One of our greatest joys was when the start of the race was close to the “Oak Hedge,” that is, near where we were standing. The starter, in a frock coat, on a horse muscled like a wrestler, a great strapping fellow next to the thoroughbreds taking part in the event; the group of competitors gathering for the start, stamping like cocks, weaving like swans; then, after the formation of the line, always laborious, the sudden gallop and the noise of hoofs on the ground, from which it seemed to us we could perceive the tiniest vibrations. From this moment on, the din of the public following the moving phases of the race began to reach us, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, according to the point where the competitors were, according to whether one of them was gaining little by little on the bunch after remaining in the back or, inversely, had been overtaken after being the one in the lead, and finally according to whether an accident—a jib before an obstacle or a fall coming out of a jump—irretrievably deprived one of the competitors of his chance and, at the same time, caused for a section of the bettors a loss of money.
Even though I have always (despite some slight inclinations) been the opposite of a sportsman, I have retained from that period an impression of amazement that may play a part, now, in making me see every sporting event as a sort of ritual ostentation. The jockeys’ saddlery gear, the white ropes of the rings, and all the preparations: the parading of the competitors, the introduction of the adversaries, the duties of those who—like the referee, the starter, or the judge at the finish—are known as “officials”; behind the apparently unbroken facade of a detailed regulation, everything, too, that one senses having to do with applications of liniment, massages, administrations of drugs, special diets (as for fighting cocks, over which spells are cast). It is as though the protagonists of such events move through a world apart, at once more isolated and closer to the public than actors, for example. For here nothing is false: however important the stage production may be, here, and however strong the element of illusion, the sporting event, whose outcome is theoretically unpredictable except within the limits of a bet, is a real act and not a make-believe, all of whose vicissitudes, down to the least important, take place in conformity with what has been arranged in advance. Whence, along with a sharp consciousness of being less than these supermen, there is a most intense participation, since the creatures from whom we are thus separated and who hurl themselves recklessly toward victory or defeat are not conventional mannequins—vague reflections of ourselves or effigies reduced to a substanceless geometry—but creatures like us, of at least equal density, who could be us.
Besides the Auteuil racecourse and the one at Longchamp, scarcely farther away from where we lived since it, too, was within the area of the Bois de Boulogne, and besides Enghien (which we were not familiar with but knew to be close to a casino where we were taken one evening for a performance by a professional singer, a relative of ours) there existed—and there still exist—other racetracks scattered through the environs of Paris: Le Tremblay (which I believe was not long ago known for its “heavy ground” and whose name recalls the noise of the field galloping on wet earth), Maisons-Laffitte (with the same name as a great vineyard, like Château-Margaux), Chantilly (the most aristocratic of all, even though its name made one think much sooner of lentils [lentilles] than of lace mantillas [mantilles de dentelle] or of whipped cream [crème Chantilly]), Vincennes (which was nothing to us, for we felt only disdain for trotting races, whether in harness or mounted). The racecourses to which race-goers went by railroad and not by piling into horse-drawn charabancs as one did for Auteuil or Longchamp were, for us, lost in an almost unreal distance; we had of them a knowledge that was only, so to speak, secondhand, through the newspapers that we examined, in the manner of true bettors, to establish our selections.
Reading fairly regularly L’Echo des Courses, Auteuil-Longchamp, and (sometimes) La Veine, we derived from them a documentation that became the basis of laborious calculations involving multiple factors, often difficult to evaluate, both in themselves and as to their relative importance: the weight—or rather, load—of the horses (the top-weight,* in other words the most heavily loaded, posing a delicate problem since his present disadvantage resulted precisely from the fact that his past record had demonstrated his superiority); earlier performances by each, from which one deduced that a certain horse would “strike out” a certain other horse (by means of a long series of operations allowing one to evaluate the merits of the competitors by taking, if one could, other horses against whom they had already run as standards of measure which were themselves subjected to a similar system of evaluations); the state of the ground (considered to be better or more poorly adapted to the abilities of a certain horse); pedigrees; the reputation of the owners and trainers; the quality of the jockeys, their spot in the “general ratings” and with respect to the “percentage” of winning mounts in the total number of mounts (a criterion we preferred because it was less crudely quantitative than the rating according to the gross number of victories), the good or bad form of said jockeys added to the risky notion of “deviation” (that is, the number of consecutive defeats one of them might have just suffered, a greater deviation, in the case of a good jockey, allowing one to think that his period of bad luck would soon end); the predictions of certain newspapers that had shown themselves to be particularly shrewd on this subject, even though they were not exclusively devoted to it.
