A crash course in Pétanque

Me, Claude, and Jacques

It was a late summer day in Paris, and the streets were caressed with an unusually Mediterranean warmth. Me and my friend Maithra, whom I had just met a few days earlier at my hostel, and who hales from Bangalore, had headed out to see the Louvre museum. Unfortunately, we soon discovered, the Louvre was closed on Tuesdays.

So we went to the crepe stand and got some inexpensive (and quite tasty) lunch, and walked to the Seine, where we sat down, soaked up the sun, and enjoyed the light breeze from the water. We walked to l'iglese des invalides, and wandered inside for a gander. Housed in the same building, on the other side, was the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. As we walked into the door, we glimpsed the tomb of Monsieur Bonaparte from a distance just before a man approached us and asked for our ticket. Having seen the tomb already, we turned and left.

We walked a few minutes to a park across from l'iglese des invalides. Here we saw two sixty-something men playing a game which involved several small metal balls. I remembered reading something about this game in the French class I had taken recently but didn't remember what it was called. But it looked like fun. "Should we ask them if we can play with them?" we asked asked each other.

“Nous pouvons jouer avec vous?” we asked tentatively. Actually, my Bangalorean friend asked and I told her what to say, because I feared that these Frenchmen would laugh at us with disdain, or perhaps cast their metal balls in my direction, in response to the request. “Yes,” responded on of them, in English. He introduced himself as Claude. The other man was Jacques, his brother.

The game was called Pétanque explained Claude, who seemed to have a somewhat better grasp of English than his brother. "Pétanque comes from the Provencal language." He proceeded to explain the rules of the game. Jacques' English was about as good as my French, which made for some interesting conversation. Soon the game was afoot. The score was surprisingly close as the game came to a close (I think they were going easy on us), and I wondered to myself “could we emerge victorious against these veteran Frenchman in this, our first game of Petanque?” Alas, the answer was “non,” as they pulled it out, and then invited us to play a second game with them.

Jacques told me he was sixty seven years old. He asked me where I was from in the US, and I said Ohio. “I like California music,” he said. I asked him what music he liked, specifically, and he responded “Beach Boys, Bob Dylan.” He said there was a radio station in Paris that plays “California music” every Saturday for one hour from 11 am to 12 pm. I asked him if he listened to it. “Every week.” He told us a little about his family, and the ages of the various members. “My sister is seventeen,” he said. “Seventy,” corrected Claude, with a laugh.

And so the second game concluded with a more lopsided defeat for our team than the first. Claude and Jacques bid us a warm farewell, and we headed back toward the hostel. “It's a good thing we asked those guys if we could play,” I said to Maithra. “We didn't ask them, I asked them,” she said, grinning.