In field sports the chief difference between France and England is not a difference of taste for sport itself, but a difference in game-preserving. In England this is carried to the utmost perfection by the most artificial means and at enormous cost; in France this is done only on a few estates, and ordinary game-preserving is very lax and very economical. Often it is merely nominal. Some man with another occupation is supposed to be the _garde_, and he walks over the estate occasionally with a gun, killing a hare or a partridge for his private use, and seldom arresting a poacher. Still, the shootings are supposed to be worth something, as they are let, though at low prices. The English believe that there is no game at all in France, except a few partridges; and they might quote French humorists in support of this opinion, as they have laughed at the Parisian sportsman and his empty bags from time immemorial. However, as this is not a comic account, but an attempt to tell the truth, I may say that for several years my sons kept my larder very fairly supplied with game in the shooting season, including hares, partridges, woodcocks, snipes, and wild ducks. The neighbouring squires occasionally kill a deer or a wild boar, and one nobleman has killed many wild boars, some of them magnificent beasts. As a rule, a French sportsman walks much for little game, and is himself quite aware that the game is a mere pretext; the exercise is the real object. If the English reader thinks this ridiculous, I may remind him that English fox-hunting is an application of the same principle. A hundred horsemen follow a single fox, and when he is killed they do not even eat him.[4] [Sidenote: French Hunting.] There is nothing that resembles English hunting in France. French hunting is pretty and picturesque, with some remnant of old-world costume and ceremonial, and it affords some exercise in riding about the roads through the dense forests, but as a training in horsemanship it is not comparable to such hunting as I have witnessed in Yorkshire. French farmers and peasant proprietors would never permit a regiment of gentlemen to spoil their fences; that can only be done in a very aristocratic country. [Sidenote: Contrast between Classes in regard to the Physical Life.] [Sidenote: The desirable Ideal.] [Sidenote: Apparatus of the English Aristocracy.] [Sidenote: Access to Natural Beauty.]