In October, Longchamps is deserted for Chantilly, where the trials of two-year-olds take place—the first criterion for horses, the second criterion for fillies—the distance in these two races being eight hundred mètres, or half a mile. The Grand Criterion, for colts and fillies, has a distance of double this, or one mile (sixteen hundred mètres). Since their débuts in August at Caen and Déauville the young horses have had time to harden and to show better what they are made of; and it is in the Grand Criterion that one looks for the most certain indications of their future career. The names of the winners will be found to include many that have afterward become celebrated, such as Mon Étoile, Stradella, Le Béarnais, Mongoubert, Sornette, Révigny and others.
Chantilly is the birthplace of racing in France. In the winter of 1833—the same year which also witnessed the foundation of the Jockey Club—Prince Labanoff, who was then living at Chantilly, and who had secured the privilege of hunting in the forest, invited several well-known lovers of the chase to join him in the sport. Tempted by the elasticity of the turf, it occurred to the hunters to get up a race, and meeting at the Constable's Table—a spot where once stood the stump of a large tree on which, as the story goes, the constable of France used to dine—they improvised a race-course which has proved the prolific mother of the tracks to be found to-day all over the country. In this first trial M. de Normandie was the winner. The fate of Chantilly was decided. Since the suicide—or the assassination—of the last of the Condés the castle had been abandoned, the duc d'Aumale, its inheritor, being then a minor. The little town itself seemed dying of exhaustion. It was resolved to infuse into it a new life by taking advantage of the exceptional quality of its turf. The soil is a rather hard sand, resisting pressure, elastic, and covered with a fine thick sward, and of a natural drainage so excellent that even the longest rains have no visible effect upon it. On this ground—as good as, if not better than, that at Newmarket—there is to-day a track of two thousand mètres, or a mile and a quarter—the distance generally adopted in France—with good turns, excepting the one known as the "Réservoirs," which is rather awkward, and which has the additional disadvantage of skirting the road to the training-stables—a temptation to bolt that is sometimes too strong for horses of a doubtful character. For this reason there is sometimes a little confusion in the field at this point. Before coming to the last turn there is a descent, followed by a rise—both of them pretty stiff—and this undoubtedly has its effect on the result, for the lazier horses fall away a little on the ascent. Just at this point too a clump of trees happens to hide the track from the spectators on the stands, and all the lorgnettes are turned on the summit of the rise to watch for the reappearance of the horses, who are pretty sure to turn up in a different order from that in which they were last seen. This crisis of the race is sometimes very exciting. A magnificent forest of beech borders and forms a background to the race-course in the rear of the stands; in front rise the splendid and imposing stables of the duc d'Aumale, built by Mansard for the Great Condé; on the right is the pretty Renaissance château of His Royal Highness; while the view loses itself in a vast horizon of distant forest and hills of misty blue. The stands are the first that were erected in France, and in 1833 they seemed no doubt the height of comfort and elegance, but to-day they are quite too small to accommodate the ever-increasing crowd. The stands as well as the stables, and the race-course itself, all belong to the duc d'Aumale, who gave a splendid house-warming and brilliant fête last October to celebrate the completion of the restorations of his ancestral château. Under the Empire, the property of the Orleans princes having been confiscated, a nominal transfer of Chantilly was made to a friend of the family. The emperor, having one day signified his wish to witness the Derby, had the mortification on his arrival to find the reserved stand closed against him by the prince's orders. It was necessary to force the gate. The emperor took the hint, however, and never went to Chantilly again.
