The parade to the Grand Prix is well worth seeing, even if one cannot see the race itself. Out the broad avenue of the Champs Elysées streams the procession, coaches, automobiles, smart traps of all kinds, hired fiacres, high-stepping horses, dapper drivers, exquisitely gowned women, merry-makers of all types.
Past the Place de l'Etoile they go, where the avenues, radiating in all directions, pour tributary streams of humanity into the already swollen tide. Out along the Avenue du Bois and through the gates, past Armenonville, past the cascades, on to Longchamps!
There is the smooth green stretch, there is the pesage already crowded with fashionable men and women, jockeys, sports, gee-gees (as the French bookies are called). There is the Tribune, closely packed and glowing like a Dutch tulip-garden with colour. Groups of women, arrayed with a subtlety of elegance of which Sheba's queen never dreamed, are clustered under the lindens, everywhere flutter the colours of the various starters,—which are the colours of the great families of France; for the Grand Prix is run under the auspices of the Jockey Club of France, and the Jockey Club, as has been said before, is the gentlemen's racing club par excellence.
Perhaps it is because the horses belong, as it were, in her own set, perhaps because she and her world follow the racing season so closely, that the average Frenchwoman of society knows more about the horses than her American or English sister, and places her bets right cannily; but the Parisienne at large is quite as eager over racing, and puts up her money with quite as much zest as does my lady of legitimate Jockey Club connections. She is a born gambler, the little Parisienne, born to gambling as to all forms of excitement, to all that is recklessly, feverishly, uncalculatingly gay; and she bets upon the Grand Prix, if not again through the year. She may wager louis or francs, but she places her stake with smiling audacity, and takes her losses or gains sportily.
Each year, after Grand Prix, the air of Paris is full of stories of feminine plunging, and many of the stories would make spicy reading could they be told with the names attached.
There, for instance, was the American actress who lost the ten thousand dollars borrowed for her new production, and could not get her ordered gowns out of the hands of her dressmaker until she had made a flying trip to New York and succeeded in raising money enough to pay for them.
There was the French danseuse who, through a jealous rival, obtained a tip that was pure fabrication, but purported to be a sure thing emanating from a distinguished source. She did what she was expected to do, staked every franc she could get together upon a horse quite out of the running, and was the only one not surprised when she found herself one of the handful who had backed a winner, and provided with money to throw to the birds. And there was the story of the little Countess of high degree who pawned the family diamonds for money to risk on a sure tip from a famous jockey, and who came a cropper that was offset only by the spectacular winnings of her husband's bonne amie on the same race.
Yes, the air is full of such stories and the scandal-mongers whisper them, chuckling; but they are hardly pleasant stories, and sometimes tragedy looms grim in the aftermath of the Grand Prix. For that matter, tragedy lurks always just beneath the surface of Parisian life, but on the surface there is such gaiety, such insouciance, such a glitter and a fanfare, that one forgets. It is absurd to be haunted in Paris. The ghosts are themselves Parisian; and, recognizing the absurdity of their metier, allow themselves to be decently laid while the tide of life swirls over them and around them. Or, if they do walk between the hydrangea clumps of Auteuil, or under the lindens of Longchamps, or steal through the corridors of the Grand Condé at Chantilly, they are well-behaved, unobtrusive ghosts, unnoticed in the whirl of brilliant colourful life.
At Longchamps