Philidor and the Café de la Régence Chess Masters

§ 1. The Second Career of François-André Danican Philidor (1726–1795) as a Chess Player

Several others among the philosophes, those eighteenth-century intellectuals who led the movement known as the Enlightenment, also entertained themselves there. Montesquieu perhaps, Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin very likely, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau most definitely paid regular visits during one period or another in their lives. Spectators assembled there in crowds after Rousseau became famous and the police had to station guards at the door to control them. For their part, the philosophes did not go to the Café de la Régence only to watch or to converse; they went to play chess.^[3]

The “royal game” had been accepted for hundreds of years at face value, as just a game, an amusement, a diversion. The few who ascribed a deeper significance to it considered it a symbolic representation of war, an activity generally associated with the aristocracy, and the game itself was also generally thought to belong to the aristocracy. In the eighteenth century, however, intellectuals took an increasing interest in chess, so that by the end of the century it had become as much or even more their game than the nobility’s. The philosophes, who had a collective reputation for questioning everything, began to wonder whether there might be something in the game other than mere amusement or symbolic war.

Diderot appears to have been undecided on the matter, to judge from Le Neveu de Rameau. The Encyclopédie (1751–80), the great literary monument of the Enlightenment edited by Diderot and his friend d’Alembert, expresses the same uncertainty in its article “Échecs” (Chess). The author of the article, the chevalier de Jaucourt, concedes that some people,

struck by the fact that chance has no part in this game, and that skill alone brings victory, have regarded good chess players as endowed with superior minds; but if this reasoning is correct, how is it that one sees so many mediocre thinkers, indeed even a few near-imbeciles, excel at the game, while geniuses of all sorts have not been able to reach the level of a mediocre player?

Nevertheless, both Jaucourt and his editors must have felt that the game had some significance beyond its obvious entertainment value, otherwise why devote an article to it at all, and why admire people who excel at it, such as Philidor?

We have had at Paris a young man aged eighteen, who used to play two games of chess at once without looking at the boards, beating two players of better than average ability, to each of whom he could only give odds of a knight when playing with sight of the board, although he himself was a player of the first rank. To this feat may be added something that we witnessed with our own eyes: In the middle of one of these matches, an illegal move was deliberately made; after a rather large number of subsequent moves, he recognized the error and had the piece put back where it belonged. This young man is a M. Philidor; he is the son of a musician of some renown; he is himself a great musician, and perhaps the best player of Polish checkers there ever was or ever will be. This is one of the most extraordinary examples of the power of memory and imagination.^[4]

The German philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, another representative of the Enlightenment, unhesitatingly recommended chess: “I strongly approve the study of games of reason, not for their own sake, but because they help to perfect the art of thinking.” ^[5] Thus, unlike Jaucourt, Leibniz did expect good chess players to be good thinkers. Philidor, perhaps misunderstanding him, wrote in the preface to his chess treatise: “I believe I have improved the theory of a game that many famous authors, such as Leibniz, consider a science.” ^[6]

Others believed that chess could teach morality. In a letter, Diderot drew attention to the chess master Légal’s maxim that when a misplay occurs, the rectification “in doubtful cases should always be against the player who might have been in bad faith.” Diderot did not credit the game as much as the player, however: “What is so frivolous that it cannot inspire a few serious reflections?” ^[7] While living in Paris, the didactic autodidact Benjamin Franklin composed a short essay entitled “The Morals of Chess” (1779). He asserted therein that playing chess was “not merely an idle amusement” but a constructive activity that fostered the virtues of foresight, circumspection, caution, and perseverance.^[8]

The Danican family acquired the name Philidor when François-André’s great-grandfather or great-uncle moved to Paris in the early seventeenth century and joined the orchestra of the French court, replacing a distinguished Italian oboist named Filidori. King Louis XIII, after hearing his new oboist play, is supposed to have remarked in delight: “I have found a second Filidori.” The Danicans adopted the royal compliment as a sort of title and subsequently supplied many musicians to the kings of France. François-André grew up in the ambience of the royal chapel, where he served as a page de la musique, studying music and singing in the choir. At the age of eleven he composed a motet that was performed in the cha-pel before Louis XV, who rewarded and encouraged him. The precocious composer wrote several more motets before he turned fourteen, when he retired from his official post. At that point he became self-employed, copying music and giving private lessons. He continued to produce motets and to have them performed at Versailles.^[11]

