While we are on the subject of nascent tennis in Paris, the “Paris Sportif” publishes this
amusant study of the game at the Ile de Puteaux Tennis Club, penned by its resident social commenter and satirist, Crafty.
For those philistines among us who are not sufficiently versed in the mysteries of the French tongue (or at the very least haven’t spent enough time on Duolingo), this very roughly translates (please blame me for all transcription errors, not Google Translate) as:
“The game of tennis, so to speak abandoned in France, has returned to us from England, simplified and made accessible to all.
Under its new name of lawn tennis, it no longer requires the construction of expensive buildings; all it needs is a sufficiently level ground so that the balls bounce on it without being influenced by causes other than the movement made by the players.
Once this earthwork is done, maintenance is inexpensive, and the costs incurred by the purchase of a net, a few rackets, a few dozen balls, and a limited number of sandals without heels, do not constitute expenses likely to request a ban, especially since the association allows the amount of contributions to be divided indefinitely and ends up reducing the financial contribution of each player to very little. This applies to bourgeois lawn tennis, played in the family, in a good-natured way, and with no other concern than to give young people a healthy and at the same time economical exercise.
The vacant lots surrounding the Bois de Boulogne, surrounded by fences and along the recently opened avenues, awaiting inevitable added value, are ideal for such an installation. A wooden shack covered with tar paper, to which skilled workers can inexpensively give a touch of Parisian chic, completes the setup and serves as a shelter, in case of an unexpected downpour, for a change of clothes and their owners.
Some young people, scattered throughout the world and regular guests at many homes, have adopted this method to return the favor, and when the good weather arrives, in turn offer an almost rustic hospitality to the more comfortably installed guests who have received them during the winter.
This ingenious way of paying off past and future hosts gives them the privilege of receiving, without any cause for criticism, the young girls who have seemed agreeable to them as dancers, allows them to study them, once the ball season is over, from another angle, to know them better and to deepen the study of their character that they began in cotillion.
I know well that mothers are always there, ensuring that their daughters do not let the unsavory underside of their natures show too much; just as they strictly forbid excessively violent movements that might reveal physical imperfections that it is preferable to conceal until it is no longer possible to hide them. They know how to avoid opportunities for them to show how easily their amiability turns sour, their good humor turns grumbling, and their deference to themselves turns to the most characteristic impertinence; all dangerous revelations regarding people likely to become marriage candidates, and who base their hope for their future tranquility on the equality of character of the companion called upon to share their daily life.
It was this discrepancy between the girl's declared leanings and the young woman's actual tastes that prompted Gavarni to say, through a seemingly astonished husband: "What stinks like that? But it's the same tobacco you found smelling so good at your mother's!!!"
Tennis doesn't always have matrimonial tendencies.
Alongside family tennis, there is social tennis, which often destroys what the former has built.
It naturally needs a more elegant facility, and it is also to the association that it falls to meeting the essential expenses. Hence the founding of special clubs, such as the Racing Club, whose only fault is that, due to the lack of a fence, it is exposed to the gaze of all the curious visitors of the Bois.
I know that the playing fields are quite far from the confines of the reserved enclosure, but it is no less unpleasant to show, even from a distance, to an audience that is mostly ill-disposed towards leisure-goers, the spectacle of one's clumsiness, and to hear, even muted by the distance, the bursts of laughter provoked by some blunder of which you are the author.
The ideal circle does exist, however.
Besides being very private, and far from being as close as you can get to a mill, those who have free access are obliged to make a real journey; but for the privileged members of both sexes, distance doesn't exist, and with a good team, the journey that separates Paris, especially the elegant Paris that now borders the Bois de Boulogne, from the island of Puteaux, doesn't constitute a significant waste of time, and besides, the walk it requires is absolutely pleasant.
Along with an incomparable location, the Puteaux club had the incredible luck of finding an exceptional organizer, a spoiled child of the living world, immersed in all its pleasures, and retaining, despite the already long practice that could have jaded him, a youthful ardor and the activity of a beginner. [Note: Crafty refers here to the Vicomte Léon de Janzé]
When one passionately pursues a well-defined goal, it is rare that one fails to achieve it, and that is what happened this time again.
The success is complete, so complete that the envy that attaches to anything that succeeds in an overly undeniable way had to content itself, in order to disturb the triumphant's joy, with seeking a derogatory nickname for him: current events have provided it, and, with the help of a deplorable approximation, they have nicknamed him the Puteauxmane; all things considered, the consonance alone is disagreeable, for the term means nothing, or, if it does mean something, it is undeniably that the personage so irreverently designated plays his island with exceptional virtuosity, and that is the pure truth.
This island is charming, shady and cool, and so dense that one would not suspect the proximity of the horrible industrial agglomeration whose name it bears. The method used to reach it was reminiscent of the embarkation for Cythera, and there was no shortage of models for Watteau to immortalize it. Unfortunately, Watteau failed to do so, and before it could happen, there was time to build a bridge.
Civilization marches on.
This allows the boat to be replaced by the bicycle or any other mode of locomotion commonly used on land.
For playing tennis, there is nothing better; for flirting, it is perhaps even superior.
Everyone whose beauty, grace, or elegance merits the celebration of these eminent qualities with a more or less disinterested cult meets there daily, and anyone who considers the fairer sex to be most successful from a visual point of view is sure to meet the most brilliant representatives of the opposite sex.
It is a permanent garden party, which has the undeniable advantage over those organized on a fixed day of allowing you to choose the temperature that seems favorable to you, and does not impose on you the obligation to go and play outdoors in pouring rain, scorching sun, or a north wind as icy as it is persistent, depending on the barometer's omnipotent good pleasure.
By consulting this far-sighted instrument, instead of relying on the imbecilic calendar which systematically ignores the temperature reserved for the days it indicates, without providing any explanation to those who consult it, one manages to avoid the bad weather which turns the most skillfully planned pleasure parties into chores, and endangers even the existence of the slaves of the fixed-date invitation. We go out in our best clothes to have lunch, and we come back with pleurisy!
Club meetings have the advantage over formal social gatherings of eliminating the need for a specific date. This is an undeniable advantage, and when, as is the case in Puteaux, the club is composed of people from the same world, we find all the charm of private gatherings stripped of all their drawbacks.
This is the great convenience of everyday life.
Some solemn occasions, however, require the setting of a date, as elsewhere: this is when it involves an important match prompted by the arrival of a foreign team, or the visit of distinguished players from England and elsewhere specifically to compete against the French champions.
Very exceptionally, the club offers the hospitality of its courtyards to similar, less comfortably established societies when they have to provide a test of particular interest. Thus, last June, the challenge launched by the London club Winchester House, and accepted by the Union of French Athletic Sports Societies, was contested on the island of Puteaux.
Six players from each team took part in the match played there.
In such circumstances, members of the society abandon their habits of calm and intimacy. Invitations are issued and all sails are set alight: lunch, illuminations, a ball, a full party is held, and the result is that people who were invited "just this once" have the fixed idea of doing it again and apply for permanent membership. There are examples, few in number, but all the more flattering, of admissions taking place under these conditions.”
