§ 2. Philidor’s Followers: Deschapelles, Labourdonnais, and the Dethroned Dynasts

§ 2. Philidor’s Followers: Deschapelles, Labourdonnais, and the Dethroned Dynasts

Alexandre-Louis-Honoré Lebreton Deschapelles (1780–1847), Philidor’s successor in the Café de la Régence dynasty, was both an aristocrat and an army officer.^[52] Given his interest in chess and his place in French society, he might appear at first glance a social atavism. But even as late as the Napoleonic era, the aristocracy and the officer corps had not given up the game.

Nor were all aristocrats and army officers reactionary; many, including both Napoleon and Deschapelles, had republican views and supported the Revolution. For Deschapelles, this represented a rebellion not only against society at large but also against his own community, and not only against his social class but also against his own family. Like Légal, Deschapelles was an aristocrat whose family had its roots in Brittany, one of the most counterrevolutionary of the former provinces of France. Deschapelles’s family emigrated from France rather than accept the new republic.

The chess master’s youth resembled Napoleon’s. Born near Versailles in 1780, he was sent as a boy to Brienne, in Champagne, to attend the collège there. In France a collège is a secondary school, generally a prestigious one; Brienne’s was reserved exclusively for sons of the nobility. Napoleon had attended the same school, graduating in 1784. Ten years later, with revolutionary France at war against most of Europe, the school closed and its students dispersed. Deschapelles joined the army and fought in the northern campaign, notably in the important battle at Fleurus. During that battle he suffered a saber wound in the head and lost his right hand. A regiment of Prussian cavalry subsequently galloped over him, he said, for good measure. In recognition of his bravery, he received the cross of the Légion d’Honneur at its first distribution, under the Consulate. Later, not only soldiers but also cooks, musicians, and mechanicians would be admitted into the Légion d’Honneur. Deschapelles’s injuries prevented him from pursuing what promised to be a successful career as a field officer. As soon as he recovered, he was transferred into military administration.

Deschapelles discovered chess while on leave in Paris in 1798. He happened upon the Café Morillon, where a lawyer named Bernard was holding court, surrounded by other refugees from the Café de la Régence. The revolutionaries had taken over the latter venue, as previously mentioned, sending into exile the advocates of ludic trials. Bernard had been one of the few players who had only had to accept odds of a pawn and the first move from either Légal or Philidor. He had also coauthored a chess treatise in 1775 and participated in the founding of the Paris chess club in 1783.^[54] Deschapelles learned the game from Bernard and created a legend out of the process: “I acquired chess in four days. I learned the moves and played with Bernard, who had succeeded Philidor as the sovereign of the board. I lost the first day, the second, the third, and beat him even-handed on the fourth, since which time I have never either advanced or receded. Chess to me has been, and is, a single idea, which once acquired cannot be displaced from its throne while the intellect remains unimpaired by sickness or age.” Sometimes he said it took only three days. Otherwise he stuck to this account to the end of his life. One critic, drawing on contemporary apologetics for the biblical account of creation, suggested that it should be taken as a parable in which the four days stand for four years or four ages.

In his capacity as supply officer, Deschapelles accompanied the Grande Armée on its campaigns through Europe. Out of the 1806 campaign against Prussia came another story he used to tell about himself, subsequently published in the chess journal Le Palamède under the title “Supplément au bulletin de la bataille d’Iéna” (Supplement to the Bulletin of the Battle of Jena). Napoleon, a pioneer in the use of propaganda, regularly sent “bulletins” back to France from foreign battlefields. The bulletin from Jena described the French victory that marked the culmination of the Prussian campaign. After the battle, the French army marched directly to Berlin, and Deschapelles marched directly to the headquarters of its chess club. There he suffered two disappointments: The Germans were not in the habit of playing for stakes, and they refused to accept odds of a pawn and two moves. Their three strongest players did, however, agree to contend against him as a team. Deschapelles defeated them in both games played. Back in Berlin after the February 1807 Battle of Eylau, near the Baltic coast city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), he returned to the chess club. “I declared to them that I no longer wanted to play even with them, that it was time to give up the joke, and that I would not play another game without imposing odds on them.” He gave odds of a rook and won two out of three games, drawing the third. It was also around this time that he later claimed to have offered his “permanent challenge” to the world at odds of a pawn and two moves.^[55]

A year and a half later Deschapelles found himself in the opposite corner of Europe in opposite circumstances. Spanish guerrillas forced a French army to which he was attached to surrender at Baylen. Taken from there to Cadiz, on the Atlantic side of the Straits of Gibraltar, he escaped and returned to France. Whether resentful of the failure of Napoleon’s regime to reward him according to what he felt were his merits, or of the humiliating treatment by Napoleon of the army that had surrendered, or of the behavior in general of that “liberticide,” he retired from public service and thenceforth refused to wear his Légion d’Honneur cross. In 1812, however, Marshal Ney arranged for him to be offered the post of commissioner of the government tobacco monopoly at Strasbourg, and he accepted it. There, during Napoleon’s brief return to power in 1815, known as the Hundred Days, Deschapelles helped to organize the resistance in the eastern part of France to the second invasion of the allies, a year after their first invasion and first expulsion of Napoleon. This does not necessarily mean that Deschapelles had converted to Bonapartism in the interim, even though he received a general’s rank: Many republicans, and opponents of the Bourbons of all kinds, joined in opposing this second, longer-lived restoration of France’s old dynasty by the allies.