Meanwhile, Philidor had discovered chess. His eldest son, who started to write his biography but did not get very far, passed along this anecdote:

At the age of six, he was allowed to join the children of Louis XV’s chapel. The musicians, while waiting for the king to arrive for [daily] mass, customarily played chess on a long table that was inlaid with six checkerboards. Philidor used to entertain himself by watching the games, to which he gave his entire attention. He had scarcely turned ten when one day an old musician, having arrived before any of the other players, complained to him of their lateness and expressed annoyance at not being able to begin a game. Hesitantly, Philidor offered to play; the musician responded first by laughing and then by accepting. When the game began the musician’s disdain for his young opponent soon gave way to astonishment. The game progressed, and it was not long before irritation appeared, quickly swelling to such proportions that the child, fearing the consequences of wounded pride, began to watch the door. He pursued his successful course of play, edged imperceptibly toward the end of the bench, and fled suddenly after advancing the winning piece and crying “Checkmate!” The old musician was left to curse his leaden legs and swallow his rage.

According to Philidor’s son, he rapidly surpassed all the other musicians. After he left the royal chapel in 1740, he began to frequent the Café de la Régence. At the time, according to Philidor himself, chess enthusiasts played in many of the cafés of Paris. But M. de Kermur, sire de Légal, held court at the Régence.^[12]

Born around the turn of the eighteenth century in Brittany, Légal was the founder of the Café de la Régence dynasty. As we have seen, the narrator of Le Neveu de Rameau refers to him as “a wit and a great chess player”; the character “Rameau’s nephew” calls him, somewhat indirectly, a chess genius. For countless years he sat in the same chair and wore the same green coat, taking large quantities of snuff and attracting a crowd with his equally brilliant conversation and combinations. He had already established his reputation as the best in France when Philidor first walked into the Régence in 1740, and he continued playing into the 1780s, his own eighties, without ever having to acknowledge a superior, although he lost at least one match. Philidor persisted as Légal’s chess student for three years, during the course of which he increasingly neglected and finally lost his own music students. But by the end of this period he could hold his own against his master without having to accept odds. He also learned about blindfold play from Légal, who, however, apparently did not attempt it more than once or twice himself.^[13] As the Encyclopédie attests, Philidor could soon play two blindfold games simultaneously.

Philidor traveled to the Netherlands in 1745 with the father of a child-prodigy harpsichordist in preparation for a series of concerts to be given there. The harpsichordist died suddenly, however, obviously putting an end to the whole project. But Philidor stayed on in the Netherlands anyway, playing chess and Polish checkers for stakes and giving chess lessons for a fee. Not only the Dutch supported him in this way; so too did some English army officers—noblemen, of course—who were on the Continent to play out the intricate endgame of the War of the Austrian Succession. It was undoubtedly the latter’s encouragement that prompted Philidor to go to England in 1747.^[14]

In London, Philidor boosted his international reputation by winning two important matches. He defeated Sir Abraham Janssen, the top-rated English player, three games to one, and Philippe Stamma, a native of Syria and author of a well-known chess treatise published a decade earlier, eight games to one, with one draw. In 1748, Philidor returned to the Netherlands, where he composed his own chess treatise, Analyse du jeu des échecs (Analysis of the Game of Chess), and then in 1749 went back to London, where he published it. Again he bested Stamma, this time in the bookstalls. The number of copies of the Analyse that sold over the course of the next two centuries cannot even be estimated. All told, it has appeared in at least one hundred editions, in at least ten languages. And it sold well immediately, probably in large part because of its novel attempt to build a bridge between general principles of good play and the bare record of moves made in model games. Like previous writers on chess, Philidor provided both abstract theory and records of games, but unlike them he also annotated the records at key points in the games, telling his readers which possible moves at those junctures he judged good and which bad, and on the basis of what principles. In another break with tradition his book emphasized good use of one’s pawns, pieces relatively neglected in the royal game until then. In a revolutionary maxim Philidor wrote that pawns “are the soul of chess.” ^[15]

