Up on the second flooring, hidden behind the facade of a tall Haussmann constructing not removed from the Arc de Triomphe, is the Jeu de Paume Club, the one lively courtroom tennis membership in Paris.

The members of the membership, just like the gamers at Wimbledon in England, are dressed all in white, and so they name out the scores “quinze!” and “trente!” simply the identical because the umpires a couple of miles west, at Roland Garros, the place the French Open is being performed by means of June 11.

Modern tennis, or garden tennis, which was formally invented in England within the 1870s, bears lots of the traces of courtroom tennis, not least the fundamental vocabulary of scoring, even when nobody has definitively confirmed whether it is referenced from medieval horological sources or the paces {that a} participant superior when he gained some extent within the sport of longue paume, the ancestor of most racket sports activities however significantly garden tennis, which has been performed in villages throughout France because the thirteenth century.

Court tennis, often known as actual tennis, developed 200 years later, in line with Gil Kressmann, a historian and the honorary president of the Jeu de Paume Club, as cities advanced in France and walled courts changed the massive open areas beforehand used for longue paume. The sport took off throughout Europe and Britain, the place it was championed by Henry VIII.

The courts in France then, as right this moment, have been managed by professionals often known as maîtres paumiers, who carried out in matches, gave classes and made the balls and rackets. As for the final requirement, Guillaume Dortu, the present membership skilled on the Palace of Fontainebleau, didn’t conceal his aid that “mercifully, professionals don’t have to do that today.”

But he and different membership execs like Rod McNaughtan in Paris are the one individuals allowed to promote courtroom tennis rackets, that are nonetheless constructed of wooden. Each month, they make 100 to 150 balls, rigorously weighing the laborious core of cork and cotton webbing earlier than stitching the thick yellow felt exterior by hand. They additionally clear the courtroom each day.

Enthusiasm for the sport began to wane on the finish the seventeenth century, and it was linked to playing and fewer salubrious occasions equivalent to when the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi, higher often known as Caravaggio, killed an opponent on a tennis courtroom in Rome in 1606, resulting in his being banished from the town. In France, the sport’s reputation suffered beneath Louis XIV, whose heavy physique discouraged him from enjoying. He was keener on billiards.

The French Revolution, which started in 1789, distracted from the sport, although one of many revolution’s founding moments, the Tennis Court Oath, came about within the tennis courtroom at Versailles, the place deputies convened after being locked out of the palace, swearing to not disband till France had a structure.

Today, the game is performed competitively within the 4 international locations that additionally make up tennis’s Grand Slam: France, the place the sport is called jeu de paume; Britain and Australia, the place it goes by actual tennis; and the United States, residence of the present males’s world champion, Camden Riviere. There are simply over 50 courts on the planet, and the prohibitive price of setting up new courts is a serious subject. While the sport is gaining in reputation, there are solely round 10,000 lively gamers.

Whatever they may lack in numbers, courtroom tennis gamers make up for with enthusiasm. When requested to explain the game, they most continuously examine it to chess and say its cerebral calls for are as essential, if no more so, than the bodily ones.

Players take pleasure within the esoteric nature of the sport in addition to its asymmetrical courtroom with buttress, galleries, quite a few nooks and crannies with odd names and the truth that no two courts on the planet are precisely the identical. Therein lies the problem for gamers like Matthieu Sarlangue, who’s ranked No. 10 on the planet and is a 13-time French novice champion. “Technically it’s very difficult and demanding,” he mentioned. “You really have to master the tactics because there are so many options on the court.”

The sport is a sporting conundrum, one which Martin Village, a 70-year-old courtroom tennis fanatic from London and member of the Dedanists’ Society, a small group of British gamers devoted to the historical past of the game, defined merely.

“If you wanted to design a game that was going to put people off from playing it,” he mentioned, “you would probably design a real tennis court. But that’s why it is a source of endless fascination.”