would
perceive at once that racing has no hold upon the popular heart, and
that, so far as it is an amusement at all apart from the gambling
spirit evoked, it is merely the hobby and pastime of a certain number
of idle gentlemen. As to the great mass of spectators, who are not
interested in the betting, they go to Longchamps as they would go to
any place where uniforms and pretty toilettes and fine carriages are to
be seen; for the Parisian, as one of them has well said, "never misses
a review, and he goes to the races, although he understands nothing
about them: the horses scarcely interest him at all. But there he is
because he must do as 'all Paris' does: he even tries to master a few
words of the barbarous jargon which it is considered _bon-ton_ to speak
at these places, for it seems that the French language, so rich, so
flexible, so accurate, is insufficient to express the relations and
affinities between man and the horse."

The _enceinte du pesage_, often called in vulgar English "the
betting-ring," or the enclosure mentioned above to which holders of
twenty-franc tickets are admitted, at Longchamps is scrupulously
guarded by the stewards of the Jockey Club from the invasion of the
_demi-monde_--a term that I employ in the sense in which it is
understood to-day, and not in that which it bore twenty years ago. A
woman of this demi-monde, which the younger Dumas has defined as that
"community of married women of whom one never sees the husbands," may
enter the paddock if she appears upon the arm of a gentleman, but the
really objectionable element is obliged to confine itself to the
five-franc stands or to wander over the public lawns. Some of the
fashionable actresses of the day and the best-known _belles-petites_
may be seen sunning themselves in their victorias or their
"eight-springs" by the side of the track in front of the stands, but
this is not from any interest that they feel in the performances of Zut
or of Rayon d'Or, but simply because to make the "return from the
races" it is necessary to have been to them, and every woman of any
pretension to fashion, no matter what "world" she may belong to, must
be seen in the gay procession that wends its way through the splendid
avenue on the return from Longchamps.

The great day at Longchamps, that crowns the Parisian season like the
"bouquet" at the end of a long series of fire-works, is the
international fete of the Grand Prix de Paris, run for the first ti