Balls of Steel

     It's impossible to describe the game of petanque without conjuring up images of Napoleonic warfare crossed with a British country club.
For starters, there are the balls. None of your lightweight, plastic, neon-coloured holiday rubbish here. Non messieurs, these are bullet-smooth mortar rounds of the sort the l'Emperor's artillery used to pound the foe into submission (see, there go the military metaphors). Mind you if the combatants I had the pleasure of watching last weekend had been in the little general's forces, wars would have been a lot shorter. They could have landed a shot right on the end of booted big toe, albeit from 12 foot out.
     The other point is the regimented pomp and etiquette of the game. The starting arc is marked out by a regal sweep of the foot. Humps and dimples in the gravel or sand are smoothed out like a batsman tamping down the square after receiving his first bouncer of the day. Each shot is applauded and even the most vicious cannonade is greeted with a chorus of the French equivalent of "Good shot, old bean!"
But what shots!
     On Sunday I had decided to cut across the 5th on my way from the Jardin du Plants to a pub near the Panthéon to watch El Classico between Real Madrid and Barcelona. On my little map I spotted a point of interest known as L'Arênes de Lutece. Lueticia was the Roman name for Paris and here, right at the heart of the city, was a little amphitheatre re-created on the grounds where the original had once stood. Only now, where there were once gladiators there were now les petanqueurs.
     It was clear that I had arrived at the end of a game (played to 13) as there were tense looks on the faces of the scattered audience around. The pairs were easily recognisable too. Pair One consisted of a character I named 'the Corsican' as he was dark and swarthy, with jet black hair and a glare hardened during nights of hunting in the Maquis. In between lanes he fired off practice boules one after the other sending them scittering away with unerring accuracy. His partner was "Cappy" - on account of his blue baseball cap - who didn't walk so much as stride between ends.
     The second partnership was an odd one at first sight. 'Guillaume le Kid' was shaven headed and a good 20 years younger than his playing companions, not that his laser-sighted arm exhibited any sign of inexperience. Finally 'L'homme du main plastique' had obviously injured his non-playing hand and had wrapped it in a protective plastic bag to ward off infection. It could have been a superpower-wielding prosthetic for all that I saw.

All I could see was that battle had been well and truly joined and it seemed that pair 2 had the upper hand. What turned out to be the final end went something like this:

- Le Kid fires off the cochonet and launches a boule to within an inch of it.
- Cappy canons Le Kid's boule away with a fire-cracker but cannot get his shot closer.
- The Corsican moves in to aid his colleague and they have the advantage.
- Plastique and Cappy exchange pin-point shots until the strider has his ball closest, within two feet and Le Kid has one boule left.
- Not content with moving an opponent's boule, Guillaume takes aim at the tiny, green, wooden jack and from all of 8ft away lightly flips it between his and the grinning Plastique's last shot, giving him and his partner a two-shot win and the match.

Cue applause, quite a few "beh oui!"s and much gallic back slapping as the ground is cleared away for the next time.
The Circus Maximus it may not have been, but from this particular spectator: Ave gentilhommes! Ave!