of the killing of the church mouse, an explosion of violence in a boy who until that moment had always behaved well, got under my skin most uncomfortably. We are told that Julian, waiting by the mousehole, gave the creature a small tap and was taken aback to see that its little body had stopped moving. A drop of blood stained the flagstones. And the longer the story went on, the more blood there was. Time after time, the crime must be masked by another kind of death. The pigeon brought down by Julian with his sling lies twitching in a privet bush, and as he wrings its neck he feels his senses faint with pleasure. As soon as he has learned the art of the chase from his father, the urge comes over him to go out into the wilderness. Now he is forever hunting wild boar in the forest, bear in the mountains, deer in the valleys or out in open country. The animals take fright at the sound of the drum, hounds race over the hillsides, hawks rise in the air, and birds drop like stones from the sky.
The huntsman comes home every evening covered with mud and blood, and so the killing goes on and on until, one icy cold winter’s morning, Julian goes out and, in a daylong frenzy, strikes down everything moving around him. Arrows fall, we are told, like rain beating down in a thunderstorm. In the end, night comes, the sunset is red among the branches of the forest like a cloth soaked with blood, and Julian leans against a tree with his eyes wide open, looking at the vast extent of the slaughter and wondering how he can have done it. He then falls victim to a paralysis of the soul, and begins his long wanderings through a world which is no longer in a state of grace, sometimes in such blazing heat that the hair on his head catches fire of its own accord in the glow of the sun, at other times in cold so icy that it breaks his limbs. He refuses to hunt anymore, but sometimes his terrible passion comes over him again in his dreams; he sees himself, like our father Adam, surrounded by all the creatures in the garden of paradise, and he has only to reach out his arm and they are dead. Or he sees them passing by in pairs before his eyes, beginning with aurochs and elephant and going on all the way to the peacocks, guinea fowl, and ermine as they looked on the day when they entered the Ark. From the darkness of a cave he hurls darts that never miss their mark, yet more and more follow without end.