The soil of the Forest of Fontainebleau being of the same nature as that of the turf in the open, the alleys of the park furnish an invaluable resource to the trainer. For this reason, since racing has come in vogue, most of the stables have found their way to Chantilly or to its immediate neighborhood, where one of the largest and finest alleys of the forest, running parallel to the railway and known as the Alley of the Lions, has been given up to their use. Thus, Chantilly, with its Derby Day and its training-grounds, may be called at once the Epsom and the Newmarket of France. There is hardly a horse, with the exception of those of the comte de Lagrange and of M. Lupin, and those of Henry Jennings, the public trainer, that is not "worked" in the Alley of the Lions. The Société d'Encouragement has control of the training-ground as well as of the track, and also claims the right to keep spectators away from the trial-gallops, so that the duc d'Aumale, whose proprietary privileges are thus usurped, is often at war with the society. He has stag-hunts twice a week during the winter, on Mondays and Thursdays, and now and then on Sundays too—as he did with the grand duke of Austria on his late visit to Chantilly—and he naturally objects to having the hunt cut in two by the gallops over his principal avenue. He worries the trainers to such a degree that they begin to talk of quitting Chantilly for some more hospitable quarters. When things get to this pass the duke, who, in his character of councillor-general, is bound to look after the interests of his constituents, relents, and putting aside his personal wrongs calls a parley with the stewards of the races, offers a new prize—an object of art perhaps—or talks of enlarging the stands, and the gage of reconciliation being accepted, peace is made to last until some new casus belli shall occur. His Royal Highness is not forgetful of the duties of his position. When he is at Chantilly on a race-day he gracefully does the honors of his reserved stand to all the little Orleanist court. Since the reconciliation that took place between the comte de Paris and the comte de Chambord in 1873 this miniature court has been enlarged by the addition of several personages of the Legitimist circle, and the "ring" at Chantilly is often graced with a most distinguished and aristocratic assemblage. Amongst the beauties of this brilliant company may be especially noticed Madame de Viel-Castel, the young princesse Amédé de Broglie, the duchesse de Chaulnes with her strange, unconventional type of beauty, Madame Ferdinand Bischoffsheim, the comtesse Beugnot, the comtesse Tanneguy-Duchâtel and the princesse de Sagan. And when all this gay party has dispersed, and the duke is left to his cigar—as constant a companion as the historical weed in the mouth of General Grant—he might almost fancy, as he walks the great street of his good town, that he is back again at Twickenham in the days of his exile. There is something to remind him on every side of the country that once sheltered him. To right and left are English farrieries, English saddleries, and English bars and taverns too. English is the language that reaches his ears, and English of the most "horsey" sort that one can hear this side of Newmarket. Everybody has the peculiar gait and costume that belong to the English horseman: the low-crowned hat, the short jacket, those tight trousers and big, strong boots, are not to be mistaken. It is a little world in itself, in which no Frenchman could long exist, but its peculiar inhabitants have not, for all that, neglected anything that may attract the young folk of the country. They have even offered the bribe of a race in which only French jockeys are permitted to ride, but these, with only an exception here and there, have very promptly given up the business, disgusted either by the severe regimen required in the matter of diet or by the rigorous discipline indispensable in a training-stable. The few exceptions to which I have referred have not sufficed to prevent this race from falling into disrepute; but it may be worth mentioning that on the last occasion on which it was run, the 19th October last, when but three or four horses were engaged, the baron de Bizé, with what has been called a veritable inspiration of genius, threw an unlooked-for interest into the event by mounting in person M. Camille Blanc's horse Nonancourt, and winning the race with him. It is to be borne in mind that the riders must not only have been born in France, but must be of French parentage on the side of both father and mother.
The best-known jockeys are nearly all the children of English parents, and have first seen the light in the little colony at Chantilly or else have been brought very young into France. I give some of their names, classed according to the number of victories gained by them respectively in 1878: Hunter, who generally rides for M. Fould, 47 victories; Wheeler, head-jockey and trainer for M. Ed. Blanc, 45 victories; Hislop, 39; Hudson, ex-jockey to M. Lupin, who gained last year the Grand Prix de Paris, 36 victories; Rolf, 35; Carratt, 32; Goater, who rides for the comte de Lagrange, and who is well known in England; and Edwards, whose "mount" was at one time quite the mode, and whose tragical death on the 3d of October last created a painful sensation. When Lamplugh was training for the duke of Hamilton he made Edwards "first stable-boy," and this and his subsequent successes excited a violent jealousy in one of his stable-companions named Page. The two jockeys separated, but instead of fighting a duel, as Frenchmen might have done, they simply rode against each other one day at Auteuil—Page on Leona, and Edwards on Peau-d'Âne. The struggle was a desperate one: both riders got bad falls from their exhausted mares, and from that time poor Edwards never regained his aplomb. He frequently came to grief afterward, and met his death in consequence of a fall from Slowmatch at Maison Lafitte.
