Gustaf V Secures Romain Membership at the Tennis Club

Gustaf V Secures Romain Membership at the Tennis Club recounts how Romain Gary’s mother confronted the Parc Impérial over its refusal to admit her son, and how Gustav V intervened after watching him attempt to play. The episode begins in financial exclusion and ends with the King offering to pay the subscription; between those moments, Romain’s near-total inexperience becomes a public spectacle. The help secured his admission, but not a future on the club’s courts: he never went back.

The barrier of money

Romain had been given a tennis racquet by the parents of a friend and wanted to try the game. Membership at the Parc Impérial, however, required a fee far beyond the family’s means. For his mother, this was not an ordinary disappointment to be accepted quietly. She saw the financial barrier as an insult to her son’s prospects and to the country he might one day represent.

She stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer, took her cloak and cane, and ordered Romain to bring his racquet and follow her at once to the club. The secretary was summoned; the president, whose name was Garibaldi, soon appeared as well. Her protest made the mismatch between Romain’s supposed destiny and his actual circumstances impossible to ignore: she imagined him becoming a French tennis champion, while the club’s subscription kept him from even practising there. Romain, the narrator recalls, had not held a tennis racquet more than three or four times.

An appeal before the King

The president tried to quiet the scene by pointing out that Gustav V was nearby and that his mother should lower her voice. The mention of the King changed her manner. She approached him with a deep curtsy, pointed her stick toward the club officials, and asked him for justice and protection. She presented Romain as a boy of nearly fourteen with an extraordinary gift for lawn tennis, and explained that the family could not pay because the Bolsheviks had seized their fortune.

The appeal turned the club dispute into a small performance of supplication and accusation, staged before the King and an interested audience. In the narrator’s retrospective description, it belongs to the tradition of popular Russian legends. Romain, meanwhile, could only imagine escaping the scene altogether. He remained under the gaze of the assembled guests, acutely aware that his mother’s confident claims about his talent had placed him in a position he could not fulfil.

Gustav V did not respond with surprise or rebuke. He removed the cigar from his lips, looked solemnly at Romain’s mother, glanced casually at the boy, and asked his coach to hit a few balls with him so that they could see how he played. The request turned the appeal into a test. Romain’s mother was undisturbed by his lack of experience: she believed in him, and her confidence became the reason he could not simply refuse to go onto the court.

The demonstration

Romain went forward despite his shame and fear. His decision was shaped not only by the King’s attention but by a previous lesson from Warsaw: he remembered being slapped by his mother and her warning that next time she expected him to be brought home on a stretcher. For her sake, he felt he had to accept the possibility of looking ridiculous as readily as the possibility of acting heroically.

The demonstration was brief and disastrous. Romain jumped, dived, ran, fell, and sprang back up, moving, in his own comic recollection, like a disjointed marionette. He touched the ball only once, and then only with the wooden frame of his racquet. The failure could hardly have been more visible: he had been introduced as a remarkable prospect and could scarcely make contact with the ball, while Gustav V watched beneath his straw hat.

Romain also recalls that, even at fourteen, he still half-believed in fairy-tale intervention. Perhaps some just and indulgent power would guide his racquet, or the balls themselves would rescue him. No miracle came. The gap between his mother’s faith and his performance supplies the scene’s comedy, but the joke falls chiefly on the boy who has been made to stand before an audience and prove a gift he does not possess.

The King’s decision and the aftermath

When the coach finally took pity on him, Romain returned to the lawn. His mother received him as if he had not disgraced himself: she helped him put on his pullover and wiped his face and neck with her handkerchief. Then she faced the audience in silence, her tightly pressed lips carrying only the trace of a smile. The onlookers, who had watched the boy fail, lowered their eyes and turned their attention to their lemonade. Her protective presence made clear that his humiliation had not diminished her loyalty to him.

Gustav V ended the standoff with a courteous judgment. He said that the guests had witnessed something admirable, then told the club president that he would pay the young man’s subscription because Romain had shown courage and determination. The reason he gave was not tennis ability. The boy had failed as a player, but had endured the demonstration rather than abandon his mother’s appeal; the King’s offer recognized that effort and brought the immediate confrontation to a close.

Romain later writes that he loved Sweden from then on, an enduring response to the King’s intervention. Yet gratitude did not bring him back to the Parc Impérial: he never again set foot there. The ending holds together the scene’s opposed outcomes. His mother’s campaign won the subscription, and the King spared the family a still worse confrontation, but the successful appeal could not undo the exposure and shame of the court. In Romain’s recollection, the incident becomes a compact portrait of maternal faith, poverty, comic failure, and kindness arriving from an unexpected quarter.