After Napoleon’s second abdication, Deschapelles entrenched himself in the Café de la Régence and successfully defended his right to impose on all players the odds proclaimed in his “permanent challenge.” Meanwhile the young Louis-Charles de Labourdonnais was rising rapidly through the ranks. Deschapelles decided to commission him as his lieutenant but soon lost his ability to command him. When he could no longer compel him to accept odds, he withdrew in Labourdonnais’s favor, announcing, “in his hands the reputation of France is safe.” Deschapelles doubtless preferred to step down in a dignified manner rather than suffer overthrow by force. Moreover, his conquest of chess had brought him only modest fame and wealth. Thus, he retired from the game, sometime around 1824, when he could still claim to be its best player.^[56]

The two leading British players came to Paris on separate occasions to test their strength against Deschapelles. John Cochrane made an extended stay in 1820–21 and engaged both Deschapelles and Labourdonnais in a round robin, receiving from the former his standard odds of pawn and two moves and going even against the latter. Cochrane lost to Deschapelles by an unknown score and to Labourdonnais six games to one. Labourdonnais, also receiving odds of pawn and two moves from Deschapelles, defeated his mentor seven games to none.^[57] Then Cochrane managed to persuade Deschapelles to play without odds on the board, by accepting odds of two to one on the stakes for each game. The Scotsman won more than a third of these games, thus proving himself the better gambler if not the better chess player. Cochrane’s strength was in the openings, which Deschapelles readily conceded: “During the first twenty moves, I always had a bad game, and all the games I won were considered hopeless.” William Lewis arrived in 1821, and again difficulties arose in negotiating the terms of play. Eventually a temporary agreement was reached, Lewis accepting a pawn and one move from Deschapelles and winning at those odds one out of three games, with two draws. After this short series, however, they could not settle on terms to continue.^[58]

For Deschapelles, chess represented just one stop on a tour of games. He actually took up Polish checkers first, but his interest in it lasted only three months. At the end of that period he addressed the following discourse to the Paris checkers champion: “I have looked through your game, and I find but little in it. At one time, played by gentlemen, it might have been worth practicing; but it is now kicked out of the drawing room into the antechamber; and my soul is above the place of lackeys. In three months I have become your equal, in three months more I could give you a man; but I renounce the pursuit, and bid you farewell. I shall never play checkers again!”

From checkers Deschapelles jumped to chess, and from chess to whist. Whist is a card game that is still played today but whose popularity has been eclipsed by its descendant, bridge. At some point Deschapelles also became a very good billiards player; at another, a master at backgammon. In whist, however, he seems to have found his game. He began to win substantial sums, allowing him at last to assume something like his rightful place in society, and eventually elevating him to the rank of rentier, someone who lives on the income from his investments, which in Deschapelles’s case amounted to thirty or forty thousand livres annually. He bought a “country house” on the outskirts of the Faubourg du Temple, a suburb of Paris, where he gave large luncheons. Afternoons and evenings he devoted to playing cards in town. Pierre-Charles de Saint-Amant, a younger Café de la Régence chess master who wrote a biographical sketch of Deschapelles, speculated that “chance” gave Deschapelles his financial success. “What was required for that was a less mathematical arena than chess, a game where…chance might permit weakness to sustain its hopes, and mediocrity its illusions.” Saint-Amant’s implication is that Deschapelles found more victims at whist than at chess, and victims willing to risk more money. The card players of that era do not appear to have rated themselves systematically the way the chess players did, so a claim of supremacy for Deschapelles at whist would be difficult to substantiate. He certainly made himself well known in clubs, cafés, and spas throughout Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. His career in cards culminated in the publication of his fragmentary Traité du whiste (Treatise on Whist) in 1839, and in the general adoption of a tactic of his invention, known to bridge players even today as “the Deschapelles coup.”

In the 1830s, Deschapelles’s thoughts returned to politics. He told a British chess enthusiast: “I am of no country. Show me a good man, and I will try to be his brother. But were I to choose, though I have never seen England, and understand not your language, I am more a Briton than anything else. I love your country, in the firm belief that your admirable political constitution gives to man all of the liberty which he is as yet sufficiently civilized to enjoy without running into licentiousness.” A democrat in principle, he envisioned himself a dictator. Or at least so the prosecutor claimed when Deschapelles was brought to trial following the Paris insurrection of June 1832. He had entangled himself in a small republican party known as the Gauls, one of many groups discontented with the outcome of the Revolution of 1830. Saint-Amant believed that Deschapelles, in his “disordered ambition,” had expected to be summoned to lead the government after a new revolution: “He believed himself called to the post of commander, of lawgiver; because of his superiority of intelligence, he judged himself destined for the top, one day or another.” ^[59] Deschapelles’s conceits were not as strange as they might appear, arising as they did out of the same heady milieu that produced the dreams of the comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, and the other “prophets of Paris.” ^[60] He emerged from the episode unchastened by the memory of a month or two spent in jail and assorted bruises to his ego. Clinging to his pretensions, he wrote constitutions for refugees from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and various American republics to take back home from Paris with them. He distilled his political ideas into La Loi du peuple (The People’s Law), published in 1848, a few months after his death, when revolution again broke out in France, and in many other European countries as well.

Periodically, at long intervals, Deschapelles’s interest in chess resurfaced. This happened in 1836, roughly a dozen years after his retirement from regular play. One day he walked into the Paris chess club, apparently with no preparation, to challenge Labourdonnais. They played four games of “pawns,” a variant of chess invented by Légal in which one of the contestants plays without his queen, in exchange for which he begins with sixteen pawns, double the number with which he would ordinarily begin. Giving no odds, Deschapelles won two games, lost one, and drew one. A few days later, he played ordinary chess with Saint-Amant, one of the strongest players after Labourdonnais, giving his customary odds. Each of them won a game and a third was drawn. Deschapelles seemed to be proving his theory that chess is a “single idea,” acquired all at once and forever.^[61]

That same year an article in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle dared to doubt the historical accuracy of his just-published “Supplément au bulletin de la bataille d’Iéna.” Offended, he responded by challenging England to a duel at chess, a challenge he made public in Bell’s Life, and by dispatching Saint-Amant as his second to London to arrange the terms. Specifically, he sought to battle England’s best player for the stake of £1,000. The negotiations began promisingly, but soon faltered for no apparent reason and were finally broken off by Deschapelles. Had he suddenly lost interest in chess again? Saint-Amant wrote later: “I accepted responsibility for taking his conditions to the English. The innumerable obstacles that he subsequently raised have always made me wonder whether he really wanted to undertake this rash attempt.” ^[62]

Deschapelles returned to chess just as suddenly in 1842, when he again played Saint-Amant. In five games at varying odds, all in Saint-Amant’s favor of course, Deschapelles won three and Saint-Amant two.^[63] Additional encounters of the sort probably took place unrecorded.

