There is a big heading on the front cover of a French magazine announcing "184 pages of passion". But it's not an erotic publication - the passion refers to the lust with which hunters go after game when the season opens, as it did over the southern half of the country on Sunday, September 13th. The leading article of the same magazine carries a throbbing message from the editor to the effect that the heart yearns for beauty and beauty is to be found in the aspirations of the hunters, who don't just reckon on the number of creatures shot dead. He does write, however: "and let us not admit to shame about it" - i.e. the pleasure of seeing a bird stopped in full flight.
He quotes from a Persian poet of the 11th century, from the vampire film Nosferatu, and he gets a special shudder from the suggestion by Dutch delegates at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, who apparently put forward the idea that hunting/shooting should be used only when it is necessary to cut down excess numbers of game of one sort of another - a function that would be "sanitary, cold, technocratic, temporary". And he ends by asserting that the hunter is, more than many others, a being of flesh and blood, not a robot.
Well, on Sunday 13th, opening day for 45 departments, or about half of France, nearly all in the south, the hunters were out from 4 a.m., according to the newspapers. Two southern papers gave good coverage on Monday in pictures and stories. So far the only bag was one duck, proudly carried by the hunter's young son. One group did rise three rabbits but they escaped in the scrub. "Opening day," one veteran was quoted as saying, "is just to walk around in the open with your gun." Others, who also got nothing, said it was an excuse to give the dogs a run. A booklet included in the magazine gives recipes, including thrushes with small onions and larks with grapes. Y