The competitors were lined up at the far end, half a dozen pointers and two mud-colored dogs of impenetrable ancestry. Small clumps of brushwood had been placed at random around the field. These were the bosquets in which the game—a live quail that was held aloft by the quail handler for inspection—was to be hidden.
The chasseurs microphone technique improved enough for us to hear him explain that the quail would be tethered in a different bosquet for each competitor, and that it would not be killed (unless it was scared to death) by the dogs. They would simply indicate the hiding place, and the fastest find would win.
The quail was hidden, and the first competitor unleashed. He passed by two clumps with barely a sniff and then, still yards away from the third, stiffened and stopped.
“Aha! Il est fort, ce chien,” boomed the chasseur. The dog looked up for a second, distracted by the noise, before continuing his approach. He was now walking in slow motion, placing one paw on the ground with exaggerated care before lifting another, his neck and head stretched toward the bosquet, unwavering despite the chasseurs admiring comments about his concentration and the delicacy of his movements.
Three feet away from the petrified quail, the dog froze, one front paw raised, with head, neck, back, and tail in a perfect straight line.
“Tiens! Bravo!” said the chasseur, and started to clap, forgetting that he had a microphone in one hand. The owner retrieved his dog, and the two of them returned to the starting point in a triumphant competition trot. The official timekeeper, a lady in high heels and an elaborate black and white dress with flying panels, marked the dogs performance on a clipboard. The quail handler dashed out to replant the quail in another bosquet, and the second contestant was sent on his way.
He went immediately to the bosquet recently vacated by the quail, and stopped.
“Beh oui,” said the chasseur, “the scent is still strong there. But wait.” We waited. The dog waited. Then he got tired of waiting, and possibly annoyed at being sent out on a fool’s errand. He lifted his leg on the bosquet and went back to his owner.
The quail handler moved the unfortunate quail to a new hiding place, but it must have been a particularly pungent bird, because dog after dog stopped at one or the other of the empty clumps, head cocked and paw tentatively raised, before giving up. An old man standing next to us explained the problem. The quail, he said, should have been walked on its lead from one bosquet to the next so that it left a scent. How else could a dog be expected to find him? Dogs are not clairvoyants. The old man shook his head and made soft clicking noises of disapproval with his tongue against his teeth.
The final competitor, one of the mud-colored dogs, had been showing signs of increasing excitement as he watched the others being sent off, whining with impatience and tugging at his lead. When his turn came, it was obvious that he had misunderstood the rules of the competition. Disregarding the quail and the bosquets, he completed a circuit of the stade at full speed before racing into the vines, followed by his bellowing owner. “Oh là là” said the chasseur. “Une locomotive. Tant pis.”
Later, as the sun dipped and the shadows grew longer, Monsieur Dufour, president of Le Philosophe hunting club, presented the prizes before settling down with his colleagues to a gigantic paella. Long after dark, we could hear the distant sounds of laughter and clinking glasses and, somewhere in the vines, the man shouting for his mud-colored dog.
Inside the Belly
of Avignon
Place Pie, in the center of Avignon, is a forlorn sight in the dingy grey moments that come just before dawn. It is an architectural mongrel of a square, with two sides of seedy but elegant old buildings looking across at a hideous monument to modern town planning. A graduate of the béton armé school of construction has been given a free hand, and he has made the worst of it.
Benches, crude slabs, have been dumped around a central eyesore. On those benches, the weary sightseer can rest and contemplate a second, much more imposing eyesore, three stained concrete stories that on weekdays are crammed with cars by eight in the morning. The reason for the cars, and the reason I was in the Place Pie in time to see dawn’s rosy flush come up on the concrete, is that the best food in Avignon is displayed and sold under the car park, in Les Halles.
I arrived there a few minutes before six and parked in one of the few free places on the second level. Below me on the place I saw two derelicts with skin the same color as the bench they were sitting on. They were sharing a liter of red wine, taking turns swigging from the bottle. A gendarme came up to them and gestured to them to move on, then stood with his hands on his hips, watching. They walked in the slouched, defeated way of men with nothing to hope for and nowhere to go, and sat on the pavement on the other side of the place. The gendarme shrugged and turned away.