Elzear Blaze expressed his astonishment that the ladies should not have used their influence to prevent falconry from falling into disuse.  The chase, he considered, gave them an active part in an interesting and animated scene, which only required easy and graceful movements on their part, and to which no danger was attached.  “The ladies knowing,” he says, “how to fly a bird, how to call him back, and how to encourage him with their voice, being familiar with him from having continually carried him on their wrist, and often even from having broken him in themselves, the honour of hunting belongs to them by right.  Besides, it brings out to advantage their grace and dexterity as they gallop amongst the sportsmen, followed by their pages and varlets and a whole herd of horses and dogs.”

The question of precedence and of superiority had, at every period, been pretty evenly balanced between venery and falconry, each having its own staunch supporters.  Thus, in the “Livre du Roy Modus,” two ladies contend in verse (for the subject was considered too exalted to be treated of in simple prose), the one for the superiority of the birds, the other for the superiority of dogs.  Their controversy is at length terminated by a celebrated huntsman and falconer, who decides in favour of venery, for the somewhat remarkable reason that those who pursue it enjoy oral and ocular pleasure at the same time.  In an ancient Treatise by Gace de la Vigne, in which the same question occupies no fewer than ten thousand verses, the King (unnamed) ends the dispute by ordering that in future they shall be termed pleasures of dogs and pleasures of birds, so that there may be no superiority on one side or the other (Fig. 160).  The court-poet, William Cretin, who was in great renown during the reigns of Louis XII. and Francis I., having asked two ladies to discuss the same subject in verse, does not hesitate, on the contrary, to place falconry above venery.

[Illustration:  Fig. 158.—­German Falconer, designed and engraved, in the Sixteenth Century, by J. Amman.]

It may fairly be asserted that venery and falconry have taken a position of some importance in history; and in support of this theory it will suffice to mention a few facts borrowed from the annals of the chase.

The King of Navarre, Charles the Bad, had sworn to be faithful to the alliance made between himself and King Edward III. of England; but the English troops having been beaten by Du Guesclin, Charles saw that it was to his advantage to turn to the side of the King of France.  In order not to appear to break his oath, he managed to be taken prisoner by the French whilst out hunting, and thus he sacrificed his honour to his personal interests.  It was also due to a hunting party that Henry III., another King of Navarre, who was afterwards Henry IV., escaped from Paris, on the 3rd February, 1576, and fled to Senlis, where his friends of the Reformed religion came to join him.