One of the oldest celebrities of Chantilly is Charles Pratt, formerly trainer and jockey for the baron Nivière and for the late Charles Lafitte, and at present in the service of the prince d'Aremberg. His system of training approached very nearly that of Henry Jennings, under whose orders and instructions he had worked for a long time. His horses were always just in the right condition on the day they were wanted, and as he never allowed them to be overridden, their legs remained uninjured for many years—a thing that has become too rare in France as well as in England. As a jockey Pratt possessed, better than any other, that knowledge of pace without which a rider is sure to commit irreparable mistakes. At the Grand Prix de Paris of 1870, when he rode Sornette, he undertook the daring feat of keeping the head of the field from the start to the finish. Such an enterprise in a race so important and so trying as this demanded the nicest instinct for pace and the most thorough knowledge, which as trainer he already possessed, of the impressionable nature and high qualities of his mare.
The autumn meetings at Chantilly close the legitimate season in France. The affairs at Tours are of little interest except to the foreign colony—which at this season of the year is pretty numerous in Touraine—and to the people of the surrounding country. On these occasions the cavalry officers in garrison at Tours get up paper hunts, a species of sport which is rapidly growing in favor and promises to become a national pastime. Whatever interest attaches to the November races at Bordeaux is purely local. Turfmen who cannot get through the winter without the sight of the jockeys' silk jackets and the bookmakers' mackintoshes must betake themselves to Pau in December. The first of the four winter meetings takes place during this month upon a heath at a distance of four kilomètres—say about two miles and a half—from the town. The exceptional climate and situation of Pau, where the frozen-out fox-hunters of England come to hunt, and where there is a populous American colony, will no doubt before long give a certain importance to these races, but just now the local committee is short of funds and the stakes have been insufficient to offer an attraction to good horses. Last winter in one of the steeple-chases all the horses tumbled pell-mell into the river, which was the very first obstacle they encountered, and although the public was quite used to seeing riders come to grief, it found the incident somewhat extraordinary.
The meetings at Nice, the queen of all winter residences in Europe, are much finer and more worthy of attention. They begin in January, and the programme has to be arranged almost exclusively for steeple-chases and hurdle-races, as flat-racers are not in condition for running at the time when the season at Nice is at its height. The greater number, and particularly the best, of the racers have important engagements for the spring meetings at Paris and at Chantilly, and even in view of really valuable prizes they could not afford at this time of year to undergo a complete preparation, which would advance them too rapidly in their training and would make it impossible to have them in prime condition in the spring. The race-course at Nice is charmingly situated in the valley of the Var. The perfume of flowers from numerous beds reaches the stands, where one may enjoy a magnificent view of mountain and sea, whilst a good band discourses music in the intervals of the races. Some of the prizes are important. The Grand Prix de Monaco, for instance, popularly known as "The Cup", consists of an object of art given by the prince of Monaco and a purse of twenty thousand francs, without counting the entrance-stakes. On the second day is run the great hurdle handicap for seventy-five hundred francs called the Prix de Monte Carlo, and on the third and last day of the meeting the Grand Prix de Nice, a free handicap steeple-chase for a purse of ten thousand francs.
The international pigeon-shooting matches at Monaco, which occur at the same time, contribute, with the races, to give an extraordinary animation to this period of the season at Nice. The betting-ring feels the influence of the proximity of the gaming-tables, where everybody goes; and yet one could so easily exchange this feverish life of play for the calmer enjoyments of the capital cuisine of London House and an after-dinner stroll on the English Promenade or the terraces of Monte Carlo, in dreamy contemplation of the mountains with their misty grays and a sea and sky of such heavenly blue. But no: this charming programme is wantonly rejected: not the finest orchestras, not the prettiest fêtes, not the newest chansonettes sung by Judie and Jeanne Granier themselves, can turn the players for a moment from the pursuit of their one absorbing passion. Play goes on at the Casino of Monte Carlo the livelong day, the only relaxation from the couleur gagnante or tiers et tout being when the gamblers step across the way to take a shot at the pigeons or a bet on the birds; for they must bet on something, if it is but on the number of the box from which the next victim will fly. And when in the evening the players have returned to Nice it is only to indulge the fierce passion again in playing baccarat—the terrible Parisian baccarat—at the Massena Club or at the Mediterranean, where the betting is even higher than at Monaco. Hundreds of thousands of francs change hands every hour from noon to six o'clock in the morning in this gambling-hell—a hell disguised in the colors of Paradise.
