falcon

The falcon is the central nonhuman presence in the hunting world surrounding Jeanne d'Ys and the Château d'Ys. First encountered standing on a dead hare with a bell-bearing leash fastened around its talons, it appears at once as predator, captive, trained instrument, and independent creature. Through its handling, classification, and repeated movement across moor and courtyard, the falcon gives material form to the story's tension between wildness and ceremony, appetite and discipline, survival and the fragile human desire to command both nature and the past.

First Appearance on the Moor

A falcon first enters the narrative as the decisive image in a lonely moorland encounter. After a great bird has been disturbed above the narrator and drops into the brake, he finds a dead hare beneath a magnificent falcon. One talon is buried in the hare's neck and the other rests on its limp flank; the bird is not merely feeding but visibly possessing the kill. What arrests the narrator, however, is the apparatus attached to it: both talons are bound by a leash from which hangs a round piece of metal like a sleigh bell. The bell transforms the natural scene into a human-managed spectacle, while the bird's fierce yellow eyes and curved beak retain the unmistakable force of a wild predator.

Jeanne d'Ys then enters the covert and handles the falcon with practiced assurance. She slips a small hood over its head, lifts it from the quarry onto her gauntlet, and gathers up the hare by passing a cord around its legs and fastening the thong to her girdle. The sequence establishes the bird's place within a complete hunting economy: the falcon seizes the prey, Jeanne controls and protects the bird, and the carcass becomes a carried resource. Its presence also leads indirectly to the narrator's rescue, since the hunting party and Jeanne's household offer him food and shelter after he has become lost on the moor.

The Hunting Household

The falcon belongs to a larger, highly organized retinue. Hastur and Raoul appear with a hoop strapped to a falconer's shoulders; three hooded falcons sit around its rim, each fitted with tinkling bells. Jeanne transfers her own bird to the hoop, where it settles among its companions while the bells and jesses sound together. She identifies Raoul as a skilled fauconnier whom she intends one day to make grand veneur, while Hastur is described as incomparable. The falcons are therefore not isolated pets but members of a hierarchy involving falconers, huntsmen, hounds, horses, equipment, and inherited offices.

The following morning, the same system resumes in the courtyard of the Château d'Ys. A man with a curved horn and long-lashed whip stands among the hounds, while horses stamp and the falconers ride in with birds on their wrists. Jeanne gives detailed instructions about the epervier, the hagard, the leurre, and the proper treatment of an imperfectly trained bird. Raoul asks whether he should keep the hawk or leave it tethered, and Jeanne orders him to retain it, insisting that he still has much to learn about Autourserie. Her authority is practical rather than ceremonial: she evaluates the bird's behavior, understands its training, and directs the men who handle it.

The hunt departs as a coordinated soundscape. Jeanne calls for Piriou Louis to mount and urges Glemarec René and the others to hurry; the hunting horn fills the courtyard, the hounds run through the gateway, and hoofbeats recede across the drawbridge, heather, and bracken. The falcons flap and cry upon their perch as the bells recede into the distance. Their sounds mark changing space more vividly than sight alone, carrying the hunt from the enclosed court into the open moor and making the bird's presence audible even when it is no longer visible.

Species, Training, and Captivity

Jeanne keeps fifteen or twenty tree stumps scattered across a grassy lawn beside a brook, and falcons occupy all but two of them. Each bird is tethered by a thong fastened with steel rivets to its legs just above the talons, with fresh spring water within reach of every perch. When Jeanne appears, the birds clamour; she moves among them, caressing some, taking others onto her wrist, and adjusting their jesses. The arrangement displays care and confinement simultaneously. The birds receive water, attention, and specialized handling, yet their movement remains governed by tether, perch, hood, and human command.

She distinguishes the birds by both appearance and hunting behavior. The falcon-gentil is called ignoble because it takes quarry in direct chase, whereas the blue falcon is noble because it rises over the quarry and drops upon it from above. A northern gerfalcon is also noble; the collection further includes a merlin and a falcon-heroner. Jeanne also shows the narrator young falcons still in the nest and explains the stages of their development: a niais remains in the nest, a branchier can hop from branch to branch, a sors has not yet moulted, and a mué is a hawk that has moulted in captivity. A wild falcon that has changed its plumage is termed a hagard. These distinctions make the birds legible within a technical vocabulary and reveal a culture that measures age, origin, plumage, temperament, and training with exactness.

Jeanne says that Raoul first taught her to dress a falcon, and she offers to teach the narrator. Her lesson describes training as a gradual contest between appetite, fear, habit, and trust. The young bird must first have a good appetite; its nourishment is then reduced, a process called pât. After nights spent tethered au bloc, the hagard may learn to remain quietly on the wrist. Food is attached to a thong, or leurre, and the bird is trained to come when the cord is whirled. It first eats the food on the ground, then learns to seize the moving lure, and finally is taught to strike at game. Even at the culmination of control, Jeanne insists on making courtoisie à l'oiseau, allowing the bird to taste the quarry. The rule recognizes the falcon's appetite rather than pretending that training has erased it.

Threat, Motion, and Narrative Significance

The falcon's world is not fully subordinated to its handlers. When a grey serpent crosses the flat rock beside the brook, one bird begins to squeal, and soon all the falcons scream and flap. Their alarm detects and announces a danger that the human observers have not yet perceived. The falcons consequently function as sentinels as well as hunting instruments: their collective response converts hidden movement into audible information and briefly reverses the direction of observation, since the humans must rely on the birds to identify the disturbance.

The birds also connect Jeanne's household to a lost historical register. The narrator hears her use the old language of falconry, the forgotten French associated with medieval manuscripts, while hounds bay, horses stamp, and hawk bells provide an accompaniment. Jeanne claims not to remember how she learned the vocabulary and supposes that her father taught it to her when she was very young. The falcon thus becomes a vehicle through which an archaic order persists in the present of the narration. Its jesses, hood, leash, lure, and perch are practical objects, but together they make the Château d'Ys seem governed by customs outside ordinary historical time.

The recurring bells sharpen the contrast between freedom and possession. On the moor, the falcon is visibly capable of killing and flight, yet its talons are bound and a bell announces every movement. In the château, many birds are displayed as a collection and trained through hunger, restraint, and reward. Still, their cries, alarm, and sudden wingbeats interrupt human composure. The falcon is therefore neither simply a symbol of liberty nor merely a tool of aristocratic sport. It remains an animal with appetite, fear, reflex, and force, while human beings build an elaborate language and social order around the attempt to direct those qualities.

Broader Animal Motif

Elsewhere in the book, animals repeatedly expose the limits of human control. Mr. Wilde keeps a vicious cat and deliberately provokes it until they roll across the floor scratching and clawing; Boris Yvain drops a goldfish into a rose-coloured chemical bath, where it becomes rigid and sinks before being drawn out as an exquisite marble form; a white rabbit undergoes the same experiment. A snake alarms Jeanne's falcons, while the city's desperate poverty makes a rat both hunted object and food. Against these scenes, the trained falcon occupies an especially complex position: it is captive, but it is also admired, feared, technically understood, and repeatedly allowed to enact its own predatory nature.

Its significance lies in this unstable balance. The falcon carries the narrative from the immediate fact of a hare's death to a whole system of memory, rank, knowledge, and desire. It gives Jeanne practical authority, supplies the narrator with a path into the Château d'Ys, organizes the movement of the hunt, and makes invisible danger audible. Above all, it dramatizes a recurring question in the book's treatment of nonhuman life: whether civilization consists in mastering living forces or in learning how to preserve their force while binding them to human purposes. The falcon's beauty never cancels its violence, and its training never completely cancels its wildness.