After perhaps two years’ residence in England, Philidor left to visit Germany, at that time an irregular checkerboard of more than a hundred independent principalities. Frederick the Great of Prussia welcomed him to Potsdam and observed some of his games, but the martial king, although a chess player, did not himself venture into the field against such a formidable adversary. It was there in 1751 that Philidor’s first-known three-game simultaneous blindfold exhibition took place. The mathematician Leonhard Euler, in nearby Berlin, unfortunately missed the entire visit, although he mentioned it in a letter, calling Philidor a great chess player and thereby giving posterity some idea of the latter’s international fame. Besides Frederick, at least two other German princes castled Philidor before he returned to England.^[16]

He remained in England until 1754, when he at last went home to Paris, which, to the best of our knowledge, he had not seen in nine years. Although Philidor played a lot of chess during this long vagabondage, he did not entirely neglect music. We recall that he had set out from Paris to assist with a musical tour that ended before it started. The fact that he never played an instrument and that he apparently ceased singing after he left the royal chapel raises the question of what his role in the tour was supposed to have been. He may have been asked to do some arranging. Whatever the original plan, nothing indicates that he had anything to do with music while in the Netherlands. In Prussia, he was reported to have taken some lessons in counterpoint and studied the works of German composers. In England, he did some composition of his own. His son said that he managed to have one of his pieces performed in London in 1753, and that “the famous Handel gave it a benevolent welcome and found its choruses well-constructed.” ^[17] That same year he placed this curious notice in the 9 December issue of the London Public Advertiser:

Mr. Philidor begs leave to acquaint the public, that in order to justify himself of the calumny spread about town, that he was not the author of the Latin Music he gave last year, as likewise to convince the world that the Art of Music has been at all times his constant study and application, and Chess only his diversion, he has undertaken to set an Ode to Music, in praise of harmony, wrote by the celebrated Mr. Congreve.^[18]

This public statement tells us not how Philidor actually lived but rather how he saw himself, or how he wanted to be seen, in his society. And it probably says as much about Western society in the mideighteenth century as it does about Philidor as an individual within that society. Scarcity of evidence prevents us from being able to make an independent assessment of the relative importance to Philidor of chess and music, in terms of, for example, hours spent or income derived, during his nine years as a knight errant. It is quite likely that Philidor supported himself, even comfortably, playing chess. It is also likely that chess occupied a good part of his waking day for large portions of that period. But whether or not it was in some objective sense his occupation, he did not consider it such. Some intellectuals might have gone beyond considering chess merely a diversion, to the point of considering it a useful or instructive diversion, but almost no one in the Western world could yet conceive of it as an occupation.

Philidor may also have earned money during those nine restless years by giving music lessons, copying music, or composing. But certainly chess more than music provided him with adventures, opened doors for him, and enabled him to see the world and learn about life, including musical life, outside of France; perhaps chess even supported further musical study and paid his bills while he composed. And if he thought of it only as a means to an end, he never suggested that he did not enjoy playing chess.

Chess players almost always staked money on their games in the eighteenth century. This was gambling, to be sure, but because chess engaged the intellect and reduced the role of chance to insignificance, it was a much more respectable form of gambling than most others. These two circumstances, money at risk and the absence of chance, made it a necessity for a stronger player to offer odds to a weaker player. In general, a player gave odds to his adversary by giving pieces, that is, by beginning the game with one or more of his own pieces removed from the board; by giving opening moves, that is, by allowing his adversary the first move and perhaps a free move preceding the first move; or by giving a combination of pieces and opening moves. The same scale of values of the pieces that is used today for the purpose of analysis had already been established in the eighteenth century for the purpose of giving odds. The scale runs, from the least valuable to the most valuable piece: pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, and king, the last of whose value, by the rules of the game, is absolute. The opening move was and is considered to be worth some fraction of a pawn. One pawn and the first move constituted the minimum that Légal, his reputation established, or Philidor, having caught up with his master, ever gave to other players.^[19]

