To the best of my knowledge they have only one plus-handicap amateur in France, being M. François de Bellet, who is rated at plus 1 at two or three clubs, but I have examined the handicap books at different places and find that there are a few scratch men, and that the number of players who have single figure handicaps is quite good in proportion to the whole, and is increasing. The fears we had that the French temperament was not good for the game prove to be unfounded; while the French enthusiasm is equal to anything that we know. There are cases of golf fever in France that are every degree as bad—or as good—as those we find here at home.
One muggy winter morning, when a friend and I teed up at the beginning of the round at La Boulie, we could with difficulty see the flag on the first green, short as was the hole. We surmised that we might be the only players; but, no, many holes ahead, having started early, was a match going on between a baron of France and one of his rivals. The baron was taking the game with exceeding seriousness, and the information was given to me that he played two rounds on the course every day of his life. "Saturdays and Sundays?" I asked my caddie. "Toujours!" was the answer. "Even if it rains?" I pursued. "Toujours!" the boy answered with emphasis. "Or snows or is foggy?" I persisted, and then the carrier of clubs replied a little impatiently and with finality, "Toujours!" intending to convey that in all circumstances whatsoever the indefatigable baron played his two rounds a day, and independent witnesses confirmed the statement of the boy. This surely is the French counterpart of what is considered to be the finest case of golf enthusiasm that Britain has produced, being that of old Alexander M'Kellar who played on Bruntsfield Links in the brave days of old and was known for his ardour as "the Cock o' the Green." He also would play always; when snow covered the course he begged and implored some one to become his opponent in a match, and if nobody obliged he would go out alone and wander the whole way round, playing his ball from flag to flag, the greens and holes being hidden. At night he would sometimes play at the short holes by the dim glimmer of a lamp, and golf by moonlight was his frequent experience. Once upon a time his suffering wife thought to shame him by taking to the links his dinner and his nightcap; but he was too busy to attend to her. M'Kellar is long since dead, but something of his soul survives in England—and in France. And there are old and experienced golfers in France. There are Parisians who are members of the Royal and Ancient Club of St. Andrews, and I have met others who could argue most deeply with me upon the peculiarities and merits of many British courses from Sandwich and Sunningdale to Montrose and Cruden Bay. I took tea at Fontainebleau with M. le Comte de Puyfontaine, who exercises a kind of governorship over the course, and he told me that he learned his golf twenty-three years ago at a place near Lancaster, and that since then he has played in many parts of the United States and elsewhere.
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I have endeavoured to make the point that the French are worthy and thorough, that the Parisian golf and golfers must be taken seriously, and that it is a pleasure to go among them with our clubs. Their courses are nearly good enough for anything, and they are all different from each other in type and characteristics. Fontainebleau is cut out of the forest, and silver birches line the fairway, while some of the great boulders which are peculiar to the place stand out as landmarks near the putting greens—but not so near as to be useful to the erratic player. Holes of all kinds are at Fontainebleau, and some of them make pretty puzzles in the playing. The teeing ground for the third is high up on a hill and the view is charming, but that may be of less account than the circumstance that the carry is farther than it looks, and the hole is a long one. The fifth is a catchy dog-leg hole, which the caddies of Fontainebleau do not call a jambe du chien, as you might expect them, but a "doc-lac." Soon the game will be Gallicised completely. The ninth, being a drive and a peculiar pitch, is a strange hole which worries the pair of us exceedingly. It looks one of the simplest things, but there is an inner green and an outer one, as one might say, and the former is on a high plateau. There is a secret about it which we did not discover in three full days. The tenth is a fine long hole, with a guard to the green that might have been brought up from the Inferno, and so on to the end in great variety. I like Fontainebleau. Chantilly has less character but more length. It is a better test of wooden club play, but not of pretty work with the irons in approaching. Yet it is well bunkered, the fairway is smooth and dry, as it is at Fontainebleau, all through the winter, and the putting greens are most excellent, fast and true. If most parts of the course are a little flat, there is a great ravine about the middle of it which gives a touch of the romantic and helps to the enjoyment. The turf at La Boulie does not winter so well as it does at the other places, though the club has spent many thousands of francs in applying real sea-sand to it for its improvement; but in the spring, the summer, and the autumn, golf here at Versailles is a fine pleasure. Yet some will say that, much as I tempt them, they would not after all go to France for golf, that indeed they could never confess to others that they had been to Fontainebleau and Versailles and Chantilly for their game. But why may they not take their game and their historical views and reflections on the same days, as they may do better in France than elsewhere; though when we play at St. Andrews or at Sandwich, where Queen Bess visited, and Westward Ho! we wonder again how strangely this royal and ancient game does attach itself and cling to the old places of celebrity, and especially those whose fame was made for them by kings. It is curious. The keen golfer is a man of thought and sense. We play on a morning at Fontainebleau, and in the afternoon we wander through the rich galleries of the wonderful palace where many kings of France held magnificent court, a place where the great Napoleon loved to rest a while between campaigns. There are relics of the Emperor in many chambers; and it was at the chief entrance here that he bade his last good-bye to the old guard and went lonely away, an emperor no more. The wonders and the glories of Versailles are known even to those who have never crossed the Channel; Chantilly has had its great romances of history also. The old castle was put up in the ninth century; here the Condes lived in fine state, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the place was very famous. The good French have endeavoured to make their courses suit their places. Sometimes we seem to look even on these playgrounds for a touch of art, a little delicacy, a fineness and a high quality, and we think in just that way of the golf de Paris when the train of the Nord runs us homewards again.