At the end of his life Deschapelles adopted Candide’s point of view and retired to tend his garden. Literally. Growing fruit became his new game. His melons won prizes and were served at the table of King Louis-Philippe. The secretary of the London Chess Club summed up his interview with the éminence grise of serious play:

M. Deschapelles is the greatest chess player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest whist player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest billiard player in France;

M. Deschapelles is the greatest pumpkin-grower in France; and

M. Deschapelles is the greatest liar in France.^[64]

New and old attitudes coexisted uneasily in Deschapelles. One could with equal justice describe him as an aristocratic dilettante or a professional gambler. He was a stickler on the matter of rank and a revolutionary republican. Perhaps his insistence on the strict observation of rank in chess—refusing to play without giving proper odds—was a compensation for his lost prestige as an aristocrat in increasingly republican times and for his own republican political views.

As a chess player he was a “natural,” having learned the game rapidly without ever formally studying it. He did not read chess books. His knowledge of the openings, the phase of the game most thoroughly analyzed in his day, was not at all up to contemporary standards. As a consequence he often got into trouble early, and from beginning to end he played very slowly. While others could open games mechanically, pursuing lines of development that had been established as sound, Deschapelles had to think out every move for himself, even the first ones. He was the last master to achieve the highest rank without the aid of accumulated knowledge. And of course he published nothing on chess himself. In these ways, he was a chess anachronism.

Nevertheless, Deschapelles did contribute to the future of the game. His condescension passed from champion to champion like a conqueror’s mantle, enlarging the popular image of great chess players. Like the young Rousseau, he felt that to be the best was the main thing; what to be the best at was not so important. Like the young Rousseau, but with more success, he cultivated one field after another. Again like Rousseau, this time the mature Rousseau of Du contrat social (On the Social Contract) and the Projet de constitution pour la Corse (Draft of a Constitution for Corsica), he felt that having become the best in a field made him a superior human being, qualified to dictate laws and social organization to an entire nation. This represented in a way a throwback to the ideas of the philosophes, who believed chess to be a useful or instructive game that taught skills applicable elsewhere. But Deschapelles did not make this argument. He played chess, as well as checkers, whist, billiards, and backgammon, because he liked games, because he could be the best at them, and because being the best at them made him, modestly, wealthy and well known. Through chess and the rest he acquired the social position to which his aristocratic birth no longer automatically entitled him.

The chessboard remained a battlefield, but from a symbolic one it had become a real one. To be sure, few died there. Many, however, in a country exhausted by more than two decades of almost continuous warfare, could see virtue in peaceful combat, and increasing numbers fought for laurels in that manner. And a “disabled” veteran officer, who refused to wear his military cross, proudly accepted for victories won on the chessboard real fame and real fortune.

Labourdonnais’s grandfather, Bertrand-François Mahé de Labourdonnais, had had a distinguished career as an admiral, serving as governor of the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean in the 1730s and 1740s, capturing Madras from the British in 1746, and making an appearance as the benevolent governor of idyllic isles in the popular Rousseauist novel Paul et Virginie (1788). Appropriately for a young nobleman of such ancestry, Labourdonnais attended the prestigious Collège Henri IV in Paris. But within a few years of graduation, sometime around 1820, he strayed into the Café de la Régence. There he first learned the moves of chess, studied under Deschapelles, and was crowned king of the French players, all in the space of about three years. For a while he continued to live like the aristocrat he was born, dividing his time between Paris and the château he had inherited at St.-Malo. Gradually, though, chess took over his life. He traveled to London several times in the 1820s in order to test himself against the leading British players. In 1826, probably on one of those trips, he married an Englishwoman. He committed his last infidelity to chess the following year when he edited and published the memoirs of his grandfather. He himself fathered no children, only masterpieces of abstract strategy.

Labourdonnais and Deschapelles were the obverse and reverse sides of the same medal. After noting that they both died of hydropsy, Saint-Amant remarked: “But what a contrast in physique! Labourdonnais was large, fat, well-fed, sanguine; Deschapelles on the other hand was delicate, thin, sombre, and bilious. In one, there was intemperance of every sort, abuse of a strong constitution; in the other, abstinence and restraint in everything.” With regard to the latter, “One had to have seen his cold, calm, severe bearing, saturated with punctiliousness, to have a real conception of it. It was the last conversation of Socrates with his disciples, to judge by the attention and reverence with which one had to listen to him. At the least interjection, the slightest remark, he stopped, and did not begin again until total silence had been restored.”

Labourdonnais, in contrast, was described as Rabelaisian by the contemporary English chess enthusiast George Walker. The gourmand of his circle, Labourdonnais took trencherman honors at the luncheons given by Deschapelles at his Faubourg du Temple home.^[66] In the Café de la Régence, he smoked cigars, drank heavily, and carried on boisterously, jok-ing, singing, gesticulating, and emitting bon mots—all the while piling up victories on the checkered board. Walker gives us an admirable illustration of the excesses of the romantic period:

His chess hours are from noon till midnight, seven times a week. He seems to be a species of chess-automaton, wound up to meet all conceivable cases with mathematical accuracy.…He would snatch a hasty dinner by the side of the chessboard, and in ten minutes be again enthroned in his chair, the hero of the hundred fights, giving rook, or knight, or pawn, as the case might be, to any opponent who presented; fresh as the dewy morn, and vigorous as though ‘twere breakfast-time.…I recollect that upon one occasion he played above forty games of chess at a sitting, with amateurs of every grade of skill.

