“If you wanted to design a game that was going to put people off from playing it,” one court tennis enthusiast said, “you would probably design a real tennis court.”
Up on the second floor, hidden behind the facade of a tall Haussmann building not far from the Arc de Triomphe, is the Jeu de Paume Club, the only active court tennis club in Paris.
The members of the club, like the players at Wimbledon in England, are dressed all in white, and they call out the scores “quinze!” and “trente!” just the same as the umpires a few miles west, at Roland Garros, where the French Open is being played through June 11.
Modern tennis, or lawn tennis, which was formally invented in England in the 1870s, bears many of the traces of court tennis, not least the basic vocabulary of scoring, even if no one has definitively proven if it is referenced from medieval horological sources or the paces that a player advanced when he won a point in the game of longue paume, the ancestor of most racket sports but particularly lawn tennis, which has been played in villages across France since the 13th century.
Court tennis, also known as real tennis, developed 200 years later, according to Gil Kressmann, a historian and the honorary president of the Jeu de Paume Club, as cities evolved in France and walled courts replaced the large open spaces previously used for longue paume. The sport took off across Europe and Britain, where it was championed by Henry VIII.
The courts in France then, as today, were managed by professionals known as maîtres paumiers, who performed in matches, gave lessons and made the balls and rackets.
