The theater Comédie–Italienne, July 19, 1777. The premiere performance of Ernestine, a new opera by the Chevalier de Saint–Georges, libretto by Choderlos de Laclos, in the presence of the queen. Midway through the first act, a minor character, a coachman, cracks his whip and shouts, “Ohé! Ohé!” This amuses Marie Antoinette. The next time he appears, she calls out, “Ohé!” The courtiers join in. Soon they are calling “Ohé!” at every opportunity. The performance ends in chaos. Ernestine won’t be performed again for more than a century.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 14, 1789, AS HIS SUBJECTS STORMED the Bastille prison, igniting the revolution, Louis XVI, twenty–five kilometers away in the palace at Versailles and ignorant of the events that would send him, his family, and most of France’s leisure class to the guillotine, updated his diary, summarizing the day in a single word—“Rien” (nothing).
To be fair to Louis, “nothing” didn’t mean the day was without incident but rather that he had not gone hunting, and had therefore killed no animals. Among people for whom it was a point of pride to do no work at all and pursue only pleasure, hunting was one of the few activities in which the nobility could honorably indulge. Louis did little else, except work with the court locksmith in tinkering together new and more complicated gadgets. Exasperated, his Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, complained, “My tastes are not those of the king, who has none, except for hunting and mechanic’s labor.”
While medieval hunters appreciated the taste of game, the primary function of the chase was sport. The quarry, in particular foxes, wolves, and bears, were chosen as much for their cunning and speed as for culinary possibilities: Oscar Wilde mocked foxhunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
When the hunting season ended, the courts reconvened, and young women from good families, known as débutantes, or “beginners,” were “presented” to the king. Between December and April, in the capitals and fashionable resorts of Europe, hostesses staged parties, balls, and receptions to show off the new crop of marriageable young men and women. Families from the Americas sent their daughters to Europe to be “finished,” then, ideally, presented at court, after which they were “out” and regarded as fit to participate in society. Britain’s premium such event, Queen Charlotte’s Ball, at which four hundred young women were presented at Buckingham Palace each year, was discontinued only in 1958.
For many girls, “coming out” was the first step in snaring a title. They were coached and managed by older and more experienced chaperones—sexual gamekeepers who understood the rules of the social hunt. In recognition of the fact that trapping a titled husband was as much a business as any pursuit in the wild, women who crossed the Atlantic with marriage in mind were known collectively as “the fishing fleet,” while the round of balls and receptions at which the hunt took place was called, naturally, “the Season.”