Hidden under the facade of a Haussmann skyscraper not far from the Arc de Triomphe, on the second floor is the Jeu de Paume Club, the only active tennis club in Paris.
The club members dress all in white and shout “Quinze!” And “Trante!” Just like the referee at Roland Garros, just a few miles west, where the French Open runs until June 11th.
Modern tennis, or lawn tennis, which was formally invented in England in the 1870s, has a scoring system, even though no one has definitively proved that it was drawn from medieval horological sources. Many vestiges of court tennis remain, including basic vocabulary. Most of the rackets pace forward when a player scores a point in his sport, especially his game of long his pommes, the ancestor of lawn tennis, which has been played in villages all over France since the 13th century.
According to Gilles Cressmann, a historian and honorary president of the Jeux de Paume Club, court tennis, also known as real tennis, was developed in France as cities developed and until then the large squares used for long paume It evolved 200 years later as the court was replaced by a walled court. . The sport spread across Europe and England and was championed by Henry VIII.
At that time, the French courts, like today, were run by specialists called Maîtres Paummiers, who played games, gave lessons, and manufactured balls and rackets. As for the last requirement, Guillaume Dortout, a club professional at the Palace of Fontainebleau, said with relief, “Fortunately, professionals don’t need that today.”
But only he and other club pros like Paris’ Rod McNaughton are still allowed to sell court tennis racquets made of wood. Each month, they make 100 to 150 of his balls, carefully weighing a stiff core of cork and cotton webbing, then hand stitching the outside of thick yellow felt. They also clean the courts daily.
By the end of the 17th century, enthusiasm for the game had begun to wane, and was associated with gambling and less favorable events such as when the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, murdered his opponent on a tennis court in Rome in 1606. rice field. He was banished from town. In France, the game’s popularity declined during the reign of Louis XIV, who was reluctant to play due to his heavy build. He was more into billiards.
The French Revolution, which began in 1789, distracted from the game, but one of the revolution’s founding moments, the Tennis Court Oath, took place on the tennis courts of Versailles, where parliamentarians barred from the palace were convened. , pledged not to commit any wrongdoing. It was dissolved until France had a constitution.
The sport is now played competitively in the four countries that make up the Grand Slam of tennis. In France the game is known as Jeu de Paume. Real tennis is played in England and Australia. and the United States, home of the current men’s world champions, Camden Riviere. There are just over 50 courts in the world, but the prohibitive cost of building new courts is a major problem. Although the game is growing in popularity, the number of active players is only around 10,000.
What the court tennis players lack in numbers, they make up for in enthusiasm. When asked to describe the sport, they most often compare it to chess and say that its mental demands are as important, if not more, than their physical demands.
Players take pride in the esoteric nature of the game, buttresses, galleries, asymmetrical courts plentiful around every corner with strange names, and the fact that no two courts in the world are exactly alike. There lies the challenge for players like Mathieu Sarlang, world number 10 and 13-time French amateur champion. “It’s technically very difficult and demanding,” he said. “There are so many options on the court that you really have to master the tactics.”
The match is a sporting conundrum and Martin Village, a 70-year-old court tennis enthusiast from London, Dedanist Societybriefed by a small group of British players devoted to the history of the sport.
“If you want to design a game that people stop playing, you’re probably designing a real tennis court,” he said. But that is why it is a source of endless fascination. “