This system may have developed in response to necessities within the eighteenth-century chess microcosm, but it also reflected the social macro-cosm of eighteenth-century France. French society, or at least its upper 10 percent of aristocrats, clergymen, large landowners, merchants, civil servants, and professionals, was acutely status-conscious. If a stronger player offered odds to a weaker player partly to draw him into a game, he also did it partly to maintain his own superior status. For the stronger player, it was considered more honorable to lose while giving odds than to win while playing without odds, which constituted an admission that the presumed inferior actually had the rank of an equal. Of course if the presumed superior player lost consistently while giving odds to the presumed inferior, eventually he had to give up his pretense, or at least his fortune. Or he could refuse to play his presumed inferior any longer when he saw a disturbing trend developing, and this does not appear to have been a particularly unusual course of action, or inaction, to take. Which may explain a 1787 reference to Légal and Philidor: “The last match these gentlemen played was in 1755 when the Scholar beat his Master.” ^[20] That is, the two best players in France, habitués of the same café, had not played each other for more than thirty years.

When Philidor, soon after returning to Paris from his nine years abroad, defeated his former teacher Légal in that last match of theirs, he became in all likelihood the best chess player in Europe. But during the next fifteen years he conducted a productive and successful career in music and we hear little about “his diversion.” Philidor stayed in Paris, wrote a long string of comic operas, and acquired a reputation as one of France’s leading composers. His success began with Le Diable à quatre (1756) and Les Pèlerins de la Mecque (1758), and peaked with Le Sorcier (1764), Tom Jones (1765, based on the novel by Henry Fielding), and Ernelinde (1767). Companies throughout Europe staged these operas.^[21] He also married a musician. Angélique-Henriette-Elisabeth Richer sang, occasionally as a concert soloist, and played keyboard instruments. Her three brothers were all musicians, and one of them, Louis-Augustin Richer, had attained contemporary celebrity as a singer and singing master. Often Philidor’s wife, and sometimes one or more of his brothers-in-law, rehearsed his compositions for him so he could hear how they sounded, since he himself neither played nor sang.^[22]

The beginning of this period in Philidor’s life coincided with one of the many civil wars of French cultural history. Its theater happened to be the opera, and since the invading forces championed an Italian form known as opera buffa, it was called the querelle des bouffons. Paris society cleaved into two camps, favoring either the French traditionalists or the Italianizing innovators. Led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophes generally sided with the latter.

Rousseau and Philidor were friends, at least for a short while. Philidor helped the philosophe with the music for his first opera, Les Muses galantes (1745). Rousseau reported that Jean-Philippe Rameau, the reigning monarch of French music and the uncle of “Rameau’s nephew,” said of the opera that “a part of what he had just heard was the product of a consummate artist, and the rest that of an ignoramus who knew nothing of music.” Rameau himself corroborated this report of his judgment. A biographer of Philidor, not surprisingly, concludes that Philidor’s contribution was the part singled out for praise by Rameau. Rousseau, in contrast, wrote that Philidor came twice to work on the opera, “but he could not commit himself to laboring diligently for a distant and uncertain profit. He did not return again and I finished the task myself.” Since the score of the opera has long since disappeared, the last word may have been had by the music historian who declined to judge between them, musing, “it would be interesting to know whose genius intermittently flashed.” ^[23]

In the querelle des bouffons, Rousseau won the biggest victories both on and off the stage. His second opera, Le Devin du village, composed with no help from Philidor, attracted legions of listeners and piled up four hundred performances between its début in 1752 and 1829. His pamphlet salvo of 1753, Lettre sur la musique française, provoked a huge outcry by targeting the “fictitious ‘style’” of the French: “To make up for the lack of song, they have multiplied accompaniments…[and] to disguise the insipidity of their work, they have increased the confusion. They believe they are making music; but they are only making noise.” ^[24] Contemporaries generally counted Philidor among the Italianizers, although in music he was not a theorist.^[25]

From a later perspective, Philidor’s music seems ambiguous with regard to the querelle des bouffons, especially if one accepts Rousseau’s drawing of the battle lines. Rousseau associated the Italianizers with melody, “pure song,” and freedom from both affectation and ornamentation, and the French traditionalists with harmony, “style,” and artful accompaniment. F.-J. Fétis, a highly influential nineteenth-century conductor, composer, teacher, critic, and historian of music, judged that “Philidor showed himself to be a much more skillful harmonist than the [other] French composers of his time, and despite what has been said, he did not lack melody.” ^[26]