Not only did Labourdonnais have great stamina, he also moved speedily and without hesitation; he combined intensive with extensive play. This was how he could steam through so many games in one session. Walker writes that Labourdonnais made holes “like a cribbage machine” in the margin of the chessboard, using pegs to keep track of the total. Another member of the Westminster Chess Club corroborated Walker’s characterization:

He played with marvelous rapidity, yet rarely made a mistake. “Tout ce que je demande,” he used to say, “c’est une petite position.” The moment he had got his petite position, his opponent’s doom was sealed. I could never play my best against him; his rapidity dazed me. Although talking and laughing all the time, no sooner had I made my move than his at once came down with a loud impact on the board, as though he meant to break it. I was fascinated, and fell an easy prey to the huge python.^[67]

The foregoing accounts make it clear that the intimidation exercised by Labourdonnais was not confined to the chessboard. Able to decide on his own moves in a flash, he had little patience for more deliberate players. He expressed his impatience “by sundry very plain gestures and shrugs,” and even by drumming his fingers on the tabletop. When the game was going his way, he “talked and laughed a good deal”; when going against him, he “swore tolerably round oaths in a pretty audible voice.” Walker, by no means a Francophobe, complained that in his time the French chess players displayed little sportsmanship. When they lost a game, they shouted, threw the chessmen, and often failed to pay their wagers. When they observed a game, they commented on it freely, second-guessing the players and criticizing their moves out loud.^[68] One may take it that Walker’s charges had some foundation, without necessarily accepting his implied comparison of national characters. Players in Britain, Germany, or Italy may or may not have been more polite. But whatever the case elsewhere, French chess circles clearly no longer recognized the social graces even as minor deities.

Labourdonnais played fast and accurately in part because he played a lot. In chess, speed and practice are mutually reinforcing: the more games one plays, the faster one’s decision making becomes; and the faster one plays, the more games one plays in a given period of time. Nowadays, all top contenders play “speed chess” as part of their training in order to learn recurring configurations through frequent exposure to them. Twentieth-century grand masters, it has been estimated, can distinguish “some 50,000 basic ‘building-block’ configurations—small groupings of pieces by which the board’s more complex structures are erected.” ^[69]

Labourdonnais played fast and accurately also because he studied. Unlike Deschapelles, he was abreast of contemporary opening and endgame theory. He read chess books and in 1833 produced one of his own, the Nouveau traité du jeu des échecs (New Treatise on the Game of Chess). Although several translations and a second French edition followed within a few years, his book is not very highly regarded. Perhaps it is because he did not introduce many new ideas or annotate his games very instructively. Unlike Philidor, Labourdonnais does not seem to have been good at communicating his knowledge. But there is no doubt that he had great knowledge and could apply it. Deschapelles was the last of the great pure improvisers and in his own time an exceptional case. After Philidor, codifying one’s knowledge in a book had become de rigueur for European players of the first rank. Many who were not of the first rank also published, and translations and reissues of the classic works began to proliferate as well.

The championship chess match was a creation of the nineteenth century. The eighty-five-game series, actually constituting six matches, that Labourdonnais and Alexander MacDonnell played from June to October 1834, has been generally regarded as the first championship ever since it took place: It was the first long series of games between two opponents each of whom had the reputation as the best in a circle of dedicated players. The fact that the opponents came from different countries and that the circles they represented became identified with those countries added to the interest and prestige of the event, making it not merely the first championship but also the first international championship. The British players invited Labourdonnais to London specifically for the purpose of staging the event, which soon attracted the attention of newspapers and the general public. Accounts of the outcome differ; collating them yields something on the order of forty-five wins for Labourdonnais and twenty-seven for MacDonnell, with thirteen draws.^[70] Considering the number of games it encompassed, the length of time it lasted, and the competitive intensity it generated, this first championship must have been as grueling as any subsequent one. The daily sessions lasted from eleven A.M. or noon until six or seven P.M., after which MacDonnell often retired exhausted, sometimes “walking his room the greater part of the night in a dreadful state of excitement.” He died the following year of a kidney disorder at the age of thirty-seven. By contrast, Labourdonnais often spent the evening after a session playing more games against other opponents.^[71] A prolific but now forgotten writer, Joseph Méry, celebrated the Frenchman’s victory in a long poem entitled Une Revanche de Waterloo (A Revenge for Waterloo).

Curiously, Philidor is generally considered to have been the first European chess champion, even though Labourdonnais won what is generally considered to have been the first European chess championship. Philidor won his unofficial posthumous title by playing a lot of chess outside of France and never meeting his equal. The second match to be widely recognized as a championship was again one pitting the best of Great Britain against the best of France, the Staunton–Saint-Amant match of 1843. Fully organized championships, with time limits for play and tournaments to determine challengers for an official title, began in the 1860s. Since then, such matches have been held every few years.

In 1836 Labourdonnais founded Europe’s first chess journal, Le Palamède, named for Palamedes, the mythical Greek inventor of the game. Labourdonnais’s deteriorating health forced him to suspend publication in 1840, but within a year of his death Saint-Amant revived it and kept it going through 1847. This experiment established the viability of the genre. Beginning in 1841, British enthusiasts could read Howard Staunton’s Chess Player’s Chronicle, which lasted until 1902. In Germany, the Schachzeitung (Chess Times), later called the Deutsche Schachzeitung (German Chess Times), began in 1846 and continues to this day, interrupted only by World War II. The longest unbroken run is probably that of the British Chess Magazine, which has been coming out regularly since 1881. Since these pioneers opened up the territory, two thousand more have appeared and, mostly, disappeared. In 1950 there were more than one hundred chess periodicals in print worldwide.^[72]

One gambit that has been particularly successful for these publications from the first issue of Le Palamède to Advances in Computer Chess is the chess problem. In the most common of the various kinds of chess problem, the reader is presented with a chessboard situation, which may or may not arise in the course of an actual game, and challenged to use the white pieces to force checkmate on the black pieces in a specified number of moves, usually two, three, or four. Chess problems, unlike chess journals, were hundreds of years old, but they too began to multiply in the nineteenth century. Philidor’s Analyse du jeu des échecs contained no chess problems. Labourdonnais’s Nouveau traité du jeu des échecs contained sixty, although the author himself had composed only eight of them. Periodicals provided an ideal format for chess problems, since they could withhold the solution from the reader for a tantalizing space of time. In the new era signaled by the appearance of journals, it became possible to specialize in composing problems, just as it became possible to specialize in writing chess literature—poetry, short stories, biographical sketches, travel pieces, and the like on chess subjects. For example, P. A. d’Orville made his name as a composer of problems, and Joseph Méry, coeditor with Labourdonnais of Le Palamède, as a writer; neither distinguished himself as a player.^[73]

