Since prehistoric times, man has amused himself by hurling small spherical objects, or boules, at some kind of target. It was a popular pastime with the Egyptians around 3500 B.C. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, used to recommend it as an exercise to develop strength and mobility, and the Greeks enjoyed it so much that they left to posterity a bronze statuette of a player dating from the fifth century B.C. This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the young gentleman is stark naked, a sight very rarely seen on a modern boules court. Second, he is holding his boule in his left hand, which is unusual in a world that is predominantly right-handed. And third, he is standing in precisely the same way that a player would stand today in the throwing circle as he prepares to make his throw. His arm is bent, his boule is held at waist height, his eye is fixed on the target.
For centuries, boules was a game that required players to be reasonably athletic. The court was long, the boules were heavy, and you needed to take a run to generate the momentum necessary for the required long throw. It wasn’t until early in the twentieth century that this changed, and we even have a fairly precise date. It was June 1910, in La Ciotat (incidentally, the birthplace in 1895 of motion pictures), a town on the coast between Marseille and Toulon. The regular afternoon game of boules was in progress, watched as usual by an audience of wistful old enthusiasts who no longer had the agility or strength to play the long game. None was more wistful than Jules Lenoir, once nimble, but now afflicted with chronic rheumatism, who longed to play again; and it was his great friend Ernest Pitiot who invented a way for him to do that.
“We will play a shorter game,” said Pitiot, “but instead of running to make the throw, we’ll play with les pieds tanqués, feet together and planted on the ground.” And that was the birth of pétanque.
The beauty of the game is that it can be played by practically anyone, practically anywhere there is a more or less level piece of land. The preferred surface is hard-packed, sandy earth, smooth enough to allow the boule to run, but uneven enough to cause some interesting deviations from the straight line. Reading a boules court is not unlike reading a tricky green on a golf course.
The target is a small wooden ball—variously known as the but, the pitchoune, the ministre, the cochonnet, or the gendarme—and the winners are those who end up with more boules closer to the but than the opposition. Each individual victory scores one point, and the first team to reach thirteen points wins.
This may seem like a straightforward, placid diversion, a gentle to-and-fro devoid of drama. In fact, it’s nothing of the kind. It can be every bit as vicious as croquet. An expert, or even a lucky beginner, can scatter an opponent’s group of boules with a well-aimed bomb, a direct hit from above. This is a willful act of savagery that causes outrage and a desire for instant revenge. There is also the delicate and contentious matter of measuring the distance between two competing boules and the but in a closely fought game. Unbiased judgment is available in the form of the boulomètre à tirette, a folding measure calibrated in millimeters, which is useful and is sometimes accepted as the final word. But sometimes not.
Usually, the distance in contention is no more than the width of a whisker, and so it is crucial that the measurement be taken correctly. But what is seen as correct by the winner is not always seen the same way by the loser, and it is then that the Provençal fondness for heated debate takes over. Voices are raised, fingers are wagged, accusations of partial blindness fly back and forth, and the peace of a summer’s evening is shattered. To the spectator, it seems as though physical violence is imminent. At the very least, it looks unlikely that the two sides of the dispute will ever speak to one another again. And yet, five minutes later, there they are, playing as though harsh words had never been uttered.
Pétanque can be enjoyed by two teams of complete novices, and it is one of the very few athletic events that permit players to pause for the occasional restorative glass while playing. This makes for an extremely convivial game, and in Provence it is almost always played under halcyon conditions. The air is warm and still, the cigales are in full chirp, and the other sound effects—the soft thud of a boule landing, the clack of one boule against another—are pleasantly hypnotic. All is serene. Until the next argument.