The elegant central stand or tribune, of brick and stone, is reserved for the chief of the state. In the time of the last presidency it was almost always occupied by the marshal, a great lover of horses, and by his little court; but his successor, M. Grévy, whose sporting propensities are satisfied by a game of billiards or a day's shooting with his pointers, generally waives his privilege in favor of the members of the diplomatic corps.
The stand to the left of the track is the official tribune, very gay and attractive in the days of the Empire, when it was filled by the members of the municipal council of Paris and their families, but to-day rather a blot upon the picture, the wives of the Republican ædiles belonging to a lower—though, in this case, a newer—stratum of society than did their imperial predecessors. The Jockey Club reserves for itself the first stand to the right, from which all women are rigorously excluded. The female element, however, is represented upon the lower ranges of benches, though the ladies belonging to the more exclusive circles of fashion prefer a simple chair upon the gravel of the paddock. It is there, at the foot of the club-stand, that may be seen any Sunday in spring, expanding under the rays of the vernal sun, the fresh toilettes that have bloomed but yesterday, or it may be this very morning, in the conservatories of Worth and Laferrière. The butterflies of this garden of sweets are the jaunty hats whose tender wings of azure or of rose have but just unfolded themselves to the light of day. My figure of "butterfly hats" has been ventured upon in the hope that it may be found somewhat newer than that of the "gentlemen butterflies" which the reporters of the press have chased so often and so long that the down is quite rubbed from its wings, to say nothing of the superior fitness of the comparison in the present case. In fact, the gentlemen do but very rarely flutter from flower to flower within the sacred confines of the paddock, but are much more apt to betake themselves in crowds to the less showy parterre of the betting-ground, where, under the shadow of the famous chestnut tree, such enormous wagers are laid, and especially do they congregate in the neighborhood of the tall narrow slates set up by such well-known bookmakers as Wright, Valentine and Saffery.
Each successive year sees an increase in the number of betters, who contribute indirectly, by means of subscriptions to the races, a very important proportion of the budget of the Jockey Club. But if any one should imagine from this constant growth of receipts that the taste for racing is extending in France, and is likely to become national, he would be making a great mistake: what is growing, and with alarming rapidity, is the passion for gambling, for the indulgence of which the "improvement of the breed of horses" is but a convenient and sufficiently transparent veil. Whether the money of the player rolls around the green carpet of the race-course or upon that of M. Blanc at Monte Carlo, the impulse that keeps it in motion is the same, and the book-maker's slate is as dangerous as the roulette-table. The manager of the one piles up a fortune as surely as the director of the other, and in both cases the money seems to be made with an almost mathematical certainty and regularity. They tell of one day—that of the Grand Prix of 1877—when Saffery, the Steel of the French turf and the leviathan of bookmakers, cleared as much as fifty thousand dollars. Wright, Valentine, Morris and many more make in proportion to their outlay. Four or five years ago these worthies had open offices on the Rue de Choiseul and the Boulevard des Italiens, where betting on the English and French races went on night and day; but the police, following the lead of that of London, stepped in to put an end to this traffic in contraband goods, and the shops for the sale of this sort of merchandise are now shut up. But if all this has been done, and if even those great voitures de poules which once made the most picturesque ornament of the turf, have been banished out of sight, it has been impossible to uproot the practice of betting, which has more devotees to-day than ever before. It has been discovered in other countries than France that the only way to deal with an ineradicable evil is to check its growth, and an attempt to prohibit pool-selling a year or two ago in one of the States of this Union only resulted in the adoption of an ingenious evasion whereby the pictures of the horses entered were sold at auction—a practice which is, if I am not misinformed, still kept up. The same fiction, under another form, is to be seen to-day in France. In order to bet openly one has to buy an entrance—ticket to the paddock, which costs him twenty francs, whereas the general entry to the grounds is but one franc, and any one found betting outside the enclosure or enceinte of the stables is liable to arrest. The police, no doubt, are willing to accept the theory that a man who can afford to pay twenty francs for a little square of rose- or yellow-tinted paper is rich enough to be allowed to indulge in any other extravagant freaks that he pleases.