Rousseau had previously tried his hand at chess and, as in music, sought Philidor’s assistance early. In a passage whose echoes we will hear repeatedly, Rousseau confesses:

I made the acquaintance of M. de Légal, of a M. Husson, of Philidor, of every great chess player of the time, and did not become, for all that, any more skillful. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that in the end I would become stronger than all of them, and that was enough for me to keep me playing. I always reasoned in the same way about every foolish thing that infatuated me. I said to myself: Whoever is the best at something is sure of being well known and sought out. Let me be the best then, at no matter what; I will be sought out, opportunities will present themselves to me, and my natural abilities will make me a success.^[27]

Diderot’s character “Rameau’s nephew” expresses a similar attitude toward chess and other activities:

Ah ha! There you are, monsieur philosophe. And what are you doing here among this crowd of good-for-nothings? Do you also waste your time pushing wood? (That’s how one scornfully refers to playing chess or checkers.)

No, but when I have nothing better to do, I entertain myself by watching those who push well.

In that case you are rarely entertained; leaving aside Légal and Philidor, the others don’t know what they’re doing.

And M. de Bissy?

He is to chess what Mlle Clairon is to acting: As players, they both know everything that one can learn.

You are difficult to please; I see you spare from criticism only sublime genius.

Yes, in chess, checkers, poetry, eloquence, music, and other nonsense of the sort. What good is mediocrity in those endeavors?^[28]

The relentless drive to become the best that Diderot ascribes to a younger “Rameau’s nephew” and that Rousseau ascribes to his own younger self stands in sharp contrast to the wit and irony that most of the philosophes brought to their activities. Another striking and related similarity between the two youths, and again contrasting with the philosophes, is their idea that chess is equivalent to other arts, in the sense that it is worthwhile to devote one’s life to it and that a great chess player is comparable to a great artist. It has been argued that Diderot’s character “Rameau’s nephew” is in large part a caricature of Rousseau. Diderot and Rousseau were in fact introduced to each other in the Café de la Régence; perhaps they became acquainted across a chessboard, and perhaps Diderot chose this scene of their meeting as the setting for a satire of the opinions of his former friend and current enemy. Other commentators have interpreted the character “Rameau’s nephew” as one side of Diderot’s own personality.^[29] In any case, if a few advanced thinkers such as Rousseau and “Rameau’s nephew” could consider making almost any activity at which one excelled a full-time occupation, Philidor still considered chess, though worth study, “only his diversion.”

Thus, for the last twenty years of his life, Philidor spent from mid-February to mid-June in London playing chess and—until the Reign of Terror—from mid-June to mid-February in Paris giving music lessons and composing. He had less and less success with his compositions. No new works of his seem to have been performed in public in the four years from 1775 through 1778. In the latter year he composed music for Horace’s choral hymn Carmen seculare, the original music for which had been lost in antiquity. He managed to have it staged three times in London in 1779, three times in Paris a year later, and several more times in Paris in subsequent years; it received high praise from critics in both cities.^[31] Through careful preparation, Philidor made the Paris premiere into a society event. He secured a hall in the Tuileries Palace; he chose a Wednesday, when no classes were held at the University of Paris; he sold tickets in advance; and he had a program printed up giving the text in both Latin and French. A contemporary chronicler reported before the concert:

M. Philidor is doing his best to excite the public, through his own efforts and those of his friends, to purchase tickets for the performance that he is putting on today; he has had one of his partisans write a letter, printed in the Journal de Paris, no. 17, in which the report of the prodigious success his Carmen sæculare had in the capital of England is reiterated; and he has gathered together the support of the three factions into which music lovers are divided.

The same chronicler reported after the concert that it had been attended by “a numerous and distinguished assembly,” who had listened to it “with sustained interest and often with outbursts of enthusiasm.” ^[32] Then passed another stretch of four years, 1781 through 1784, when again no new works of Philidor were performed. In the last decade of his life, he scored two more successes with a Te Deum (1786) and a comic opera, La Belle esclave (1787), but also several failures.^[33] There is no evidence of his playing chess in Paris during this period, although the French players founded a club of their own in 1783. It met in some rooms of the Palais-Royal, a palace being renovated by the enlightened duc de Chartres—called “Philippe Égalité” during the Revolution—quite near the Café de la Régence.^[34]

