The pursuit and harassment of Marie-Josèphe during the hunt

At the royal hunt, the Duke of Chartres and the Chevalier de Lorraine turn a request for a token into an assault on Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s dignity and safety. Their pursuit unfolds amid the hunt’s display of royal power, where the language of chivalry barely disguises coercion.

The demand for a token

Marie-Josèphe is so intent on the sea woman’s peril that she has forgotten her own when the Duke of Chartres addresses her. Smiling, he plucks at her lace and asks for a token to carry “like a knight of old.” The gesture frames his demand as romantic gallantry, but the lace is part of her clothing, and his hand has already crossed the boundary between compliment and intrusion.

The Duke of Berwick rides beside Chartres, astonishing Marie-Josèphe because she expects Madame to disapprove of her son’s company with a bastard—even James Fitzjames, the King of England’s natural son. Berwick joins the pressure by urging her to make Chartres his champion. When Marie-Josèphe says she has no token, Chartres lists an earring, a handkerchief, or a corset lacing; from her other side, the Chevalier de Lorraine proposes a petticoat ruffle. The larger horses hem her in, while Zachi’s flattened ears and stamping foot register the mare’s distress as well as Marie-Josèphe’s constrained position.

Marie-Josèphe refuses the handkerchief on the practical ground that she would then have none, adding that her mother would be ashamed to see her without it. Her answer maintains the decorum expected of her while making clear that the men’s demands would require her to surrender something personal. The scene’s chivalric vocabulary thus sharpens the contrast between the gallant role Chartres claims and the pressure he and his companions exert.

The hunt becomes a pursuit

The pressure turns openly physical while Louis XIV fires at an aurochs. Even Chartres hesitates at the sight of the charging animal, but the pursuit he has made of Marie-Josèphe proves more tempting to him: as the aurochs falls beneath the King’s shots, Chartres leans from his saddle and snatches at her petticoat lace. The court’s staged display of royal hunting skill and the danger of the wounded beast form the backdrop to an assault that Chartres treats as entertainment.

The harassment intensifies amid the slaughter and confusion of the hunt. Chartres declares, “His Majesty’s hunt bores me, mademoiselle,” and says he has found another he likes better. He plucks the lace at Marie-Josèphe’s throat; when she backs Zachi away, the Chevalier de Lorraine blocks her path. The lace tears, and Lorraine pulls a pin from her hair. As the hunters’ gunfire scatters animals across the field, Marie-Josèphe tries again to move forward, but Berwick’s horse cuts her off. Chartres tears the lace from her throat, while Lorraine tugs at her sleeve, dragging it against the painful cut made by Jean-Baptiste Fagon’s lancet. The language of a playful hunt has become a physical pursuit in which the men use their horses and the crowded hunting ground to restrict her escape.

Zachi’s startled leap gives Marie-Josèphe a way out. She guides the mare backward; Zachi rears, spins, and gallops as Chartres, Berwick, and Lorraine ride after her. Chartres catches the hem of her habit and nearly unseats her, but Marie-Josèphe braces herself against the saddle-crook and urges Zachi to flee. The mare outpaces the larger horses, leaving the pursuers’ hoofbeats and snorts behind; their laughter gives way to irritation and anger as the distance grows. Once alone, Marie-Josèphe slows Zachi along the manicured trails and praises the mare’s speed, acknowledging that she could never afford to keep her when the time came to return her.

At that moment, Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien appears from a side trail, as though summoned by Marie-Josèphe’s mention of him. His arrival ends the immediate chase, but the encounter has already exposed the violence beneath Chartres and Lorraine’s gallantry: Marie-Josèphe escapes not through their restraint, but because Zachi can outrun them.

The hunt’s double meaning

The episode makes the hunt’s hierarchy visible by turning its usual roles against Marie-Josèphe. The animals are driven into gunfire and killed for the spectators’ excitement; Chartres then announces that he has found a more interesting quarry, making the violence of the field’s sport an explicit model for his treatment of her. Yet Marie-Josèphe is not simply another creature to be cornered: with Zachi’s speed, she breaks the pursuit and leaves the riders behind. Her escape exposes the difference between the men’s assumed right to pursue and her own power to refuse them, even as the manicured trails and royal spectacle frame that resistance within the court’s ordered world.

A pause after the chase

Lucien’s arrival does not erase what has happened, and the scene offers no account here of what he says or does next. Instead, it closes on a quiet, physical contrast: his mare, Zelis, stops before Zachi, and the two mares blow into each other’s nostrils. After the riders have turned the hunt into a chase and used their horses to hem Marie-Josèphe in, the animals meet without pursuit or demand. That small pause shifts the scene away from the hunters’ coercive spectacle, while leaving Marie-Josèphe’s escape—won by Zachi’s speed—its decisive outcome.