Thus, during Labourdonnais’s reign as champion, several signs marking the onset of professionalization first appeared. The accelerating intensity with which chess has been cultivated in the Western world since then cannot be more strikingly illustrated than through the simultaneous blindfold exhibition. Such demonstrations of chess skill had lapsed since Philidor’s death in 1795, but Labourdonnais revived them in 1837. Attending a performance in the spring of that year “were peers, parliamentary deputies, generals, colonels, artists, men of letters; it was a convention.” That was how Le Palamède trumpeted the event, muting the disparity between Philidor’s frequent performances of three blindfold games at once and Labourdonnais’s mere two. But Labourdonnais began to play blindfolded only in the last few years of his life, and he seems to have been working up to three games just before his final illness.^[74] More significant, since his revival of the exhibition, a continuous stream of performers has maintained it. Indeed, in terms of the number of games played at once, they have steadily escalated the level of achievement. A younger Café de la Régence master, Lionel Kieseritzky, played four simultaneous blindfold games in 1851. The American master Paul Morphy played eight in the Café de la Régence in 1858. Louis Paulsen, an American originally from Germany, played fifteen in 1859. After a succession of intervening record holders, Harry Pillsbury, yet another American, played twenty-one in 1902, with the added difficulty that all his opponents were top-ranked masters against whom he was competing in a championship tournament. Still later, an American originally from Belgium, Georges Koltanovski, a specialist in such feats, played thirty-four blindfold games simultaneously in 1937, fifty in 1952, and finally fifty-six in 1961 in San Francisco, winning fifty of them and drawing the other six.^[75]

In the mid-1830s, Labourdonnais lost most of his fortune in a building speculation. The rest of it he spent on a luxurious holiday with his wife in the south of France. Only a loan from Captain Guingret, a fellow chess enthusiast, later commandant of the École Militaire and president of the Paris chess club, whom they happened upon, enabled them to return to the capital.^[76] From that point forward, Labourdonnais had to live on his earnings at chess.

Unfortunately, both his earnings and his health soon went into decline. He was diagnosed as dropsical and submitted to twenty-one drainings in the space of eighteen months. In the last month of his life, December 1840, he traveled to London in the hope of improving at least his financial situation, if not his health. But after a few days he was too sick to appear in public and too poor to be able to afford either food or medical attention. The British players took up a collection so that he did not have to die literally in a garret. Like Philidor, he died in London; also like Philidor, he died on the verge of his deliverance. He had just been voted two pensions, one from the French government as a “man of letters,” for his contribution to culture, and another from the île de la Réunion, the largest of the Mascarenes still under French control (as it remains yet today), in appreciation for his grandfather’s service as governor there.

Maintaining the tradition of the Café de la Régence masters, Labourdonnais continued to give odds to the end. The Hungarian master József Szén arrived in Paris in 1838, and Labourdonnais measured his inferiority at a pawn and two moves. After imposing that handicap, the Frenchman proceeded to lose thirteen of twenty-five games.^[77] Making even more questionable use of the principles of the Old Regime, Labourdonnais ranked himself above Philidor. Once in a conversation with the chevalier de Barneville, who was born a half-century before him and died after him, he asked:

“Let us converse a little about distant history, my dear chevalier; on what terms did you play with Philidor?”

“He used to give me a knight and a pawn.”

“I would have given, then, a pawn and two moves to Philidor?”

“Doubtless.”

Brushing aside Barneville’s advanced age, all differences in styles of play, and all changes in the competitive environment, Labourdonnais concluded from the fact that he gave greater odds to Barneville than Philidor had given him that he, Labourdonnais, was the better player. The conversation continued:

“And how did you play against Jean-Jacques Rousseau?”

“I used to give him a rook.”

“He was a weak player then.”

“But on the other hand,” said the chevalier, “he had colossal pride, and the most frightful character of any chess player who ever lived.” ^[78]

Despite the vestige of rank-consciousness, Labourdonnais had abandoned his aristocratic and warrior heritage, or perhaps he had sublimated it into chess. He had lost, sold, or given away all of his inherited possessions. He never saw the Mascarenes.^[79] He had no apparent talents or skills, and cultivated no interests or friendships, outside of chess. Chess provided almost his only connection to the world. His success at chess determined not just his career but eventually his whole life and his very identity.

Saint-Amant had positioned himself to inherit the Café de la Régence throne and thus, presumably, to rule over French and European chess.^[81] Born at the turn of the nineteenth century in his family’s ancestral château in Gascony, he moved to Paris in his early twenties and began to frequent the famous café. There he studied with the Alsatian master Wilhelm Schlumberger, who soon afterward sailed to America to become, in a mechanical disguise, one of the chess world’s first touring professionals. Saint-Amant steadily improved his game so that by the early 1830s he was second only to Labourdonnais, Deschapelles having long since retired. It was Saint-Amant who led the Paris club in its victories over the London club at correspondence chess. Labourdonnais’s death in 1840 made Saint-Amant the best active player in France and allowed him to become the editor of Le Palamède, still the only chess journal in Europe. His upward course continued in 1843 when he visited London and defeated Staunton three games to two, with one draw.