Philidor expanded his Analyse du jeu des échecs twice, doubling the original size of the book in 1777 and then redoubling it to two volumes in 1790, both times bringing out the new edition in London. The list of subscribers to the 1777 edition resembled the membership list of the London chess club in its social mix, although it contained French names as well as English. Among intellectuals, Diderot, Voltaire, Marmontel, and Gibbon subscribed for copies. The first expansion consisted mostly of endgame analyses. With these he took another long stride ahead of his predecessors. He specified whether the side with the material advantage would win or could only draw, if both sides played the best possible moves, for certain generalized advantages. For example, he said that a side having a rook and bishop left with its king, facing a side with only a rook and king, should win, whatever the placement of the pieces on the board, with the exception of a few extreme cases. He did this for many more kinds of advantage than his predecessors had done; he was usually correct; and for some of them, for example the rook and bishop against rook ending, he gave the definitive analysis. That is, he explained correctly how one can always checkmate with a rook and a bishop against a rook.^[35] Incidentally, the piece that the anglophone world calls a bishop is known in France as a fou (jester)—scant difference, from the point of view of the anticlerical philosophes. The 1790 edition contained both more opening and more endgame analyses, as well as the records of some of Philidor’s recent blindfold matches.

Philidor’s music distinguished itself above all by its technical perfection. Musicologists return to this point again and again. Composition classes at the Conservatoire de Musique used his works as models for many years. The fact that Rossini praised Philidor’s music to the latter’s granddaughter perhaps shows nothing but social grace, but the nature of the praise is significant: “All composers make mistakes, and I count myself first; Madame, none have ever been found in the works of your illustrious grandfather; he never made any.” ^[36] André Grétry, Philidor’s successor as the leading comic-opera composer in France, struck more of a balance in his eulogy of his predecessor:

To invent something entirely new in the arts is impossible; but to add some new beauties to those already known is sufficient to succeed and to merit the title of genius. Philidor is, I believe, the inventor of that kind of piece which uses several contrasting rhythms; I had never heard such things in the theaters of Italy before coming to France. How easily the vigorous intellect of this justly famous and sorely missed artist could grasp difficult combinations is well known. He would arrange a succession of sounds with the same facility that he followed a game of chess. None could vanquish him at this game of combinations; no musician will ever put more power and clarity into his compositions than Philidor put into his.^[37]

Did some common skill in fact connect Philidor’s achievement in chess with his achievement in music? Unfortunately, he himself left us no thoughts on so interesting a subject. A few other chess masters have also excelled at music: The mid-nineteenth-century Café de la Régence master Lionel Kieseritzky, a man of many talents, was an excellent amateur pianist, as was the Hungarian master Vincenz Grimm of the same era; Mark Taimanov, one of the top grand masters in the world in the early 1950s, was a concert pianist, and Vassily Smyslov, world champion in 1957–58, an opera singer.^[38] Some sort of correlation seems to exist, although certainly not every great chess player has also been a great musician. Likewise probable appears an association between a particular kind of skill in chess and a particular kind of skill in music, but this, too, remains nebulous.

Philidor gave simultaneous blindfold exhibitions during his annual sojourns in London probably beginning in 1782. As far as we know, he had not given such an exhibition since 1751 in Potsdam, and never before in front of a paying audience. These performances, sponsored by the chess club, undoubtedly had the purpose of contributing to Philidor’s earnings and of adding another incentive to induce him to continue making his regular visits. The club advertised the events in the London newspapers, inviting the public to attend. Thirty-three people came to one of them, in 1787, and forty-three to another, in 1790, not counting club members. Several of the exhibitions attracted reporters.

Yesterday, at the Chess-club in St. James’s-street, Mr. Philidor performed one of those wonderful exhibitions for which he is so much celebrated. He played at the same time three different games, without seeing either of the tables. His opponents were, Count Bruhl, Mr. Bowdler (the two best players in London), and Mr. Maseres. He defeated Count Bruhl in an hour and twenty minutes, and Mr. Maseres in two hours. Mr. Bowdler reduced his game to a drawn battle in an hour and three quarters. To those who understand Chess, this exertion of Mr. Philidor’s abilities, must appear one of the greatest of which the human memory is susceptible.

