“SPARTA” SECRETS

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 27 September 1933, Page 6

“SPARTA” SECRETS

EXCLUSIVE! FRENCH NUDISTS

ARISTOCRATS AT .TAN

I have just spent the most extraordinary week-end of m.v life staying at an old sixteenth-century manor house as a member of “Sparta,” the most exclusive nudist club in the world, wrote the Paris correspondent of the “Daily Express” recently. Jan is the name of the old stone manor house. It is .near the cathedral city of Mantes, only fifty miles from Paris, but when I entered the gates of the manor grounds I passed into another world. A score of fashionable motor-cars parked in the courtyard were the last links with Paris; the rest was strange. Membership of “Sparta” is confined to members of the French aristocracy, the services, .and the professions.

MIXED DORMITORY. Practically all the members are young. Under the orchard trees, now fragrant with the blossoms of spring, I saw dozens of beautiful women and handsome sunburned men wandering about completely naked, and not a bit ashamed. I slept in a mixed dormitory at Jan. Men and women slept in the same room like children. Nobody minded, nobody was shocked. To ail Englishman the complete lack of clothing was at first embarrassing. Obedient to the injunctions of “Sparta” I took my clothes off in a stone dressing room which lmd once been a mill. Shyness, amusement, curiosity, were some of my first reactions on stepping out into the sunshine under the trees. AWAY FROM THE. WORLD. These feelings gave way to a sense of freedom and pleasure, of relaxation, of restfulness. The noise and strain of Paris, the uncertainty and confusion of life in that most sophisticated of cities, died army. I seemed distant from the world. Old-fashioned chimes called the mem-; hers of the club to lunch, and I wassurprised to observe that the young; men and women put on their clothes. Nudeness in the open air is natural hr France; indoors it is considered out of, place. The French do not. like to appear at table undressed. After lunch, however, they took off their clothes again, and played a kind of deck tennis with a medicine ball, with a dozen men and women a side.