This “informal match” led to the “championship match” won by Staunton in Paris later the same year. The French players disputed this characterization of the two series of games, however. Toward the end of 1844, Staunton returned to Paris for a third match that would settle the matter for good, but he fell ill with pneumonia before it started and went home to England without having played a single game. The dispute flared up anew and then smoldered for years.^[82] In their separate capitals, Staunton continued to focus on chess, while Saint-Amant, still at the top of his game, reduced his playing to once a week, allowing Staunton’s claim to be the international champion to accrue legitimacy. In the late 1840s Saint-Amant retired from chess altogether, returning to it only intermittently during the last twenty-five years of his life. He had always had diverse occupations, including secretary to the governor of French Guyana, journalist, actor, wine dealer, captain in the National Guard, governor of the Tuileries Palace, French consul in California, and author of several nonfiction books, none of them on chess. A popular man, he was known for his sociability and civility. In sum, he had neither an intense drive to cultivate his skill in chess nor an intense drive to promote himself.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Café de la Régence attracted players from every corner of Europe. Some sought only to joust with French knights on level ground. This wish was not always granted: Labourdonnais, as we have seen, imposed unreasonable odds on Szén, and Saint-Amant avoided the Hungarian altogether.^[83] Other, bolder paladins took up permanent residence in the palace of the royal game. But the valiant foreigners scarcely even postponed, let alone prevented, the collapse of its battlements in the 1840s.

Aaron Alexandre, a Bavarian trained as a rabbi, arrived in 1793.^[84] Gratified by the Revolutionaries’ policy of religious toleration he decided to become a French citizen. At first, he taught German for his livelihood, and made mechanical inventions and played chess as pastimes. Eventually, however, chess became his principal occupation. He set himself the task of making a complete survey of the openings that had been analyzed up to then, publishing his findings as the Encyclopédie des échecs (Encyclopedia of Chess, 1837). Then he made a survey of endgame analyses and a compilation of almost two thousand chess problems, which he published in London as The Beauties of Chess (1846). Both books set new standards of comprehensiveness for their specialties and showed Alexander’s great technical knowledge. In chess as in his other activities, he preferred erudition to performance.

Lionel Kieseritzky arrived in Paris in 1839 from Dorpat, Livonia (now Tartu, Estonia), in the Russian Empire.^[85] As previously mentioned, Kieseritzky was an excellent amateur pianist and, an acquaintance later recalled, “through his active literary and artistic propensities, the social center, so to speak, of Dorpat; he staged dramatic and musical performances frequently and with great enthusiasm.” On the eve of his departure from his hometown he produced in a public garden a game of “living chess,” in which costumed people took the place of the chessmen. In Dorpat he had been teaching mathematics but once in Paris began to teach chess instead, giving lessons for a fee in the Café de la Régence. By the time of his arrival there he had already progressed to a level only slightly below that of Labourdonnais and about equal to that of Saint-Amant. In 1846 he visited London and engaged in a curious triangular match with Staunton and a German player named Harrwitz, each of the three playing the other two in simultaneous games, Staunton giving rook odds to both of the others, who played blindfolded; Harrwitz won his two games and Kieseritzky lost both of his. In 1849 Kieseritzky launched a new chess journal, La Régence, Saint-Amant having abandoned chess and allowed Le Palamède to expire in 1847. Kieseritzky invented a three-dimensional version of chess, but it failed to attract much interest. He played a lot of blindfold chess, including one simultaneous blindfold exhibition of four games, a new record, in which he called out his moves for each game in a different language, French, German, English, or Italian. In 1851 he again traveled to London, to participate in the first international championship tournament, where he was knocked out in the first round. A contemporary described him as “essentially a gallery player, dealing chiefly in fireworks against weak opponents.” ^[86] He cultivated chess as a spectacle intensively but did not cultivate chess as a skill comparably.

The careers of these relatively unsuccessful successors to the Café de la Régence dynasty signaled the end of an era. It had lasted roughly a century, from about 1740 to about 1840. What the Age of Revolution was to European society at large, the Café de la Régence era was to chess: the childhood of many of its most characteristic present-day institutions. The chess club; the chess journal; the international championship match; subspecialties such as imaginative writing on chess subjects, problem composition, and simultaneous blindfold exhibitions; the study and publication of systematic analyses as an essential part of mastering the game; and, in general, a commitment to chess commensurate with that to any art or science: These are some of the distinctive institutions of modern chess that took form during the Café de la Régence era. The glory years of the Café de la Régence, whose traditions prevailed until the new institutions established themselves, were indeed those of a regency.

Before the Café de la Régence era, it had been aristocrats who constituted the social group in Europe most identified with chess; during that era, it was intellectuals; since then, it has been quite simply professional chess players. Before that era, many Europeans regarded chess as a mere game; during that era, a useful or meaningful game; since then, a serious pursuit. Before that era, chess was played by some people as symbolic war; during that era, by many army officers as a pastime; since then, by many people as a real battle for fame and fortune.

In 1852 the Café de la Régence lost its original home on the place du Palais-Royal, where it had opened in 1681 as one of the first coffeehouses in Paris. It found temporary quarters on the rue de Richelieu for two years, then moved permanently to the rue Saint-Honoré, where it remains to this day, though under a different name.^[88] The removal of the café from its time-honored location symbolized its removal from the history of chess. When the immortal American master Morphy gave a fantastic exhibition in the café’s new home in the late 1850s, playing eight blindfold games simultaneously, it was the visit of Morpheus, and the Café de la Régence has slept peacefully ever since.

Notes

Denis Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres, ed. André Billy (Paris: Pléiade, 1951), p. 395. For help with the translation of all passages drawn from this work, the author consulted Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, trans. Jacques Barzun (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Georges Roth, 16 vols. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1958), vol. 3, pp. 115–17, 357; vol. 4, p. 204; Madame de Vandeul [née Marie-Angélique Diderot, daughter of Denis Diderot], “Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Diderot,” in Denis Diderot, Mémoires, correspondance et ouvrages inédits de Diderot, 4 vols. (Paris: Paulin, 1830), vol. 1, p. 21.

George Walker, “The Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 22, no. 132 (December 1840): 670–71. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Daniel Oster (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 80. Voltaire’s correspondence contains many references to his playing chess, mostly at Ferney. Ralph K. Hagedorn, Benjamin Franklin and Chess in Early America: A Review of the Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1958), p. 39. On the crowds who went to see Rousseau at the Café de la Régence: Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours, 36 vols. (London: Adamson, 1777–89), vol. 5, pp. 133–34, 136; Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Daniel Roche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 182–83 n. 228.

Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Échecs,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 35 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1966–67; reprint of 1st ed., 1751–80), vol. 5, pp. 247–48.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, 7 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1960), vol. 3, p. 304.

[François-]A[ndré] D[anican] Philidor, Analyse du jeu des échecs, new ed. (London: n.p., 1777), unpaginated pref.

Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 4, p. 205.

Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), vol. 7, pp. 357–62.

Jacques Barzun, trans., pref. to Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, p. 3; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Götz von Berlichingen” (1772–1773), in Der Junge Goethe, ed. Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, 6 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963–74), vol. 3, p. 211.

[Sébastien-Roch Nicolas] Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, caractères et anecdotes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 148.

Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, “Philidor,” in Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, 4 vols. (New York: AMS, 1978; reprint of 1st ed., Paris, 1780), vol. 3, pp. 461–62; Richard Twiss, Chess, 2 vols. (London: Robinson, 1787–89), vol. 1, pp. 149–50; Ernst Ludwig Gerber, “Philidor (André Danican),” in Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966; reprint of 1st ed., Leipzig, 1790–92), 2 parts, pt. 2, cols. 126–27; J Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” incorporating the fragment “Biographie de Philidor par son fils aîné,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1 (January 1847): 3; F[rançois]-J[oseph] Fétis, “Philidor (François-André Danican),” in Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, 2d ed., 8 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1870–75), vol. 7, p. 28; Julian Rushton, “Philidor,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 14, p. 625.

Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 4–5; Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 150–51. The chess master’s name is variously spelled Kermur, Kermeur, or Kermuy; his title, Légal, Legall, or Legalle.

Diderot, Neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres, pp. 395, 398; David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, The Oxford Companion to Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 181–82; Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 150–51, 165; Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 15, p. 294.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 154–55.

Ibid., pp. 155, 157, 163. The title of the first edition of Philidor’s book was Analyze des échecs (London: n.p., 1749); most of the many subsequent French editions bear the title Analyse du jeu des échecs, which will be used here in reference to any and all editions in order to avoid confusion. A bibliography of the hundred-plus editions of this book may be found in Charles Michael Carroll, “François-André Danican Philidor: His Life and Dramatic Art” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1960), pp. 433–41. Philidor himself pointed out many of his innovations in the preface to the first edition of his book, which also contains the famous phrase quoted here. Discussions of the originality of the Analyse may be found in Jean Biou, “La Révolution philidorienne,” in Le Jeu au XVIII^e siècle: Colloque d’Aix-en-Provence (Aix-en-Provence: EDISUD, 1976), pp. 61–68; H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 866–67; Richard Eales, Chess: The History of a Game (New York: Facts on File, 1985), pp. 114–15.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 157–58; Gerber, “Philidor,” Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler, pt. 2, col. 127; Leonhard Euler and Christian Goldbach, Briefwechsel, 1729–1764, ed. Juskevic and Winter (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1965), pp. 336–37.

Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 14, 7 (quotation); Laborde, “Philidor,” in Essai sur la musique, vol. 3, p. 462; Gerber, “Philidor,” Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler, pt. 2, col. 127; George Allen, The Life of Philidor: Musician and Chess-Player (New York: Da Capo, 1971; reprint of 1st ed., Philadelphia, 1863), p. 21.

Quoted in Twiss, Chess, vol. 2, pp. 215–16.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 165–66.

Ibid., p. 165.

Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 120–26, 154–204, 301; Rushton, “Philidor,” in New Grove Dictionary, vol. 14, p. 628. Donald Jay Grout, in A Short History of Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 491, says that they were produced in America as well.

Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 9, 14; Michel Brenet, Les Concerts en France sous l’ancien régime (New York: Da Capo, 1970; reprint of 1st ed., Paris, 1900), pp. 241, 272, 294; Fétis, “Philidor,” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, vol. 7, p. 31; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 134–35.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–69), vol. 1, pp. 333–34; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 98–101; Henry Raynor, A Social History of Music, from the Middle Ages to Beethoven (New York: Taplinger, 1978), pp. 234–35.

Raynor, Social History of Music, p. 236; Grout, Short History of Opera, pp. 254–59; Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (New York: Norton, 1982), pp. 262–88.

Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 11, p. 38; Charles Burney, quoted in Frances Burney, The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis, 2 vols. (London: Bell, 1907), vol. 1, p. 123; Mercure de France, January 1766, p. 212, quoted in Brenet, Concerts en France, p. 283; Raynor, Social History of Music, p. 240; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 116–17, 124; Rushton, “Philidor,” in New Grove Dictionary, vol. 14, p. 629.

Fétis, “Philidor,” in Biographie universelle des musiciens, vol. 7, p. 30.

Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 288.

Diderot, Neveu de Rameau, in Oeuvres, pp. 397–98.

Donal O’Gorman, Diderot the Satirist: “Le Neveu de Rameau” and Related Works: An Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1971), pt. 3, chap. 7, “The Caricature of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” and pp. 214–15; Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 420. The two philosophes met in the Café de la Régence in 1742; Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 1, p. 27. Diderot later wrote that Rousseau “always beat me at chess”; Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1767,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1875–77), vol. 11, p. 127.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 160–64; Burney, Early Diary of Frances Burney, vol. 1, p. 123, including footnotes; “Autographes de Philidor,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 4 (April 1847): 172–78; Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 69–81; Murray, History of Chess, p. 863; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 230–31, 265–66.

Brenet, Concerts en France, p. 343 n. 1; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 231–47; Charles Michael Carroll, “A Classical Setting for a Classical Poem: Philidor’s Carmen Sæculare, ” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1977), vol. 6, pp. 97–111; Rushton, “Philidor,” in New Grove Dictionary, vol. 14, pp. 628–29.

Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, vol. 15, pp. 16–17, 25–27, 28–30.

Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 248–64.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, p. 166; [Luc-Vincent] Thiéry, Guide des amateurs et des étrangers voyageurs à Paris, 2 vols. (Paris: Hardouin and Gattey, 1787), vol. 1, pp. 279–80; Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 237.