After his début in 1782, Philidor gave at least two performances in 1783, at least one in 1787, at least two in 1788, at least four in 1789, and at least fifteen in the 1790s. In some of these matches, he played three simultaneous blindfold games; in others, three simultaneous games, two blindfolded and one with sight of the board; in a few of them, only two simultaneous blindfold games. To infer from the frequency and dates of the known exhibitions, they probably began as exceptional events and gradually increased in regularity up to a rate of once every two weeks during his annual four-to-five-month stay in London.^[39]

Philidor approached these exhibitions almost as if they were athletic contests, putting himself through a sort of regimen in preparation for them. He invariably played at the same time of day and took care to eat only lightly before the event, reserving dinner until afterward. In fact, he regulated his diet for several days previously and refused to play on short notice.^[40]

Considering his annual visits to the London chess club, the revisions of his chess treatise, and his blindfold exhibitions, Philidor was putting a lot more energy into chess than he had at any period of his life since the three youthful years he spent studying with Légal. He also increased his personal investment in it. He gave no odds in England, from the 1770s onward, of less than a knight. This was for ordinary games; the odds were reduced for blindfold play. A later Café de la Régence master observed: “He showed just as much superiority at checkers, but he did not stake as much of his pride on it as he did on chess.” ^[41]

Philidor, the composer of comic operas, had always struck his contemporaries as a bit too serious. He was so accustomed to deliberate thinking that for the most part jokes were lost on him. Instead, he became their target. One of his relatives liked to amuse himself at Philidor’s expense: “‘Mon Dieu, how I would like to have a carriage! I would seat myself at my window and enjoy watching myself drive by.’ ‘That’s stupid, my friend,’ Philidor said to him quite seriously, ‘you couldn’t be in your carriage and at your window at the same time; thus you couldn’t see yourself pass by.’” His principal occupations had a tendency to absorb him completely. He twisted his body continually whenever he was deep in composition or chess play, a habit his wife referred to as “playing the silk-worm.” ^[42]

His contemporaries did not find him an engaging conversationalist. An article on Philidor in a biographical dictionary of musicians that was published a few years after his death reported: “He had a reputation for lack of wit; thus Laborde, one of his greatest admirers, hearing him make a large number of trite remarks at a dinner party, extracted him from his embarrassment by interjecting: ‘See this man, he has no common sense; he’s all genius.’” ^[43]

Philidor was no boor, but neither did he take the trouble to cultivate the social graces beyond the point of simple politeness. This made him an exception among eighteenth-century French intellectuals. Most of his energy went into his composing and his chess playing. We hear very little about him amusing himself. He was happily married and seems to have been a conscientious and loving father to his children. He gave assistance generously to struggling young musicians.^[44] But he also thought highly of his own powers and pushed himself to develop them.

Philidor’s seriousness and his commitment to chess intensified in tandem in his later years. He wrote to his wife in 1788: “There are astonishing panegyrics in all the newspapers, on the subject of the three blindfold games I played last Saturday; they say that the clarity of my thinking increases with my years; it is true that never have I had such a clear head.” The following year he wrote: “I have a great desire to prove that old age has not yet extinguished my genius.” And after another year, when he was giving blindfold exhibitions every two weeks: “I assure you that this does not tire me as much as many people would believe,” although a month later he admitted, “I am exceeding my strength at present.” ^[45] Undoubtedly his faltering career in music, its sharp contrast with his spectacular success in chess, and his need to earn money one way or another all contributed to the reorientation of his attention and pride toward the latter activity.

In its report of a simultaneous blindfold exhibition given in 1837 by a later Café de la Régence master, Labourdonnais, the newspaper La Presse naturally referred to Philidor’s exhibitions and mentioned that the spectators had paid a guinea per person to attend them. Philidor’s son replied in a letter to the editor that his father’s purpose had not been to make money. The controversy flared up again in a chess journal a decade later when it fell to Philidor’s grandson to defend his honor: “These matches, far from being the pretext for a benefice maintained by taxing the spectators at the rate of a guinea per person, were only engaged in by Philidor out of condescension for the members of the Chess Club, who pestered him relentlessly that they might enjoy such an astonishing spectacle.” ^[46] Reluctant as his descendants were to admit it, Philidor had become a professional chess player.

