Like many city folk in seventeenth-century France, Jean Gascard rented a small apartment—in his case, a two-room, 600-square-foot abode. He ate a lot of salted fish. He signed paperwork with an X, as he did not know how to write. Yet archaeologists have become intensely interested in how Gascard lived. From at least 1631 to 1637, he served as the first maître paumier, or tennis master, in residence at the Palace of Versailles. King Louis XIII (reigned 1610–1643) was a die-hard devotee of the game who had personally overseen the design of his court, revising the royal architect’s original plans to factor in how sunlight and wind might affect his play. The tennis-mad king ruled a tennis-crazed land. The people of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France couldn’t get enough of jeu de paume, or “game of the palm,” the precursor to the modern sport. There were at least 250 courts in Paris alone in the late sixteenth century—“two tennis courts for every one church,” English traveler Sir Robert Dallington estimated during his 1598 visit. “Ye would think they were born with rackets in their hands,” he marveled upon witnessing the elegant strokes of women, men, and children around the country. “Jeu de paume was as popular in the sixteenth century as football is today,” says archaeologist Jean-Yves Dufour of the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research.
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