In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

In the Club Grounds at Deauville

A sound all modern comes in through the Gothic doorway and wakens the group around the fifteenth-century tables from their dream of bliss. The car is waiting in the courtyard and driving the cockatoos to hysteria. There is a hasty donning of dust-coats, a climbing into the huge touring-car, an exchange of compliments with M. Paul, a waving of hands, and then the long white road through a green, green land, and Trouville in time for polo and dinner and the Casino.

Such excursions are now essential features of the seashore life. Trouville is motor-mad as is Paris, and last season there was not half enough garage room to accommodate the crowd. At every hour of the day great machines dash up to the hotels and unload well-known men and women from Hamburg, from Carlsbad, from Vichy, from Vienna, from Berlin, from Brittany, from Paris, from anywhere and everywhere. The King of Greece arrives at the Hôtel Paris in a Mercedes, the Shah of Persia spins blithely up to the Casino in a Panhard, a Russian Princess steers her motor into the narrow winding way of the Rue de Paris and brings it up with quick turn before Doucet's popular corner or in front of the fashionable pâtisserie. An English Duke has run up from Boulogne in his Daimler, the American Millionaire has made sixty miles an hour from Paris in his Packard, in order to meet his yacht in the bay of Deauville. It is an automobile show of the finest, the grande semaine at Trouville, and, later, automobile week at Ostend brings together a host of cars even more cosmopolitan, just as it brings together a crowd of folk still more cosmopolitan, than that of Trouville.

Yachting, too, is an important feature of Trouville life, and the bay is always well filled with sleek sea-going craft during grand semaine. Few of the very large yachts are French, but a fleet of beautiful small yachts has sailed up the Seine from Melun which is the anchorage for the Yacht Club of France, and there are a few imposing yachts flying the French colours. Trim English and American yachts by the dozen anchor off the Trouville shore for the great week, and there is a constant going and coming between boats and shore, a perpetual interchange of courtesies between the smart folk of villas and hotels, and the yachting visitors. Sometimes it is not the villa set that lunches and dines aboard the yacht. There are hilarious doings out there on the sea, when certain parties from the Hôtel de Paris are entertained, but those who hear tales of these doings when they stroll through la Potinière only shrug their shoulders, What can one expect when the season at Trou-Deauville, according to the traditional phrase, "bat son plein"?

Evening at Trouville means an elaborate dinner at one of the private villas or hotels, and an hour or two at the Casino, or perhaps some private social function following in the wake of a dinner—dancing, bridge, music, theatricals. The Hôtel de Paris is the public dining-place par excellence, the best vantage-ground from which to watch the passing show, but it is no easy matter to secure a table at the Hôtel de Paris during the height of the season. The most extravagant and modish part of the Trouville crowd—aside from the occupants of the handsomest villas—is quartered at the Hôtel de Paris. A crowd quite as swell but more inclined to quiet goes to the Grand Hôtel de Deauville, but rooms at this hotel are all taken months in advance by folk belonging to the Deauville set. The Hôtel de Paris rooms are reserved far in advance, too, but by a clientèle less exclusive. Money is the one essential at the Hôtel de Paris, but one must have plenty of that. There are always famous mondaines, millionaires, royal personages, staying at the Paris; but there, too, one finds the Parisian demi-mondaine, the noted jockey, the great actress, the wealthy tourist, and the worthy bourgeois of Paris will often save thriftily all year in order that he may afford a week at the Paris during the season. It is chic to stay at the Paris, and it is vastly amusing. Incidentally it is, as has been hinted, expensive. To have the humblest and scrappiest of rooms one must pay at least six dollars a day, and the prices of suites run up into appalling sums. Restaurant prices, too, are monumental and tips are no small item. The waiter who serves one is the most ingratiating, the most efficient, the most knowing of his kind, but if one does not give the suave Shylock the full ten per cent of his bill, which is the letter of his bond, it will be much better not to come back again. They have retentive memories, those waiters; they are used to lavish generosity—and tables are always at a premium.

It is practically impossible to secure a table for dinner without first enlisting the head waiter's sympathy by a discreet tip of from five to fifty francs, and a thousand francs has been paid for a table during grande semaine. The cuisine is not remarkable—not so good, for instance, as that of the Paris Café de Paris, which is under the same management; but much beside food goes to make up one's money's worth when the coveted table has at last been obtained, and there are few things more amusing to a student of men, women, and things than to sit in some corner of the café and watch the world go by. To thoroughly appreciate the show one should have, across the table, a friend who is versed in the gossip of the European capitals, and who can name the diners and tell their stories; but even the stranger within the gates can get a vast amount of entertainment out of the heterogeneous crowd, the amazing types, the beautiful clothes, the superb jewels, and many of the stories are written so plainly that he who runs may read.

After dinner the crowd drifts into the great Casino and now for a certain part of the idlers begins the serious business of the day. It is the custom to say that there is no high play in France to-day and that the great days of gambling are over, but every year folk go away from Trouville who could furnish circumstantial evidence to refute that theory. Play is more guarded than it once was. The gambling does not jump at the eyes. On the first floor of the Casino near the music a few modest tables of petits chevaux attract a crowd of players whose heaviest plunging is but a matter of a few francs, and many transient visitors go away thinking that this outfit represents the gambling of Trouville; but habitués of the place know better than that. Up on the second floor there are trente et quarante and baccarat, but even here the limit is not high. Many women surround the tables here, and women make up a large percentage of the crowd admitted to the tables of the third floor, where play runs high and admittance is not altogether easy to obtain; but on the fourth floor are tables from which women are barred and to which only the men accustomed to play for very high stakes are welcomed. Here is the innermost circle of the Trouville gambling Inferno, and here are found men whose very names ooze money. Here are found, too, men who have no colossal fortunes behind them, but who can play high because they are willing to risk all they have. A Rothschild, a Vanderbilt, a Menier, may rub shoulders at the tables, but they will perhaps have an actor, a restaurant proprietor, and a great dressmaker for vis-à-vis, and no one is playing for less than one thousand dollars a point. Last season an American actor was one of the heavy losers in this fourth-floor room, but a theatrical manager evened things up by cashing in a goodly heap of counters representing ten thousand dollars each at the end of a spectacular evening's play in which several of the wealthiest men of Europe took a hand. Men have been beggared at these tables. One prominent racing man lost his stables down to the last horse and bridle in an evening of play. A famous English yacht changed hands as a result of an hour at baccarat. Some of those who are knowing in such matters contend that the heaviest gambling in the world to-day goes on in the Trouville Casino during grande semaine, but one gives that statement for what it is worth, and authentic gambling statistics are not easy to obtain.