Fifth lesson. Fifteen days of work.—These last fifteen days will be occupied in assuring the perfect execution of all the preceding work, and in perfecting the pace of the gallop until we can execute easily changes of direction, changes of feet at every step, and passaging. We can then exercise the horse at leaping the bar and at the piaffer. Thus in two months, and upon any horse, we will have accomplished a work that formerly required years, and then often gave incomplete results. And I repeat, however insufficient so short a space of time may appear, it will produce the effect I promise, if you follow exactly all my directions. I have demonstrated this upon a hundred different occasions, and many of my pupils are able to prove it as well as myself.
In establishing the above order of work, be it well understood that I found myself on the dispositions of horses in general. A horseman of any tact will soon understand the modifications that he ought to make in their application, according to the particular nature of his pupil. Such a horse, for example, will require more or less persistence in the flexions; another one in the backing; this one, dull and apathetic, will require the use of the spurs before the time I have indicated. All this is an affair of intelligence; it would be to insult my readers not to suppose them capable of supplying to the details what it is elsewhere impossible to particularize. You can readily understand that there are irritable, ill-disposed horses, whose defective dispositions have been made worse by previous bad management. With such subjects it is necessary to put more persistence into the supplings and the walk. In every case, whatever the slight modifications that the difference in the dispositions of the subjects render necessary, I persist in saying that there are no horses whose education ought not to be completed by my method in the space I designate. I mean here, that this time is sufficient to give the forces of the horse the fitness necessary for executing all the movements; the finish of education depends finally on the nicety of touch of the rider. In fact, my method has the advantages of recognizing no limits to the progress of equitation, and there is no performance equestrianly possible that a horseman who understands properly applying my principles cannot make his horse execute. I am about to give a convincing proof in support of this assertion, by explaining the sixteen new figures of the manège that I have added to the collection of the old masters.
CHAPTER IX.
APPLICATION OF THE PRECEDING PRINCIPLES TO THE PERFORMANCE OF THE HORSES, PARTISAN, CAPITAINE, NEPTUNE, AND BURIDAN.
The persons who systematically denied the efficacy of my method ought, necessarily, also to deny the results shown to them. They were forced to acknowledge that my performance at the Cirque-Olympique was new and extraordinary, but attributed it to causes, some more strange than others; all the while insisting that the equestrian talent of the rider did not go for nothing in the expertness of the horse. According to some, I was a second Carter, accustoming my horses to obedience by depriving them of sleep and food; according to others, I bound their legs with cords, and thus held them suspended to prepare them for a kind of puppet-show; some were not far from believing that I fascinated them by the power of my looks. Finally, a certain portion of the public, seeing these animals perform in time to the sound of the charming music of one of my friends, M. Paul Cuzent, insisted seriously that they undoubtedly possessed, in a very great degree, the instinct of melody, and that they would stop short with the clarionets and trombones. So, the sound of the music was more powerful over my horse than I was myself! The animal obeyed a do or a sol nicely touched; but my legs and hands went for nothing in their effects. Would it be believed that such nonsense was uttered by people that passed for riders? I can comprehend their not having understood my means at first, since my method was new; but before judging it in so strange a manner, they ought, at least, it seems to me, to have sought to understand it.
I had found the round of ordinary feats of horsemanship too limited, since it was sufficient to execute one movement well to immediately practise the others with the same facility. So, it was proved to me that the rider who passed with precision along a straight line sideways (de deux pistes) at a walk, trot and gallop, could go in the same way with the head or the croup to the wall, with the shoulder in, perform the ordinary or reversed volts, the changes and counterchanges of hands, etc., etc. As to the piaffer, it was, as I have said, nature alone that settled this. This long and fastidious performance had no other variations than the different titles of the movements, since it was sufficient to vanquish one difficulty to be able to surmount all the others. I then created new figures of the manège, the execution of which rendered necessary more suppleness, more ensemble, more finish in the education of the horse. This was easy to me with my system; and to convince my adversaries that there was neither magic nor mystery in my performance at the Cirque, I am going to explain by what processes purely equestrian, and even without having recourse to piliers, cavessons or horse-whips, I have brought my horses to execute the sixteen figures of the manège that appear so extraordinary.
1. Instantaneous flexion and support in the air of either one of the fore legs, while the other three legs remain fixed to the ground.
The means of making the horse raise one of his fore legs is very simple, as soon as the animal is perfectly supple and rassemblé. To make him raise, for example, the right leg, it is sufficient to incline his head slightly to the right, while making the weight of his body fall upon the left side. The rider's legs will be sustained firmly (the left a little more than the right), that the effect of the hand which brings the head to the right should not react upon the weight, and that the forces which serve to fasten to the ground the over-weighted part may give the horse's right leg enough action to make it rise from the ground. By a repetition of this exercise a few times, you will succeed in keeping this leg in the air as long a time as you wish.