For my brother and me, there was no question of confirming, by even a fictional bet, the predictions resulting from this work we did together, with a disinterest and a seriousness close to those of chess players or researchers seeking in their laboratories the solution to difficult scientific problems. If we were ambitious for success (touchstone of our abilities as bettors) it was simply for the honor of it, and it seems to me, at this distance, that, because of our very innocence, we were perhaps apt to choose winners more often than other people. We ignored, it is true, the trifling small fry, the handicaps and the “selling races,” competitions of rank outsiders that their owners want to get rid of, and we only concerned ourselves with the important races, in which the contest was more or less circumscribed, between known horses, and, because of this, measurable with a smaller margin of uncertainty despite the inevitability of the unforeseen. It is also true that, given the fact that our game cost nothing, we did not have to ignore a favorite and support an outsider in the hope of cashing in on long odds and did not make use of any system, such as the “martingale,” relying almost exclusively, in deciding which of the various competitors would triumph, on the research we had carried out with such patience and methodical rigor.
During this whole period in which we were so passionate about racing, my brother and I easily imagined that when we were older, we would become jockeys—just as so many boys from the poorer sections of town may dream of becoming racing cyclists or boxers. Like the founder of a religion, like a great revolutionary or a great conqueror, a champion seems to have a destiny, and this vertiginous rise of someone who is, often, a product of a most underprivileged sector of the population, is the sign of an exceptional fortune—or magic force—that allows him to pass all stages in a single bound and attain a social rank that is, of course, somewhat marginal, but out of proportion to anything an ordinary man can reasonably expect, as assured as he may be of the advantages of his birth. In certain respects, the champion is reminiscent of the magician and, very specifically, the shaman of societies conventionally described as primitive, a figure who also quite often starts out as no more than an underprivileged person but takes a brilliant revenge on destiny in the fact that he alone, to the exclusion of everyone else, is in league with the spirits.
No doubt my brother and I sensed this confusedly when we imagined ourselves clothed in those jackets that were like some sort of armorial bearing or liturgical vestment, distinguishing us from everyone else but at the same time uniting us with everyone else, since we would become the target, the vehicle for a certain collective effervescence,
the convergence point and the receptacle for those gazes fixed on our persons as so many pins to which to attach prestige. More effectively that the top hat, the cylinder revolver, the purse full of gold, or any other symbol of the fathers authority, these thin silk tunics would have signaled our power, our mana, as people who caused all obstacles to pass under the bellies of their horses and exposed themselves triumphantly to the dangers of falling. Time passing and my ambitions becoming less lofty, perhaps it is a distant glimmer of those jackets that still attracts me in the names of certain cloths for suits or overcoats: shetland* worsted* cover-coat* [covert coating], tweed* (whose first name is “Harris” and not necessarily “Irish,” as I thought for a long time), chalk striped* (or rayé de craie), sharkskin* (or peau de requin)*.
Next to the Tablettes sportives—more modest in their presentation—there were, in the cupboard where we put our books, a number of those volumes with gilt edges and percale binding which, though children don’t always find them very entertaining, are at least an ornament to their libraries (in this respect not at all different from the libraries of many adults, who see books as a form of window dressing rather than instruments for reading). Among these works for children was one that fermented my imagination to the point that I began writing a theater adaptation of it. As I knew scarcely any other aspect of the theater, this quite naturally took the form of an opera libretto: “Violà Partner, Ce n’est Fend-l’Air” [here’s partner, he’s not air-cleaver] was more or less the text of a song that, in the epic mode, brought face-to-face two thoroughbred rivals. In a Louis XV frame, Le petit jockey du duc de Lauzun presented my brother and me with the example of a boy from across the Channel who displayed both the greatest sporting spirit and the most moving devotion to his French master. After the latter made a bet with one Count or Marquis de Conflans, the jockey had to foil the maneuvers of a wicked lackey named Laurent (devoted servant of the opposing party) in order to bring back from England the famous crack horse Partner, which, after a series of adventures, he would ride to victory somewhere in the neighborhood of Chaillot or Passy. Like Chérubin [adolescent character in Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro], little Bob wore a powdered wig tied in back with a ribbon; but no tricornered hat on top of it: a hemispherical black skull-cap like a jockey’s or huntsman’s cap, and his calves barded with riding boots instead of the rakish silk stockings of high-heeled fancy dress. Did the story continue with something about imprisonment or some scenes depicting a revolution? Upon reflection, I don’t think so; but it seems to me that one saw that great rogue Laurent roughed up, even copiously thrashed, by the members of another set of servants, as punishment for his misdeeds.
The substitution of an old nag for the marvelous horse Partner. Was it Laurent who, on the boat sailing toward France or (more likely) on a stagecoach overland, disguised some hack as the precious animal so as to leave the abduction of the latter undiscovered for a time? Or was it Bob who made use of this subterfuge to deflect the machinations of his sworn enemy onto some other beast which the scoundrel would kidnap—or drug—in place of the amazing quadruped? Whatever the reasons were and in the secrecy of whatever night this took place, one horse was disguised as another by having the color of his coat changed with a few strokes of paint, a comedy of errors the uncertain episodes of which ended with the hero scoring a point and the traitor abashed, his contemptible wiliness ineffectual against the intelligent honesty of his young adversary. Loyal like Mme de Pompadour’s little Negro or the mameluke Roustan so dear to Napoleon, brave and noble Bob will have gotten his master, that hothead, out of a truly awkward situation when the author of the book feels the time has come to put an end to his tribulations.
