More A Question Of “Who?” Than “When?”
The oldest world championship asserted for any sport is the one for tennis. By “tennis”, I mean the sport we now call real tennis, court tennis, royal tennis or jeu de paume.
This piece of amateur research was triggered, towards the end of 2021, by a casual enquiry by Carl Snitcher, a leading light in the Dedanists & Real Champions world, while we were on our way to play a match at Hampton Court Palace.
Carl was wondering whether the asserted date of 1740 for the first real tennis champion was accurate. Some had suggested it was not. I was the only amateur tennis historian Carl had to hand at that moment.
The answer to the exam question: “Did Clergé become the first tennis champion in precisely the year 1740?”, is a reasonably straightforward one; I shall answer it briefly in the next section of this piece.
But I realised, on engaging in this small piece of research, that, far more interesting than the numerical, “when?” question, is the more human query, “who on earth was this initial tennis champion Clergé?”
1740?
The earliest use of the specific date “1740” as the initial championship year is in Julian Marshall’s seminal work, published in 1878, The Annals Of Tennis:
Other great players of this time (1740- 1753) were Clergé, the elder Farolais, La Fosse, Barcellon (the father), and Barnéon. Clergé was the most remarkable…
p33
Subsequent history books, especially those that cite sources and references, use this 1740 date. Those that source/reference that date, including Marshall, cite Traité sur la connoissance du royal jeu de paume et des principes qui sont relatifs aux différentes parties qu’on y joue par Manevieux (1783) as their source. Marshall’s words are mostly a decent translation of the Manevieux passage…
Paumiers qui acquirent, il y a trente ou quarante ans, une certaine réputation de force, furent les sieurs Clergé, Farolais pere, La Fosse, Barcelon pere & Barneon ; — le sieur Clergé étoit le plus vanté…”
P137
…except in the matter of dates, where Manevieux is saying “these past thirty or forty years” rather than stating specific dates. Manevieux no doubt spent several years writing his amateur treatise.
There is other circumstantial evidence, which I’ll discuss later, which makes 1740 as good a guess as any for the start of the period of Clergé supremacy at tennis. More recent tennis historians, such as Kathryn McNicoll (The First & The Foremost A Gallery Of Champions) and John Shneerson (Real Tennis Today And Yesterday), have tended to use “circa 1740” or “1740s” as their base date.
As an early music lover, I am at home with the use of “circa” for dates derived from estimates based on best available evidence. I find the term “circa 1740” suitably precise yet hedged for the starting date of Clergé’s pre-eminence.
Who Was This Manévieux Fella?
Before we explore the story of Monsieur Clergé, I’d like to delve a little into the author, Manévieux , upon whose 1783 writings our knowledge of the early tennis champions is based.
He is almost certainly otherwise (or more completely) known as Louis-Claude Bruyset de Manévieux, who published a couple of other works, in particular a eulogy to his great uncle, Jean André Soubry (1703-1774), Treasurer of France in Lyon.
One of my bugbears is that we have no picture of Clergé, nor of Manévieux for that matter, but there is a contemporaneous portrait of Soubry, which will have to do in the “eye candy” department for the time being:
In the 1783 tennis treatise, Monsieur Manévieux describes himself as an amateur. Whether he means amateur tennis player, writer or historian is unclear. Sounds like my kind of guy in any case.
Manévieux dedicates the treatise to Le Comte D’Artois, who went on to become Charles X after the Bourbon Restoration. As a youngster, Charles, Count of Artois was famous for his drinking, gambling and womanising (presumably he wasted the other 10% of his time), the fashionable rumour of the time was that Charles was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Marie-Antoinette. He famously won a bet with Marie-Antoinette that he could get his architect, François-Joseph Bélanger, to design and build a party palace within three months. The result, at enormous expense, was the 1777 Château de Bagatelle.
