Henry Jennings is a character. His low, broad-brimmed beaver—which has gained him the sobriquet of "Old Hat"—pulled well down over a square-built head, the old-fashioned high cravat in which his neck is buried to the ears, the big shoes ensconced in clumsy gaiters, give him more the air of a Yorkshire gentleman-farmer of the old school than of a man whose home since his earliest youth has been in France. He is one of the most original figures in the motley scene as he goes his rounds in the paddock, mysterious and knowing, very sparing of his words, and responding only in monosyllables even to the questions of his patrons, while he whispers in the ears of his jockeys the final instructions which many an interested spectator would give something to hear. Beginning his career in the service of the prince de Beauvan, from which he passed first to that of the duc de Morny and afterward to that of the comte de Lagrange, he is now a public trainer upon his own account, with more than a hundred horses under his care. No one has devoted more intelligent study to the education of the racer or shown a more intuitive knowledge of his nature and of his needs. It was he who first threw off the shackles of ancient custom by which a horse during the period of training was kept in such an unnatural condition, by means of drugs and sweatings, that at the end of his term of probation he was a pitiful object to behold. The pictures and engravings of twenty years ago bear witness to the degree of "wasting" to which a horse was reduced on the eve of a race, and the caricatures of the period are hardly over-drawn when they exhibit to us the ghost of an animal mounted by a phantom jockey. When people saw that Jennings was able to bring to the winning-post horses in good condition, whose training had been based upon nothing but regular work, they at first looked on in astonishment, but afterward found their profit in imitating his example. Under this rational system it has been proved that the animal gains in power and endurance while he loses nothing in speed. The same intrepid trainer has ventured upon another innovation. Impressed with the inconveniences of shoeing, and annoyed by the difficulty of finding a skilful smith in moving from one place to another in the country, he conceived the idea of letting his horses go shoeless, both during training and on the track; and, despite all that could be urged against the practice his horses' feet are in excellent condition. His many successes on the turf have not, however, been crowned, as yet, by the Grand Prix de Paris, though in 1877 he thought to realize the dream of his ambition with Jongleur, whom he had trained and whom he loved like a son; and when the noble horse was beaten by an outsider, St Christopher, "Old Hat" could not control an exhibition of ill-humor as amusing as it was touching. When Jongleur died Jennings wept for perhaps the first time in his life, and he was still unable to restrain his tears when he described the tortures of the poor beast as he struck his head against the sides of his box in the agonies of lockjaw.
Let us close our list—in which, however, we have endeavored to enumerate only the principal figures upon the French turf—with two names; and first that of the young Edmond Blanc, heir to the immense fortune gained by his late father as director of the famous gaming-tables of Monaco. The latter, like a prudent parent, forbade his son to race or to play, and Edmond, obeying the letter of the law—at least during the lifetime of his father—was known, if known at all upon the course, under the pseudonyme of James. At present, however, he is the owner of an important stud and stable which are constantly increasing, and which bid fair before long to take rank amongst the principal establishments in the country. Waggish tongues have whispered that when he had to make choice of colors he naturally inclined to "rouge et noir," but finding these already appropriated by M. Lupin, the representative of "trente et quarante" was forced to content himself with tints more brilliant perhaps, but less suggestive. But let him laugh who wins. The annals of the turf for 1879 inscribe the name of M. Blanc as winner of the Grand Prix de Paris. It was his mare, Nubienne, who first reached the winning-post by a neck in a field of eleven horses, M. Fould's Saltéador being second, with barely a head between him and the third, Flavio II., belonging to the comte Frédéric de Lagrange.