The probity, the acumen, the seriousness displayed by the duc de Lauzun’s little jockey were the same qualities that we attributed to the jockeys we admired. Not only is the greatest jockey the best horseman (which one can judge by the easy manner in which he sits his horse), but he is the one who “doesn’t live it up,” the one who submits best to the strict diet dictated by the necessity of making weight, the one who never violates the harsh discipline of training; and these ascetic qualities go hand in hand with qualities as moral as intellectual: the great jockey doesn’t cheat, doesn’t fraudulently “haul in” his horse instead of giving him every chance; he is a good tactician also, preferring the “waiting race” to the “leading race” and knowing how to husband the strength of his mount in order to send it forward at the right moment in an irresistible burst of speed.
That a horse sets the pace from start to finish doesn’t happen often and is, in any case, not at all desirable for the interest of the race: the great pleasure is not to see one of the competitors relentlessly dominate the rest of the bunch but to see him improve his position and overtake the others one by one, sometimes easily, sometimes with difficulty, one’s joy reaching its height if he has stayed at the back for a long time and, fully urged on by his rider, who brings spurs and whip into action, comes up to beat, almost at the post, an adversary who seemed already to have won the race; a neck, a head, even a short head will be all the latecomer will win by, as though his jockey had calculated down to a fraction of a second and a few centimeters the effectiveness of his move.
The horse who leaps out ahead, or the comingman* (as fans of cycling like to call him) preparing to outclass his elders and already causing them some uneasiness. Like the challenger* with respect to the champion, the coming-man is a younger son who burns to take the place of his older brothers. Of a man like this, not yet established and young enough not to have to spare himself, one knows that he plays a straight game and (like the novillero who, in order to attract attention, takes risks he will not take when he is a recognized matador) always gives all he has; also, mingled with the impassioned attention attracted by his meteoric rise, there is a kind of love: wonder at the spectacle of such a promising youth, sympathy toward someone whose ways of behaving are still without cunning, a feeling of complicity with the person whom one expects to see topple some firmly founded reputations from their pedestals.
Though he had gone far beyond the stage where one is merely a hopeful prospect and was numbered, as a steeplechasing jockey, among the finest whips, for a long time René Sauval—son of a butcher from la Villette—was the object of a veritable devotion on the part of my brother and me. During an entire year we expected him, who was second (and very precisely because he was second), to replace Georges Parfrement at the top of the general rating and thus take the lead from an individual we detested, resenting him for the fact that he was the only one in their area of expertise to have won more races than Sauval, also that he was older and occupied the top place unfairly since Sauval, claiming a lesser number of victories but riding less often, had a percentage that we judged to be more creditable than his. The fact of seeing him comfortably installed in his fame was at the root of our animosity toward Georges Parfrement: if we sympathized to such a degree with René Sauval, it was because he represented a threat to that successful man. I don’t think I’m responding to a very different impulse nowadays when I sympathize with the oppressed classes, who are in the position of challenger with respect to the dominant classes, and when I prefer, to the great, long since recognized talent, the writer or artist rejected by his society who—having died too early to know a victory he did not even necessarily aspire to—runs, on the scale of the centuries, a waiting race.
In addition to the jackets, sometimes of a single color (only the cap being different), sometimes of two colors (juxtaposed in stripes, circles, squares, or one being belt, scarf, sleeves, or spots standing out against the other color) there were, not only the white of the breeches and the black boots with yellow tops, but the horses’ coats. No spectacle of greater sumptuousness than the passing of these fields of horses, compact or strung out, on tracks of a green, it would seem, no meadow ever attained. And I truly believe that no court costume or soldier’s uniform (with aiguillettes, frogs and loops, kalpak, dolman, epaulettes,
stars, braid, gorget, facings, pipings, sabretache, shako, shapska) could compare, in our eyes, to these thin uniforms, so dazzling and with such a very modern appearance.
A certain taste for the epic—nourished by reading Géneral Marbot’s Mémoires—induced us, certainly, to regard the jockeys’ exploits as feats of arms, of a sort; in the stories we told each other, it often happened that our animal heroes, before winning renown as warriors or heads of state, were eminent jockeys or aviators during a preliminary period in which they proved themselves, not unlike what we read, in accounts of their “childhoods,” of the characters of chivalric romances. When, after having been unable to do more than sketch out a few crude drawings (such as “Drogant, roi des lapins, en tenue de campagne et de revue” [Drogant, king of the rabbits, in country dress and review dress], an amply decorated animal, named thus because of the page Drogan, female role in the operetta Genevieve de Brabant, which my sister had told to me), I began scribbling in notebooks, where I set down the life stories of Bob Singecop, Chienchien, Moutonnet, and other amazing mammals, I drew them in ink and colored pencil, sometimes depicting them as they accomplished a brilliant action (capturing a flag or carrying a message across enemy lines) and sometimes as they ran in a great race.
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