Charles, Count of Artois was unusually keen on tennis for a French royal of his era. Thierry Bernard-Tambour (good name for a tennis historian, Tambour) in his article on 18th century royal paumiers, registers, from royal archives that that…
Janvier-Jacques [Charrier] became the King’s paumier in 1763, also [paumier to the] Count of Artois
and
[ball making by] Etienne Edmond [Quillard] in 1765 for the Dauphin and the Count of Artois
…which means that Artois did play tennis from his infancy. The Manévieux dedication suggests that Charles retained an interest in the game into adulthood. Shneerson (pp76-77) provides some fascinating insights into Charles’s extravagant behaviours and spending around the game. D’Artois apparently had a hissy-fit when spectators applauded his opponent in a public court. After that, he only wanted to play on private courts. Between 1780 and 1786 he had his architect, Belanger, build him a court on the Boulevard du Temple – as much for drinking, gambling and womanising as for watching/playing tennis if the designs are anything to go by. That was probably the last pre-revolution court built in France.
Charles spent several years in England during his exile from France, during which time he is known to have played regularly at the James Street (Haymarket) court, spectators presumably having been warned not to cheer the future King of France’s opponents.
But let us now return to Monsieur Clergé himself.
Wikipedia (Unusually Not) To The Rescue
My usual starting point for research of this kind is Wikipedia, but on this occasion, at the time of writing (December 2021), Wikipedia was having a bit of a shocker in the matter of our first named tennis champion, Monsieur Clergé.
Here is Clergé’s (wafer thin) Wikipedia entry, archived 26 December 2021.
Here is the Wikipedia entry for real tennis world champions, archived on the same date, which (wrongly) supposes our hero Clergé to be “Clergé the elder”. That entry also wrongly supposes the great Masson who followed Clergé, to be Raymond Masson, whereas it is now firmly believed that Antoine-Henri Masson (1735-1793) was the great Masson (Nicholas Stogdon via The British Museum, Bernard-Tambour, McNicoll, Shneerson). In particular Bernard-Tambour clarifies that Raymond Masson was a less exalted player, born 1740, a cousin of the great Antoine-Henri.
By the time you get to read this piece, the Wikipedia entries might well have been improved, so here are links to the live entries:
“Clergé” live Wikipedia entry.
“List of real tennis world champions” Wikipedia entry.
So Who Was Clergé The Elder?
Having explained that our hero was the younger Clergé, I should explain what little we know about “Clergé The Elder”.
Our older source is the nineteen volume Journal of the Marquis de Dangeau, with the additions of the Duke of Saint-Simon – you can read or download the whole lot through this link.
Parenthetically, it is amusing to note that Louis de Rouvroy,The Duke of Saint-Simon founded his own fame and reputation as a memoirist on the back of his annotations of Dangeau’s memoires, despite stating that Dangeau’s writing was:
of an insipidity to make you sick.
Still, the period of the Dangeau memoires; 1684-1720, covered the last 30+ years of The Sun King, Louis XIV’s reign and the early years of the Louis XV era.
Here is an example from the autumn of 1685:
Sunday 4 November 1685, in Fontainebleau. – The King went to shoot; My lord [Louis the Grand Dauphin] did not go out all day; he made the good jeu de paume players play, and Jourdain played better than little Breton or little Saumur had ever played, as people say at that time.
I am not the first tennis historian to trawl those 19 volumes for nuggets of information about tennis, nor will I be the last. It is mostly pedestrian stuff, but I discern and summarise the following:
- tennis was on the whole falling from favour in royal circles during that period;
- more or less only in the autumn, when the royals were at Fontainebleau and Versailles for the hunting season, does tennis feature at all in their lives;
- younger members of the royal family would “have a go” – Louis the Grand Dauphin was still having an occasional hit in the earlier period of those diaries. For example, on 3 December 1686, he played on the three-day old new court at Versailles – the Grand Dauphin continued to play regularly there throughout the winter of 1686/87, but the novelty of playing there soon wore off for him;
- there was more enthusiasm for watching professional players play than for having a hit themselves – the royals tended to watch if the weather was too poor for hunting and/or if they were entertaining visiting dignitaries, such as exiled English royals;
- one of the Jourdain brothers was the pre-eminent player in the mid 1680s at least;
- in October 1687 the professionals at Fontainebleau petitioned The Sun King for a licence to exhibit their skills in Paris; this he granted:
Thursday 9 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The King saw the good players of jeu de paume play, who asked that they be allowed to take money to see them play in Paris; it would earn them money, and apparently the king will allow them.
