Out in the Bois there are open-air clubs and to spare, the Polo Club and the Tir au Pigeon being those most frequented by the fashionable set during spring and summer, while the club des Patineurs is the smart skating club and one of the most attractive social rendezvous of winter Paris. The Parisienne loves skating. Here is a sport that lends itself amiably to coquetry, a sport for which one may plan the most piquant of costumes. Furs are becoming and extravagant, and looking well at an extravagant cost is the fashionable Parisienne's chief aim in life. So Madame orders her skating costumes of fur and cloth and velvet, buys an assortment of skating boas more ornamental than practical, and plays in her skating as in all her sports a rôle vastly ornamental, impressively dramatic. Yachting, too, is dear to the heart of our Lady of the Chiffons, though her yachting consists chiefly in dressing the part. Scoffers say that the French have a flourishing yacht club but no yachts, and while this statement is more amusing than accurate, the actual facts do suggest some such comic-opera situation, for though there is a yacht club of France, extremely swell and of large membership, and though several wealthy Frenchmen own superb yachts, there is little serious French yachting. Boating of one sort or another is indulged in along the Seine, and a large flotilla of small private launches and yachts lies in the basin of Deauville during the Normandy season, but the yachting races of the Regatta week at Havre are given over almost wholly to foreigners, French entries being extremely rare.
Not until within the past year did the fashionable folk of Paris take up with ardour any form of water sport. The motor boat has brought about the revolution and has the distinction of being the latest Parisian fad. It is easy to understand why this most modern form of boating has caught the Parisian fancy. Like the automobile, it appeals irresistibly to the French temperament. It demands no active exercise and it offers exhilaration, swift travel, danger, novelty. Last summer there was a race for motor boats from Paris to the sea; and, while the little boats were scudding along the river, the society folk interested in them were spinning along the road from Paris to Trouville in their automobiles, making calls at the châteaux en route, and reaching Trouville-Deauville, in time to see the up-to-date little boats follow up their three days' race to Havre by racing for the Menier cup in Trouville Bay. The motor boat came into its own that day, and next summer it will rival the horse and the automobile in the affections of sporting Paris.
Already a number of Parisiennes have adopted the dangerous playthings. Madame du Gast, upon whom some judges bestow the title of "first sportswoman of France," is an ardent devotee of motor boating as she has been of automobiling. She has all the daring of her race associated with an easy nonchalance and imperturbable self-control which never deserts her even under the most trying circumstances; and no pastime is too dangerous, no risk too hazardous for her, provided only that there is amusement connected with the danger and hazard. She has made a record in automobile races and ballooning, and she hailed the motor boat with joy at its first appearance; but her sporting enthusiasm had of course its Parisian side. There was the costume to be considered—always the costume is the starting-point of a Parisienne's sport. The motor boat is a treacherous plaything. It upsets, blows up, sinks,—and when one starts out in a promenade à bateau, one is likely to swim home, so petticoats and chiffons are not for motor boating. Madame du Gast wears what looks much like swimming tights, save that the one-piece garment is high of neck, long of sleeve, and at the knee tucks into trim high boots that may be kicked off if occasion demands. Over this practical attire goes a loose, handsome coat of sporting allure which quite hides the tights and falls over the tops of the well-fitted boots; a becoming cap warranted to stay on without attention from its wearer—and there you have the owner of the Camille as she looks when she enters a race. When she had the Turquoise built for the Monaco races, Madame du Gast indulged in a bit of drama characteristically French. S. A. R. the Prince of Monaco stood sponsor for the slim little craft. There was a ceremony, with great sheaves of flowers nodding over the bow of the boat and bedewed with the christening champagne, with gaily attired friends looking on, and with the canon from a neighbouring church in gorgeous vestments solemnly bestowing baptism and the blessing of the church upon the nautical infant. Roses and champagne and smart frocks, and the owner of Monte Carlo, and the church—all joining in the launching of the racing boat of a charming sportswoman in swimming tights and top boots! There you have a snapshot of le sport as it is sometimes played in France.
The Camille, named for Madame du Gast herself, and a motor boat more pretentious than the Turquoise, entered, with owner aboard, the famous and foolhardy high seas race from Tangiers to Toulon, and though strong winds and rough seas played havoc with all of the tiny craft, and the Camille and her owner were rescued at the eleventh hour by her escorting yacht, Madame did not lose for a moment her sporting nerve. She was obtaining excitement in large blocks and the thrill was well worth the danger.
It goes without saying that the young Duchesse d'Uzes has taken up motor boating.
When has she ever passed by a new sport, a new chance for diversion, this gay little Duchess, who is the typical fine flower of modern French civilization, the most piquant and perhaps the most popular figure in French society to-day.
She was born to social eminence, daughter of the great and ancient family of de Luynes, sister of the ninth Duke of Chaulnes and Pecquinguy, rich in her own name, good to look at, keen of wit, exquisite of taste, and stranger to fear. As if this were not enough, she must needs marry Louis Emmanuel, fourteenth Duke d'Uzes, and add his prestige and wealth to hers.
The dowager Duchesse d'Uzes, she who came so near mounting Boulanger on the back of France, is of the old régime, strong, keen, autocratic still, but surrounding herself with the old customs, the old traditions, refusing to admit that the world has moved and France with it.
But the young Duchess—she is all that there is of the most modern, the most representative type of the motoring, racing, golfing, hunting, hockey-playing Parisienne. She is all restlessness, all nerves. There is nothing new that she has not tried, and she is always reaching out for something more novel, more exciting, more audacious. And yet with it all she is grande dame, the little pleasure-seeking Duchess, and she wears her title right royally in spite of her vagaries. She has the traditions of her race, too, behind her modern caprices. She is devôte, has her private chaplain, is heart and soul in sympathy with the church party as opposed to state, she loves politics and ranges herself with her class. Not for nothing is one of de Luynes and d'Uzes. She was in the heart of the turmoil on the Place de la Concorde, at the meeting of protest against the state's measures concerning the nuns, and she was taken by the troops, this hot-headed little Duchess, though it was the dowager Duchess who was arrested and fined. She would go to the scaffold humming a tune and wearing her smartest Paquin frock, were she called upon to tread the path many of her ancestors trod, but, since scaffolds are out of date, she runs a motor boat and speeds an automobile, and dances a cake walk, and plays an extraordinary game of billiards, and is one of the best shots in France, and plays tennis and hockey and golf, and rides cross country, and swims like a fish, and has made ballooning the fashion. She is one of the prettiest, the most amusing, the cleverest and the best dressed women of Paris, and she, beyond all of her set, is the champion of le sport.