[Illustration: _An Imperial Hunt at Fontainebleau_]
He won his first stripes in the hunting field at Compiègne in 1868, at a hunt given in honour of the Prince de Hohenzollern and the Princesse, who was the sister of the King of Portugal. It was a most moving event, so much so that it just escaped being turned into a drama, for one of the ladies of the court had a leg broken, and the minister, Fould, was almost mortally injured. A "_dix cors_," a stag with antlers of ten branches, had been run down at the Rond Royal where it had taken refuge in a near-by copse, and after an hour's hard chase was finally cornered in the courtyard of some farm buildings of the Hameau d'Orillets. A troop of cows was entering the courtyard at the same moment, and a most confused melée ensued. The Inspector of Forests saved the situation and the cows of the farmer, and the stag fell to the carabine of Prince de la Moskowa, with the young Prince Murat on his pony in the very front rank.
Thus early initiated in the chivalrous sport of the hunt the young man followed every hunt, big or little, which was held in the environs of Paris for many years, and by the time that he came to possess the epaulettes of an Officier de Cuirassiers he was known to all the hunts from the Ardennes to Anjou.
For the past generation he has been retired to civil life by a Republican decree, and since that time has lived in his suburban Paris property, devoting himself to the raising of hunters. Here he lives almost on the borders of that great extent of forest which occupies the northern section of the Ile de France, occasionally organizing a hunt, which takes on not a little of the noble aspect of a former time, the prince following always within sound of the hunting horn and the baying of the hounds, if not actually always within sight of the quarry.
It is here, in his Villa Normande, near which Saint Ouen gave Dagobert that famous counsel which has gone down in history, that the Prince and Princesse Murat come to pass two or three months each year with their children, their allied parents and the "great guns" of the old régime who still gather about the master of the hunt as courtiers gather around their king.