I spent most of New Year's Eve following a stag hunt in the forests around Chantilly, just outside Paris. Few things are as exhilarating, as anyone who has ever ridden in a hunt here will tell you. Where most fox hunts run across open fields and meadows with hedges, French hunts are usually conducted in deep forests. It is a great day out (if you're not a stag), a day full of pomp and ceremony, where you will see 50-year-old men with aggressively styled hair and bright pink tunics, fortysomething millionaires in long black cloaks and tilted berets, unbelievably sexy quinquagenarian women with lipstick-slashed mouths and tight green quilted vests – and the mistress of the hounds, dressed up in all her finery (including a stag tooth stock pin) and looking something like Catherine Deneuve on a horse. They sip from hipflasks, gossip about local politics, flirt, and follow the hounds across the mud and the snow.
Columnists - The Independent
Posted by eternalimage (#1) 462 days ago (http://www.independent.co.uk)
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