Sunday 26 October 1687, in Fontainebleau. – The king saw the good players of jeu de paume playing, and granted them the privilege they asked for; they will play twice a week in Paris, and will be displayed like the actors. They are five: the two Jourdains, le Pape, Clergé et Servo.
I believe the above mention of Clergé The Elder to be the only one by Dangeau himself. There is a further mention in the autumn of 1690 which comes from a Saint-Simon footnote, the detail presumably extracted from Mercure:
Thursday 12 October 1690, in Fontainebleau. – The bad weather made it difficult for people to go hunting. – The king led the exiled royals [James II & Mary of Modena] of England to the tennis court, where the great players played (1).
(1) “The weather was so bad in the afternoon that we could not go chasing the deer. So we only went to the game of jeu de paume, where a game between the Jourdain brothers and le Page, Clerget [sic] and Cerveaux against them, gave a lot of pleasure.” (Mercure of October, p. 297)
Eagle-eyed lovers of tennis might have noticed that the account suggests that the exhibition match might have been three-a-side, or possibly three-against-two. Accounts from the 17th and 18th century, such as they are, suggest that such matches were quite common at that time – possibly even the norm for exhibition matches.
What Do We Know About The Initial Tennis Champion, Clergé The Younger?
The first thing to say is that there must have been an elder and younger Clergé, despite some histories suggesting that the Clergé referred to by Dangeau in 1687 and the Clergé referred to by Manévieux as being pre-eminent for some years from c1740 might have been one and the same person.
Even those of us who marvelled at the skills displayed at Lord’s, until recently, by nonagenarians Robin Simpson and the late Major Jan Barnes, would admit that the giddy heights of skill described by Manévieux are probably only at their peak for a decade or two or (at a push) three.
In The Annals Of Tennis, Julian Marshall suggests that Manévieux’s Clergé is…
possibly a son, or grandson, of a player of the same name, mentioned above [by Dangeau]
…while in Real Tennis Today and Yesterday, John Shneerson is more resolute:
probably the grandson of the Clergé who played in front of Louis XIV.
I agree. The tennis business tended to be a family business, in those days to an even greater extent than it is today. Assuming our c1740 champion Clergé was the grandson of the Louis XIV petitioning and performing Clergé, it is probable that the father was also “in the business”.
In truth, we know almost nothing about the early life of the younger Clergé.
David Best’s research into the Whitehall tennis courts finds our hero employed there in 1736. As Kathryn McNicoll points out in The First & The Foremost A Gallery Of Champions:
…it is possible that he [Clergé] taught [Frederick] the Prince of Wales to play the game
But it is Manévieux’s rapturous report in Traité sur la connoissance du royal jeu de paume et des principes qui sont relatifs aux différentes parties qu’on y joue that led to Clergé being lauded as the champion c1740. Let’s examine what M Manévieux had to say. These passages, pp 136-138, have been extracted and translated into English before, not least by Julian Marshall in 1878 – but here is my modern translation of them in full:
The Master Paumiers who acquired, over the past thirty or forty years, a certain strong reputation, were Messrs Clergé, Farolais (the father), La Fosse, Barcelon (the father) & Barneon. Mr Clergé was the most extolled by the strength of his first stroke, which he executed perfectly. He was the man who played the doubles game best, taking only the shots he had to, according to the rules, bolstering & warning his second, strong or weak, to take the ball. Very different from other players, who tend to make their second useless, by hogging the whole game.