But let us fly from the perilous neighborhood and reach the nearest race-course by the fastest train we can find. The passion for the turf is healthier than the other, and its ends not so much in need of concealment. Unluckily, we shall not find just at this season—that is to say, in February—anything going on excepting a few steeple-chases—some "jumping business," as the English say rather contemptuously. In England there are certain owners, such as Lord Lonsdale, Captain Machell, Mr. Brayley and others, who, though well known in flat-races, have also good hunters in their stables, while the proprietors of the latter in France confine themselves exclusively to this specialty. Perhaps the best known amongst them are the baron Jules Finot and the marquis de St. Sauveur. Most of the members of the Jockey Club affect to look down upon the "illegitimate" sport, as they call it. It would seem, however, that this disdain is hardly justifiable, for as a spectacle at least a steeple-chase is certainly more dramatic and more interesting than a flat-race. What can be finer than the sight of a dozen gentlemen or jockeys, as the case may be, charging a brook and taking it clear in one unbroken line? And yet, despite the attractions and excitement of the sport, and all the efforts made from time to time by the Society of Steeple-chases to popularize it in France, it cannot as yet be called a success. Complaint is made, as in England, of too short distances, of the insufficiency of the obstacles, of an overstraining of the pace. The whole thing is coming to partake more and more of the nature of a race, an essentially different thing. Field sports are not races—at least they never ought to be. A steeple-chase can never answer the true purpose of the flat-race, which is to prove which is the best horse, to the end that he may ultimately reproduce his like. But nobody ever heard of "a sire calculated to get steeple-chasers". The cleverness and the special qualities that make a good steeple-chaser are not transmitted. The best have been horses of poor appearance, often small and unsightly, that have been given up by the trainer as incapable of winning in flat-races. In England the winners of the "Grand National" have had no pedigree to speak of, and have failed upon the track. Cassetête had run in nineteen races without gaining a single one before he began his remarkable career as a hunter; Alcibiade had been employed at Newmarket as a lad's horse; Salamander was taken out of a cart to win the great steeple-chases at Liverpool and Warwick.
In France there is no Liverpool or Croydon or Sandown for steeple-chases: there is only an Auteuil. The other meetings in the neighborhood of Paris—Maisons, Le Vésinet, La Marche—are in the hands of shameless speculators like Dennetier, Oller and the rest. Poor horses, bought in the selling races and hardly trained at all to their new business, compete at these places for slender purses, and often with the help of dishonest tricks. Accidents, as might be expected, are frequent, although the obstacles, with the exception of the river at La Marche, are insignificant. But the pace is pushed to such excess that the smallest fence becomes dangerous. This last objection, however, may be made even to the running at Auteuil, where the course is under the judicious and honorable direction of the Society of Steeple-chases. The pace is quite too severe for such a long stretch, strewn as it is with no less than twenty-four obstacles, and some of them pretty serious. The weather, too, is nearly always bad at Auteuil, even at the summer meetings, and the ill-luck of the Steeple-chase Society in this respect has become as proverbial as the good-fortune and favoring skies that smile upon the Société d'Encouragement, its neighbor at Longchamps. It is not to be wondered at, then, that the English do not feel at home upon this dangerous track. They have gained but twice the great international steeple-chase founded in 1874—the first time with Miss Hungerford in the year just mentioned, and again with Congress in 1877. This prize, the most important of the steeple-chase purses in France, amounts to twelve hundred sovereigns, added to a sweepstakes of twenty sovereigns each, with twelve sovereigns forfeit—or only two sovereigns if declared by the published time—and is open to horses of four years old and upward. It is run in the early part of June. Last year, whilst Wild Monarch, belonging to the marquis de St. Sauveur and ridden by D'Anson, was winning the race, the splendid stands took fire and were burned, without the loss of a single life, and even without a serious accident, thanks to the ample width of the staircases and of the exits. These stands were the newest and the most comfortable in the country. It is to be hoped that the society will not allow itself to be discouraged by such a persistent run of ill-luck, but that it will continue to pursue its work, the object of which it has declared to be "to encourage, as far as its resources will permit, the breeding and raising of horses for service and for the army." As the Encouragement Society rests upon the Jockey Club, so the Society of Steeple-chases finds its support in the Cercle of the Rue Royale, commonly called the Little Club or the Moutard. This club was reorganized after the war under the direction of the prince de Sagan, and has made great sacrifices to bring Auteuil into fashion.