He himself had shown the same reluctance: “It is ridiculous that the composer of Ernelinde should be obliged to play chess for half of the year in England in order to keep his numerous family alive.” ^[47] Philidor had his moments of unhappiness and, while contemplating the decline of his once-glorious musical career, even bitterness. But everything indicates that he both enjoyed chess and relished his success at it. Regrets or no regrets, he dedicated himself to making a second career out of it. His arrangement with the London chess club anticipated in a striking way that of a twentieth-century tennis pro with a racquet club or a golf pro with a country club.

According to legend, the Café de la Régence became a favorite resort of Robespierre and other Jacobins, forcing out the devotees of the royal game for the duration of the Revolution. In February 1793 the revolutionary government declared war on England, where Philidor happened to be at the time. He found himself stranded there, first by the outbreak of war, then by the Reign of Terror that soon followed, and finally by the appearance of his name on a list of proscribed émigrés. The latter were people, theoretically aristocrats and their sympathizers, who had fled the country at various points in the course of the Revolution and were considered traitors by the revolutionaries. As might be expected of someone with friends among the philosophes, Philidor warmly approved the reforms of the early phase of the Revolution. When demonstrations erupted in the streets of Paris, he would call to his wife, “bring me my cane, I want to go out to watch the uprising.” But it is not likely that he supported the Terror, especially after it made him an exile from his home and family. Perhaps the Anglophile Philidor adopted, or was by nature predisposed to that belief in gradual change characteristic of the British intelligentsia. In 1790 he had expressed hope that France might become the model for British reforms, thus repaying the loan of liberal political ideas. In sum, there were many reasons for him to be heartbroken at the turn of events since February 1793. After living for almost three years in exile in London under ban of death, Philidor died there on 31 August 1795, just days before his family succeeded in having his name removed from the proscription list.^[48]

Some years earlier, when he was beginning to give blindfold exhibitions, Diderot had written him a letter advising him to stop. Diderot and Philidor had been friends for many years, though not particularly close friends. Philidor tutored Diderot’s daughter in music. Their families visited each other frequently, especially when Philidor himself was away in London. Diderot’s letter points up the differences between the philosophe’s view of chess and Philidor’s, in the final period of the chess master’s life.

I am not at all surprised, monsieur, that in England all doors should be closed to a great musician and open to a master chess player; people are scarcely more reasonable over here. You will agree, nevertheless, that the reputation of Greco [a chess player] will never equal that of Pergolesi [a composer]. If you have played the three blindfold games without concerning yourself with remuneration, so much the worse. I would be more prepared to pardon you for these dangerous experiments if you were to earn five or six hundred guineas in making them. But to risk one’s reason and one’s talent for nothing; that is inconceivable. I have spoken of it to M. de Légal, and this was his response: “When I was young, I dared to play a single game of chess without sight of the board; and at the end of that game, my head was so exhausted that it was the first and last time of my life. It is madness to run the risk of becoming an imbecile through vanity.” When you lose your mind, will the English come to the rescue of your family? And do not assume, monsieur, that what has not happened yet will not happen. Take my advice, write some more of your excellent music for us, write it for many more years, and do not expose yourself again to the risk of becoming what so many are born, an object of scorn. At best, people would say of you: “There is Philidor, he’s nothing any more; he lost everything he had, moving little pieces of wood over a board.” ^[49]

Philidor did not become an imbecile, even though he continued the public exhibitions for more than a decade, in fact right up to the end of his life. Twenty years after Le Neveu de Rameau, Diderot was beginning to sound like an old philosophe. He contemplated the limits of the human mind while Philidor actively tested them. To the former, chess was still just a game; to the latter, it had become an occupation, a way of life, perhaps even a form of art. While Diderot approved of Philidor’s profiting by his exhibitions, the philosophe had in mind one or two highly lucrative performances, not a continuing series as part of a career in chess. Diderot had the perspective of a wide-ranging intellectual, Philidor the perspective of a professional chess master—maybe the first.

Incidentally, for many of his blindfold exhibitions, while Philidor, sightless, called out his moves, the person who executed them—that is, the person who pushed his pieces on the chessboards for him—was Jean-François Rameau, better known to Diderot and to posterity as the famous composer’s nephew.^[50]