But with all the numerous bets that are made, and the excitement and interest, that must necessarily be aroused, there is nothing of the turbulent and uproarious demonstration so characteristic of the English race-course. The "rough" element is kept away from the French turf, partly because it would find its surroundings there uncongenial with its tastes, and partly by the small entrance-fee required; and one is thus spared at Longchamps the sight of those specimens of the various forms of human misery and degradation that offend the eye at Epsom and infest even the more aristocratic meetings of Ascot and Goodwood. At the French races, too, one never hears the shrieks and howls of an English crowd, save perhaps when in some very important contest the favorite is beaten, and even then the yells come from English throats: it is the bookmakers' song of victory. A stranger at Longchamps would perceive at once that racing has no hold upon the popular heart, and that, so far as it is an amusement at all apart from the gambling spirit evoked, it is merely the hobby and pastime of a certain number of idle gentlemen. As to the great mass of spectators, who are not interested in the betting, they go to Longchamps as they would go to any place where uniforms and pretty toilettes and fine carriages are to be seen; for the Parisian, as one of them has well said, "never misses a review, and he goes to the races, although he understands nothing about them: the horses scarcely interest him at all. But there he is because he must do as 'all Paris' does: he even tries to master a few words of the barbarous jargon which it is considered bon-ton to speak at these places, for it seems that the French language, so rich, so flexible, so accurate, is insufficient to express the relations and affinities between man and the horse."
The enceinte du pesage, often called in vulgar English "the betting-ring," or the enclosure mentioned above to which holders of twenty-franc tickets are admitted, at Longchamps is scrupulously guarded by the stewards of the Jockey Club from the invasion of the demi-monde—a term that I employ in the sense in which it is understood to-day, and not in that which it bore twenty years ago. A woman of this demi-monde, which the younger Dumas has defined as that "community of married women of whom one never sees the husbands," may enter the paddock if she appears upon the arm of a gentleman, but the really objectionable element is obliged to confine itself to the five-franc stands or to wander over the public lawns. Some of the fashionable actresses of the day and the best-known belles-petites may be seen sunning themselves in their victorias or their "eight-springs" by the side of the track in front of the stands, but this is not from any interest that they feel in the performances of Zut or of Rayon d'Or, but simply because to make the "return from the races" it is necessary to have been to them, and every woman of any pretension to fashion, no matter what "world" she may belong to, must be seen in the gay procession that wends its way through the splendid avenue on the return from Longchamps.
The great day at Longchamps, that crowns the Parisian season like the "bouquet" at the end of a long series of fire-works, is the international fête of the Grand Prix de Paris, run for the first time in 1863. It is open to entire horses and to fillies of all breeds and of all countries, three-year-olds, and of the prize, one hundred thousand francs, half is given by the city of Paris and half by the five great railway companies. It was the late duc de Morny who first persuaded the municipal council and the administrations of the railways to make this annual appropriation; ail of which, together with the entries, a thousand francs each, goes to the winner, after deducting ten thousand francs given to the second horse and five thousand to the third. Last year the amount won by Nubienne, carrying fifty-three and a half kilogrammes, was one hundred and forty-one thousand nine hundred and seventy-five francs, and the time made was three minutes thirty-three seconds on a track of three thousand mètres—one mile seven furlongs, or three furlongs longer than that of the Derby at Epsom.
The fixing of Sunday for this international contest has aroused the prejudices of the English, and has been the occasion of a long correspondence between Admiral Rous and Viscount Daru, but the committee on races has refused to change the day, contending, with reason, that the French people cannot be expected to exchange their usages for those of a foreign country. Although it is understood that Queen Victoria has formally forbidden the prince of Wales to assist at these profane solemnities, this interdict has not prevented the appearance there of some of the principal personages of England, and we have several times noticed the presence of the dukes of St. Albans, Argyll, Beaufort and Hamilton, the marquis of Westminster and Lords Powlett, Howard and Falmouth; though the last, be it said, is believed to be influenced by his respect for the day in his refusal to run his horses in France.
Those who remember the foundation of the Grand Prix will recall the extraordinary excitement of the occasion, when the whole population of Paris, as one of the enemies of the new system of racing said, turned out as they would to a capital execution or the drawing of a grand lottery or the ascension of a monster balloon: the next day the name of the winner was in everybody's mouth, and there was but one great man in the universe for that day at least—he who had conceived the idea of the Grand Prix de Paris. The receipts on this occasion amounted to eighty-one thousand francs: last year they were two hundred and forty thousand. I subjoin a list of the winners from 1863 to 1879, inclusive:
Years. Horses. Owners. Nationality.
1863 The Ranger H. Savile English.
1864 Vermont H. Delamarre French.
1865 Gladiateur Comte F. de Lagrange French.
1866 Ceylon Duke of Beaufort English.
1867 Feryacques A. de Montgomery French.
1868 The Earl Marquis of Hastings English.
1869 Glaneur A. Lupin French.
1870 Sornette Major Fridolin (Ch. French.
Lafitte)
1871 (Not run).
1872 Cremorne H. Savile English.
1873 Boïard H. Delamarre French.
1874 Trent W.R. Marshall English.
1875 Salvator A. Lupin French.
1876 Kisber Baltazzi Hungarian.
1877 St. Christophe Comte F. de Lagrange French.
1878 Thurio Prince Soltikoff Russian.
1879 Nubienne Edmond Blanc French.