This latter proprietor, the most celebrated of all—in the sense of being the most widely known and the most talked about—I have reserved for the end of my catalogue. Comte de Lagrange made his début upon the turf in the year 1857, now more than twenty years ago, by buying outright the great stable of M. Alexander Aumont, which boasted at that time amongst its distinguished ornaments the famous Monarque, who had, before passing into the hands of his new owner, gained eight races in eight run, and who, under the colors of the comte, almost repeated the feat by winning eight in nine; and of these two were the Goodwood Cup and the Newmarket Handicap. Afterward, at the Dangu stud, he achieved a fame of another sort, but in the eyes of horsemen perhaps still more important. Never has sire transmitted to his colts his own best qualities with such certainty and regularity. Hospodar, Le Mandarin, Trocadéro were amongst his invaluable gifts to the comte, but his crowning glory is the paternity of the illustrious Gladiateur, the Eclipse of modern times. Gladiateur, said the baron d'Étreilly, recalls Monarque as one hundred recalls ten. There were the very same lines, the same length of clean muscular neck well set on the same deep and grandly-placed shoulders, the same arching of the loins, the same contour of hips and quarters, but all in proportions so colossal that every one who saw him, no matter how indifferent to horseflesh in general, remained transfixed in admiration of a living machine of such gigantic power.
The first appearance of Gladiateur upon the race-course was at the Newmarket autumn meeting of 1864, where he won the Clearwell Stakes, beating a field of twelve horses. He was kept sufficiently "shady," however, during the winter to enable his owner to make some advantageous bets upon him, though it required careful management to conceal his extraordinary powers. His training remains a legend in the annals of the stables of Royal-Lieu, where the jockeys will tell you how he completely knocked all the other horses out of time, and how two or three of the very best put in relay to wait upon him were not enough to cover the distance. Fille-de-l'Air herself had to be sacrificed, and it was in one of these terrible gallops that she finished her career as a runner. Mandarin alone stood out, but even he, they say, showed such mortal terror of the trial that when he was led out to accompany his redoubtable brother he trembled from head to foot, bathed in sweat. In 1865, Gladiateur gained the two thousand guineas and the Derby at Epsom, and for the first time the blue ribbon was borne away from the English. "When Gladiateur runs," said the English papers at this time, "the other horses hardly seem to move." The next month he ran for the Grand Prix de Paris. His jockey, Harry Grimshaw, had the coquetry to keep him in the rear of the field almost to the end, as if he were taking a gallop for exercise, and when Vertugadin reached the last turn the favorite, some eight lengths behind, seemed to have forgotten that he was in the race at all. The public had made up its mind that it had been cheated, when all at once the great horse, coming up with a rush, passed all his rivals at a bound, to resume at their head his former easy and tranquil pace. There had not been even a contest: Gladiateur had merely put himself on his legs, and all had been said. These three victories brought in to Comte de Lagrange the sum of four hundred and forty-one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five francs, to say nothing of the bets. Gladiateur afterward won the race of six thousand mètres (two miles fourteen furlongs) which now bears his name, and also the Great St. Leger at Doncaster. He was beaten but once—in the Cambridgeshire, where he was weighted at a positively absurd figure, and when, moreover, the track was excessively heavy. After his retirement from the turf he was sold in 1871 for breeding purposes in England for two hundred thousand francs, and died in 1876.
Like M. Fould and several other brethren of the turf, Comte de Lagrange felt the discouragements of the Franco-German war, and sold all his horses to M. Lefèvre. Fortunately, however, he had retained in his stud at Dangu a splendid lot of breeding-mares, and with these he has since been able to reconstruct a stable of the first order, though the effort has cost him a very considerable sum. Indeed, he himself admits that to cover expenses he would have to make as much as thirty thousand pounds every year. Four times victorious in the French Derby before 1870, he has since repeated this success for two successive years—in 1878 with Insulaire, and in 1879 with Zut. His colors (blue jacket with red sleeves and a red cap) are as well known in England as in his own country. Within the last six years he has three times won the Oaks at Epsom with Regalia, Reine and Camelia, the Goodwood Cup with Flageolet, the two thousand guineas and the Middlepark and Dewhurst Plates with Chamant. On the 12th of June, last year, at Ascot, he gained two races out of three, and in the third one of his horses came in second.