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The seaside golf in the northern and north-western parts of France is coming to be an important thing in the general scheme. Personal association and its seniority above all except Dieppe have led me already to mention Wimereux, but the golf of Wimereux is not the queen of the game of northern seaside France. In all honesty we must crown the slightly younger Le Touquet, on the other side of Boulogne, with that distinction. Here you may have one of the most charming changes of the game, and the most wholesome, delightful rearrangement of your general daily living system. Go to Etaples from Boulogne, then spin in the car through that splendid forest, skimming by Paris Plage and its casinos and evidences of lightness of life, and so through to Touquet, where there is a course for golf that is most excellent in every respect, lengths and character of holes, sandy nature of soil, quality of putting greens—everything. Some of the holes are a little tricky; but the course in general has been enormously improved in recent times, and it well deserves the championship dignity that has now been accorded to it. The girl caddies there are the best of their kind. I remember a little Marie for such an intuition regarding clubs to be used as I remember no other assistant: and after playing for a day through these avenues of fir trees with the great banks of silver sand in the distance, shutting off the sea, then dawdling among the coloured lights at Paris Plage listening to the music after dinner, and in the night sleeping in an upper room near to the links, and hearing at the last moment of consciousness the wind music floating in from the surrounding trees, one feels that this is almost an enchanted land, with the spirits of happiness and pleasure controlling a joyful cosmos.
Dieppe is good, and it is quite different. Here the golf is some seventeen years of age, the whole system of things is well matured and settled, and the golfing season goes along with a fine swing from the beginning to the end. It was Willie Park who first laid out this course, but it has been much altered and lengthened since then, and now there is a fine club-house and all that a player might wish for, and especially one who likes to contend in competitions. There is something for such challengers to do all the time; I know few other golfing places where there are so many competitions in August and September, and yet they are no nuisance to the people who say they hate such things. At Etretat the game has been making excellent progress lately; at Deauville by Trouville, where you bathe always except when you do not golf or sleep or eat, it has been long established, and the course there has recently been raised very high in quality; and at Cabourg and Havre, in the same region, there are courses also. There are at Etretat thirteen holes, and yet you may play a lucky round, and I am reminded that in the long ago, when golf near the sands of Picardy was first being thought of, a wise man of Cabourg sent for an English course architect, and, displaying to his view one nice field, said, "Voila! Make me a hole! Two if possible!" But they know much better now than that, and Cabourg has its full eighteen. To golf, to lie down and sleep, to splash and tumble in the sea, to seem to do so much and yet to do so little except make a few drives and miss some putts—it is all a very happy holiday that you may enjoy at these places.