When Clergé had taken the serve [hazard end], he advanced to the last [winning] gallery, appearing to defend the galleries with volleys from boasts, cross-court forces and shots off the tambour, warning his second to play the others. On the service side, he would take his place in the line of four tiles [around chase one-and-two] near the [dedans] post, where he volleyed forehand or backhand the forces or boasts off the main wall. He preferred to allow the ball to land a chase than to move from this position & let his second play all the other shots.
Nobody, in a word, was nor will be held in higher regard, not only for the strength of his game, but also for the strength of his character – Mr Clergé was a totally honest paumier. There was no deceit to his game nor did he succumb to the commercial interests that sooner or later tend to prejudice the professional player; he never played for money.
It really does sound as though he was a great bloke, Clergé, as well as a great player.
We think we know just a little more about his later life.
In 1751, René Clergé received a Paumier-Raquettier supernumerary patent, as evidenced in the French National Archives.
In 1767, the same René Clergé received a patent of Paumier Raquettier du roi … following the death of Monsieur Liebault.
Between those two notable/notarised events, we find our hero assisting Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé in putting the finishing touches on his jeu de paume court at Chantilly, in 1756/1757.
Modern travellers can stay at the Auberge Du Jeu De Paume in Chantilly, where the former tennis court is now an exhibition and events hall.
There is more detail in the article Chantilly et ses princes : des Lumières à la Révolution by Stéphane Pannekoucke, including a full name for our hero:
Henri-René Clergé du Gillon
It was Clergé who put the finishing touches on that Chantilly jeu de paume and who also acted as paumier to Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé for some while after that:
It is to Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, master paumier, that
we entrust the regulatory finish of the room, to
namely “the black painting of the Jeu de Paume three separate times”. Finally, we equip the room with nets and we
buy different “utensils” needed for the game for nearly 1,500 pounds.
By that time, Guillaume Barcellon had been appointed paumier to King Louis XV, in 1753. Modern historians suggest that Clergé’s supremacy as a player had probably waned by then and that Barcellon was the champion player for a dozen or so years.
We also know, based on an undated mention in Manévieux, that Antoine-Henri Masson at one time (probably after 1765, once his supremacy had been established) challenged and defeated Clergé and Charrier, having given them half-fifteen in handicap.
Thierry Bernard-Tambour in his paper Les maîtres paumiers du roi au XVIIIe siècle, explains that, once Louis XVI comes to the throne, more detail is kept in the royal accounts, which informs us that the following paumiers were on the royal books in 1775:
La Taille et La Taille the younger, Bunelle, Clergé, Farolet,
Masson, Charrier and Barcellon
But, when Manévieux lists paumiers and their courts at the end of his 1783 treatise, the name Clergé is absent. Possibly he had retired, possibly he had died between 1775 and 1783.
There might now be enough evidence gathered in one place (I’m pretty sure this article is more comprehensive than anything previously published about Clergé) to enable a keen historian to dig deeper and uncover more.
Picture This: Henri-René Clergé du Gillon, aka “Clergé The Younger”
I mentioned earlier that it seems such a shame that we have no portrait of the first champion of tennis, the first sport to establish a continuous world championship.
We have images of Barcellon and Masson, who followed soon after Clergé The Younger, but none of our hero. Perhaps he eschewed pictorial publicity as well as pay for play.
So I decided to commission a fine artist – the only amateur fine artist I had to hand at that moment – to create an artist’s impression of what Clergé The Younger might have looked like.
There you have it – Clergé The Younger – he looks and sounds like such a fine chap.
Acknowledgements
With grateful thanks to the many encouraging and helpful people whose comments and ideas have shaped and are shaping my scribblings on tennis history. In particular thanks to Thierry Bernard-Tambour for additions and corrections (currently in process).
