Hieronim Florian Radziwi?? has been preparing for this day for months. Hundreds of peasants on his estates in Lithuania have captured every variety of animal: foxes, wild boars, wolves, bears, elk, and roe deer have been jammed into great cages transported by sled to Warsaw. Along the Vistula, he had a big field planted with little Christmas trees, giving rise to an artificial forest with simple footpaths. In the very center there are elegant facilities for important guests and friends of King Augustus—two stories, covered in green cloth on the outside and lined in black fox skins within. Farther down, past the enclosure, stands for the spectators have been built.
The king and his sons and their entourage, in which Primate ?ubieński rubs shoulders with the rest of the purpurate class, have entered those facilities, and the szlachta and the courtiers have settled in the stands, to have a good view. Brühl and his wife are a little bit late, arriving once the chase is already under way. In the frosty air, everyone is having a great time, aided by the mead and the mulled wine with spices, supplied in generous portions by the servants. Moliwda casts furtive glances at the king, whom he is seeing for the first time. August is big, fat, sure of himself, and ruddy-cheeked from the cold. His soft, closely shaved royal chin looks as soft as a big baby’s. Next to him, his sons are scrawny brats. He drinks, knocking back the whole goblet in one gulp, leaning his head back and then, following the Polish custom, flicking the rest onto the ground. Moliwda cannot take his eyes off the soft, quivering jowl.
At the trumpet’s signal, the animals are released in batches from their cages. The stunned and frozen animals, long motionless, barely standing now, linger by the cages, not understanding what they’re supposed to be running from. Then the dogs are released on them, and there is a terrible tumult: the wolves attack the elk, the bears the boar, the dogs the bears, all in front of the king, who is shooting at them.
Moliwda pushes his way toward the rear; he reaches the tables where the snacks are laid out and asks for vodka. They pour him a glass, and then a second, and then a third. By the time the show is over, he is pretty drunk, which makes him conversational. The king has apparently derived an even greater enjoyment from this entertainment than had been expected, and no doubt Prince Radziwi?? is responsible, everyone says. And since the king is not a frequent visitor to Warsaw, he appreciates it all the more. A fat nobleman in a fur cap with a feather in it, who speaks with an eastern accent, tells Moliwda that Florian Radziwi?? is a man of great imagination, with a hobby of shooting animals like cannonballs out of a specially built machine. Then he shoots at them as they fly—that’s how it was in S?uck in the year 1755, so memorable for its great winter, when foxes were shot in midair. For wild boar a special hedgerow was designed, and at its end, just below, there was a moat filled with water; the boar were herded into that hedge and then sicced with dogs, and when they tried to run in terror, they fell straight into the moat, where they would try in vain to swim, becoming easy targets for the shooters. This inspired great jubilation amongst the guests, in which Moliwda’s interlocutor also had his share.
Here, meanwhile, there is another attraction in the afternoon. All the hunters, who are by then quite tipsy, gather around a special arena—young boar are let into it with cats tethered to their backs like riders. A pack of dogs is set against them. Everyone enjoys it enormously, so that they are all in an excellent mood when it comes time for the ball in which the day’s hunting finally culminates.
Moliwda returns alone. His Excellency the Primate of the Commonwealth remains for a while longer a guest of the magnate. The secretary, however, is hastened on by important matters of the Church. He reaches Warsaw, whence he is to pick up letters for ?owicz, but this takes him barely three hours. He doesn’t even notice what the capital looks like on such a gloomy winter day as this. He doesn’t look at anything at all. Or maybe he sees out of the corner of his eye the wide streets, muddy—you have to watch out for horse shit, steaming in the chill of this strange air, which seems to Moliwda so foreign that he would be unable to breathe it for long. He can smell the cold steppe, the wind. He realizes how stiff he is, how shrunken, and whether because of the cold or the alcohol he has consumed, he is panting rather than breathing. In the afternoon he sets out for ?owicz. He travels on horseback, without stopping.
Outside Warsaw, the sky is gray, low, the horizon expansive and flat. It looks like the earth won’t be able to bear the burden of the sky for much longer. On the battered road, the wet snow is beginning to turn to ice—it is late afternoon, soon it will be dark, which is why more and more horses are congregated out in front of the inn. The odor of horse urine and droppings and sweat mixes with the smoke that comes out of the inn’s crooked chimney and bursts out its open door. Two women in red skirts and short sheepskin coats thrown over their white holiday shirts stand at the doorway, carefully examining all who enter, evidently searching for someone in particular. The younger, rounder one successfully grapples with the aggressive advances of a drunk man in a dun sukmana.
The inn itself is a building made of wooden logs whitewashed with lime, low, with several small windows and a thatched reed roof. On the bench by the fence sit old women who come here out of boredom to watch the wide world. Wrapped in plaid wool shawls, with frozen red noses, they sit in silence and look attentively, without sympathy, at everyone who passes. Sometimes they exchange a word over some minor event. Suddenly the two women in the sheepskin coats notice someone, and a scrimmage breaks out, with shrieks. Maybe it’s one of the women’s drunken husband, or maybe a runaway fiancé—the man extricates himself from the women, and then, once he has been calmed down, allows himself to be led toward the village. The iced snow crunches under the hooves of the horses, who also look hopefully at the smoky entrance to the inn, but only muffled sounds of instruments can be heard from inside. The most melancholy sound in the world, thinks Moliwda: music heard from a distance, crippled by the wooden walls, the buzz of human beings, the scraping of the ice—reduced to hollow, lonely drumbeats. Soon the sound of distant bells from the town will join in and flood the whole area with an unbearable despair.
Scraps: Of the three paths of the story and how telling a tale can be its own deed