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The championships of France, which began in a small and gentle way, have lately risen to be very important events, and they gain a most wonderfully cosmopolitan entry. In 1913, which was the greatest year for championships in general that the game has ever known—Taylor winning his fifth Open at Hoylake, Mr. Hilton his fourth Amateur, Mr. Travers his fourth American Amateur, Ouimet beating Vardon and Ray in the American Open—the championships of France did indeed rise to the first class, and in both events, the Amateur at La Boulie and the Open which was held for the first time at Chantilly—and the first for it to be taken away from the mother course at Versailles—produced some most exciting business. I have never seen a more extraordinary final in its way than that in the amateur event at La Boulie on this occasion, when Mr. E. A. Lassen came to grips with Lord Charles Hope—and such grips they were! I was led to describe it at the time as a dramatic affair of four periods and a spasm, and that is just what it was. Lord Charles Hope, though not physically strong, has acquired a fine game, and in the first period of this thirty-six holes match we witnessed him playing some quite beautiful golf and exercising the most complete self-possession and steadiness, gradually piling up a big lead of holes upon his more experienced opponent, who has been once Amateur Champion of Britain and a finalist another time, and seeming to make himself a certain winner. The duration of this period was one whole round, and at the end of it Lord Charles had five good holes to his advantage. The second was a period of peace, in which we watched Lord Charles keeping a tight hold on his most valuable gains, while Mr. Lassen, if losing nothing more, was gaining nothing when it was absolutely necessary he should be gaining quickly if he was not to be the loser of the day. Time was flying and holes were being done with, and fewer of them being left for play and recovery. This period terminated at the turn in the second round, with Lord Charles Hope still four to the good and "still winning." The third period lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth holes in this round, and in it the man who had seemed to be very well beaten threw a new life into his game, tightened it up, made it exact, certain, and aggressive, while at the same time his opponent seemed to collapse entirely, his driving becoming soft and uncertain and his short game nervous. The Yorkshire player won four of these five holes and at the fourteenth he was level with his man. Never was there a more extraordinary illustration of the truth that no match is lost until it is won; to some extent it recalled that amazing championship at Hoylake, when Mr. Sidney Fry so nearly gained the title after being at one time, as it appeared, hopelessly beaten by Mr. Charles Hutchings. Now it was surely Mr. Lassen's match; but in the crisis Lord Charles Hope came again and fought every inch of the way home. In this period every hole was halved to the end of the round, so that after the statutory thirty-six had been played the state of things was as at the beginning of the day. No business had been done, and each man might be said to have had his tail up quite as much as the other. The spasm followed. The thirty-seventh had to be played. Mr. Lassen teed up his ball, said to himself that he must keep it to the left as there was the dread out-of-bounds on the right that had been a constant trouble to him, swung, struck, and to his dismay saw the little white ball bearing slowly but surely to the right after all. It did not reach the trees, but, almost as bad, it fell into the big deep bunker out that way, and made recovery difficult. Lord Charles Hope seized his advantage. A good ball shot straight down the middle of the fairway, and the hole and the match were his. An extraordinary game indeed that was.
In the Open Championship at Chantilly there was an entry that was nearly good enough for a championship on British soil. Vardon and Ray, out across the Atlantic, were missing, but otherwise the class was as numerous and good as need be, and there were a few of the best British amateurs. George Duncan won, as he had won the "News of the World" tournament the week before, and so made it clear that he had come into his own at last. These two were his first really big victories in classic open events, and they were brilliantly and indeed easily gained. But it was not Duncan's victory, so well deserved as it was, that makes this championship at Chantilly worth a place in golfing history. It was something else that very nearly happened. Among the competitors was an amateur in Mr. H. D. Gillies, who at different times in recent seasons has shown an immense capacity. At St. Andrews in the Amateur Championship only a few months before he had made a brilliant display. Now, here, he did a thing which to the best of my belief and after a searching of all the records had never been done before, and that was in an open championship competition of the first order, decided by four rounds of stroke play and with the best players of the world arrayed against him, he as an amateur led the whole field for three consecutive rounds. Mr. Ouimet in America did not lead for three rounds, no amateur had led for three rounds in any open championship before, and it is not often that any professional has done so either. Mr. Gillies has enormous powers for concentration and effort, and, as one might say, he can strain himself at the game until he nearly drops. In his third round he had a wicked piece of bad luck which cost him two most valuable shots—not the sort of bad luck that one gets through finding a specially nasty place in a bunker, but the much worse variety which is the result of a grave error in course construction. After one of the finest drives one might wish to see, at a hole just after the turn he found his ball lying on a road which had to be treated as a hazard, and from here he was bunkered. He knew that Duncan was pressing him hard, and that he had not a stroke to spare. Still by an enormous effort he kept his lead, and at the end of the third round it looked as if it would still be a lead of two strokes, when alas! on the home green he lost a stroke in putting. Instead of having a lead of two over the terrible George for the last round he had now a lead of only one. There is not much difference between one and two—it may all be accounted for by the very smallest of putts—but in a case of this kind the moral effect is very great. You see, when you lead by two strokes you realise that you can afford to lose one of them and still be leading, but when you only have an advantage of one there is the cold truth that you cannot afford to lose anything at all or the lead will go—the lead that Mr. Gillies had held all the time. One may be sure that he felt this, for coming off that home green some one said to him quietly, "You still lead, Gillies," and he turned with a little melancholy and responded, "Yes, but one stroke is not much to lead Duncan by, is it?" The effect was visible at the first tee in the afternoon. He knew the responsibility. He took an infinity of pains, far too much. He addressed his ball until he was sick of looking at it any more, and then he topped it into the bunker in front of him. Good-bye, Open Championship of France! But there it was, a brilliant achievement for all that, and if he had won, as once he seemed likely to do, no man could have done justice to the golf history of that year with amateurs Ouimet and Gillies as Open Champions.