the marquis de Conflans and the prince de Guemenee who fancied themselves obliged, in their character of Anglomaniacs, to patronize the race-course; but the public of that time, to whom this imitation of English manners was not only an absurdity, but almost a treason against the state, gave but a cold reception to the attempted innovation.  Racing, too, from its very nature, found itself in direct conflict with all the traditions of the ancient school of equitation, and it encountered from the beginning the severe censure and opposition of horsemen accustomed to the measured paces of the manege, whose highest art consisted in consuming a whole hour in achieving at a gallop the length of the terrace of St. Germain.  The professors of this equestrian minuet, as solemn and formal in the saddle as was the dancer Dupre in the ballets of the period, predicted the speedy decay of the old system of horsemanship and the extinction of the native breed of horses if France should allow her soil to be invaded by foreign thoroughbreds with their English jockeys and trainers.  The first French sportsmen—­to use the word in its limited sense—­thus found themselves not only unsupported by public opinion, but alone in the midst of an actively-hostile community, and no one can say how the unequal contest might have ended had not the graver events of the Revolution intervened to put an end, for a time at least, not only to the luxurious pleasures, but to all the hopes and ambitions, of the noble class of idlers.

The wars with England that followed retarded for a quarter of a century the introduction of racing into France.  The first ministerial ordinance in which the words pur sang occur is that of the 3d of March, 1833, signed by Louis Philippe and countersigned by Adolphe Thiers, establishing a register of the thoroughbreds existing in France—­in other words, a national stud-book, by which name it is universally known.  The following year witnessed the foundation of the celebrated Society for the Encouragement of the Improvement of Breeds of French Horses, more easily recognized under the familiar title of the “Jockey Club.”  The first report of this society exposed the deplorable condition of all the races of horses in the country, exhausted as they had been by the frightful draughts made upon them in the imperial wars, and concluded by urging the necessity of the creation of a pure native stock, of which the best individuals, to be selected by trial of their qualities of speed and endurance upon the track, should be devoted to reproduction.  This was the doctrine which had been practically applied in England, and which had there produced in less than a century the most important and valuable results.  France had but to follow the example of her neighbor, and, borrowing from the English stock of thoroughbreds, to establish a regular system of races as the means of developing and improving the breed of horses upon her own soil.