Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

There remain to be mentioned, amongst the number of gentlemen who are in the habit of entering their horses for races in France, a Belgian, the comte de Meeüs, one of whose horses was the favorite in the race last mentioned, and though beaten, as often happens with favorites, he and other animals from the same stables have this year carried away several of the provincial prizes; M.L. André, owner of this season's winners of the steeple-chase handicap known as the Prix de Pontoise and of several hurdle-races; M.A. de Borda, who was unsuccessful in the present year in three at least of the races in which he had entered; M.E. de la Charme, who in June, 1879, took the Grand Prix du Conseil-Général (handicap) at Lyons, and in September won at Vincennes the hurdle-race Prix de Charenton; the marquis de Caumont-Laforce, whose colors were first this summer at Moulins in the Prix du Conseil-Général, and in the third Criterium at Fontainebleau, as well as in the grand handicap at Beauvais last July; M.P. Aumont, who has been not without some good luck in the provinces during the past season; M. Moreau-Chaslon, whose successes of late have hardly been in proportion to his numerous entries, though he won the last Prix des Villas at Vésinet, the Prix du Jockey Club (three thousand francs) at Châlons-sur-Saône and the Prix du Mont-Valérien at the Bois de Boulogne; and, to bring to an end our long list of devotees of the turf, we add the name of M. Ephrussi, who, amongst the numerous races in which he has entered horses in 1879, has been victorious in not a few—for instance, in the steeple-chase handicap at La Marche, called the Prix de Clairefontaine, in L'Express at Fontainebleau, in the Prix de Neuilly at the Bois de Boulogne, and in the handicap for the Prix des Écuries at Chantilly, as well as in a race for gentlemen riders only at Maison-Lafitte. Besides these and others, he gained last August the Jockey Club Prize (five thousand francs) at Châlons-sur-Saône, the Prix de Louray at Déauville for the like amount, another of the same figures at Vichy, and the six thousand francs of the Grand Prix du Havre. Most of the gentlemen last named are the owners of a comparatively small number of horses, which are, perhaps without exception, entrusted to the care of the famous trainer Henry Jennings of La Croix, St. Ouen, near Compiègne.

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.

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.