But the count is by no means always a winner, nor does he always win with the horse that, by all signs, ought to be the victor. He has somehow acquired, whether justly or not, the reputation of being a "knowing hand" upon the turf, and all turfmen will understand what is implied in the term, whether of good or of evil. His stable has been called a "surprise-box," which simply means that the "horse carrying the first colors does not always carry the money;" that people who think they know the merits of his horses frequently lose a good deal by the unexpected turn of affairs upon the track; and that the count, in short, manages to take care of himself in exercising the undoubted right of an owner, as by rule established, to win if he can with any one of the horses that he may have running together for any given event. Nothing dishonorable, according to the laws of the turf, has ever been proved, nor perhaps even been charged, against him; but as one of his countrymen, from whom I have just now quoted, remarks, "He is fond of showing to demonstration that a man does not keep two hundred horses in training just to amuse the gallery."
These repeated triumphs, as well as the not less frequent ones of MM. Lefèvre, Lupin and de Juigné, have naturally set the English a-thinking. They have to admit that the time has passed when their handicappers could contemptuously give a French horse weights in his favor, and a party headed by Lords Falmouth, Hardwicke and Vivian and Sir John Astley of the London Jockey Club has been formed with the object of bringing about some modifications of the international code.
A war of words has ensued between Admiral Rous and Viscount Daru, the respective presidents of the two societies, in the course of which the admiral has urged that as English horses are admitted to only two races in France, the Grand Prix de Paris and the D[/e]auville Cup, while French horses are at liberty to enter upon any course in England, it is quite time that a reciprocity of privileges were recognized, and that racers be put upon an equal footing in the two countries. Not at all, replies M. Daru; and for this reason: there are three times as many race-horses in England as in France, and the small number of the latter would bring down the value of the French prizes to next to nothing if the stakes are based, as they are in England, upon the sum-total of the entries. In France the government, the encouragement societies, the towns, the railway companies, all have to help to make up the purses, and often with very considerable sums. Would it be fair to let in English horses in the proportion of, say, three to one—supposing the value of the horses to be equal—to carry off two-thirds of these subscriptions? To this the Englishman answers, not without a show of reason, that if the foreign horses should come into France in any great numbers this very circumstance would make the entrance-moneys a sufficient remuneration to the winner, and that the government, the Jockey Club and the rest would be relieved from a continuance of their subventions. The discussion is still kept up, and it is not unlikely that the successors of MM. Rous and Daru will keep on exchanging notes for some years without coming nearer to a solution than the diplomats have come to a settlement of the Eastern Question.
I have said that the Jockey Club of Paris grants subventions to the racing societies of the provinces, which it takes under its patronage to the number of about forty-five, but it undertakes the actual direction of the races at only three places—namely, Chantilly, Fontainebleau and Déauville-sur-Mer—besides those of Paris. Up to 1856, the Paris races were run on the Champ de Mars, where the track was too hard and the turns were very sharp and awkward. In the last-mentioned year the city ceded to the Société d'Encouragement the open field at Longchamps, lying between the western limit of the Bois de Boulogne and the river Seine. The ground measures about sixty-six hectares in superficial area, and this ample space has permitted the laying out of several tracks of different lengths and of varying form, and has avoided any necessity for sharp turns. The whole race-course is well sodded, and the ground is as good as artificially-made ground can be. It is kept up and improved by yearly outlays, and these very considerable expenses are confided to Mr. J. Mackenzie-Grieves, so well known for his horsemanship to all the promenaders of the Bois.
The race-course at Longchamps enjoys advantages of situation and surroundings superior, beyond all question, to those of any other in the world. The approaches to it from Paris are by an uninterrupted succession of the most charming drives—the Champs Élysées, the grand avenue of the Bois de Boulogne, and finally through the lovely shaded alleys of the Bois. Arrived at the Cascade, made famous by the attempt of Berezowski upon the life of the czar in 1867, the eye takes in at a glance the whole of the vast space devoted to the race-course, overlooked to the right by a picturesque windmill and an ancient ivy-mantled tower, and at the farther extremity by the stands for spectators. To the left the view stretches over the rich undulating hills of S[\e]vres and of Meudon, strewn with pretty villas and towers and steeples, and rests in the dim distance upon the blue horizon of Les Verriéres.