The example given is from Biou, “La Révolution philidorienne,” in Jeu au XVIII^e siècle, p. 66. It also appears in Reuben Fine, The World’s Great Chess Games, from Morphy to Fischer and Karpov (New York: McKay, 1976), p. 4.

Carroll, “Philidor,” passim, e.g., p. 90; Rushton, “Philidor,” in New Grove Dictionary, vol. 14, p. 628; Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, p. 15.

[André-Ernest-Modeste] Grétry, Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique, 3 vols. (Paris: Verdiere, 1812), vol. 3, pp. 253–54.

Ludwig Bachmann, Aus vergangenen Zeiten: Bilder aus der Entwicklungsgeschichte des praktischen Schachspiels, 2 vols. (Berlin: Kagan, [1920–22]), vol. 1, fasc. 5, p. 95; Adrianus Dingeman de Groot, Thought and Choice in Chess, trans. uncredited (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), pp. 361–70.

The source of the quotation, from an unidentified contemporary newspaper: Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, p. 153. See also Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 15, pp. 293–95; Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 152–54, 167–70; vol. 2, p. 217; Richard Twiss, Miscellanies, 2 vols. (London: Egerton, 1805), vol. 2, pp. 105–8; “Chess,” London Chronicle, 28 May 1787, p. 507; Morning World, 28 May 1787, quoted in Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, p. 167; “Autographes de Philidor,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 4, p. 176; Allen, Life of Philidor, p. 79; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 266–75.

“Autographes de Philidor,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 4, p. 176; Charles Tomlinson, ed., The Chess-Player’s Annual for the Year 1856 (London: Hall, Virtue, 1856), p. 160; Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 76 n, 77 n.

Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, pp. 164–65; Pierre-Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, editor of Le Palamède, footnote to Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, p. 15 n.

Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 10–11; Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 58–59.

Al. Choron and F. Fayolle, “Philidor (André),” in Dictionnaire historique des musiciens, artistes, et amateurs, 2 vols. (Paris: Valade, 1810–11), vol. 2, p. 142.

Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 75–77, 53–57; Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 10–15.

“Autographes de Philidor,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 4, pp. 174–78. For the translation of the first quotation: Allen, Life of Philidor, p. 81.

A. Danican Philidor, “Les Joueurs d’échecs.—Philidor,” La Régence, 1st ser., 3, no. 4 (April 1851): 123. See also Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 79–81.

Unpublished letter of Philidor, 10 February 1784, quoted in Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 277–78.

Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, pp. 670–71; Jean Gay, Bibliographie anecdotique du jeu des échecs (Paris: Gay, 1864), p. 124; Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, pp. 8, 12; Twiss, Miscellanies, vol. 2, pp. 110–12; obituary of Philidor in the Times (London), 2 September 1795, p. 3; “Autographes de Philidor,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 4, p. 175; Allen, Life of Philidor, pp. 92–101; Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 283–89.

Diderot, Correspondance, vol. 10, p. 158; vol. 11, pp. 37–39; vol. 15, pp. 293–95, 312. For help with the translation: Carroll, “Philidor,” pp. 270–71.

“Chess Match at Mr. Parsloe’s, St. James’s-street,” Sporting Magazine 2, no. 1 (April 1793): 8; “Chess Club at Mr. Parsloe’s, St. James’s street,” Sporting Magazine 3, no. 5 (February 1794): 282.

Philippe Stamma, Essai sur le jeu des échecs (The Hague: Van Dole, 1741; first published in Paris, 1737), p. 150; Gioachino Greco, Le Jeu des eschets (Paris: Pepingué, 1669), dedication page; Joseph Bertin, The Noble Game of Chess (London: Author, 1735), p. iii.

There are two principal biographical sketches of Deschapelles: [Pierre-Charles Fournier de] Saint-Amant, “Deschapelles,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 11 (November 1847): 500–515; [George Walker], “Deschapelles, the Chess-King,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 19, no. 111 (March 1839): 310–19. Two others contain some additional information: Anon., “Deschapelles,” in Biographie universelle et portative des contemporains, ed. A[lphonse] Rabbe, Vieilh de Boisjolin, and Sainte-Preuve, 5 vols. (Paris: Editors, 1836), vol. 5, pp. 149–50; Anon., “Deschapelles,” Cahiers de l’échiquier français, no. 21 (1st trimester 1930): 132–42. Unless otherwise noted, all information on Deschapelles in this section, including quotations, derives from the articles by Saint-Amant and Walker.

[Joseph] M[éry], “Napoléon, amateur d’échecs,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 1 ([15 March] 1836): 12–13; Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, pp. 671–73.

Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, vol. 22, pp. 305–6; Twiss, Chess, vol. 1, p. 166; [Verdoni, Léger, Carlier, and Bernard], Traité théorique et pratique du jeu des échecs par une société d’amateurs (Paris: Stoupe, 1775).

[A.-L.-H. Lebreton] Deschapelles, “Supplément au bulletin de la bataille d’Iéna,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 1 ([15 March] 1836): 23–25; letter of Deschapelles published in Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 8 (15 October 1836): 292.

Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, p. 682; George Walker, “The Battles of M’Donnell and de La Bourdonnais,” in Chess and Chess-Players (London: Skeet, 1850), p. 367.

Anon., “Deschapelles,” Cahiers de l’échiquier français, no. 21, p. 135.

Editor(s) of Le Palamède, “Défi entre M. Deschapelles et M. Lewis,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 9 (15 November 1836): 318–22.

Saint-Amant, “Deschapelles,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 11, pp. 500–515; Walker, “Deschapelles, the Chess-King,” Fraser’s Magazine 19, no. 111, pp. 310–19; Joseph Gisquet, Mémoires de M. Gisquet, 3 vols. (Paris: Marchand, 1840), vol. 2, pp. 240–41.

Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris: Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte (New York: Harper, 1965).

“Club des Panoramas,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 3 ([15 May] 1836): 108; Walker, “Deschapelles, the Chess-King,” Fraser’s Magazine 19, no. 111, pp. 312–13. On the invention of “pawns”: Lardin, “Philidor peint par lui-même,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 1, p. 5 n. 1.

Saint-Amant, “Deschapelles,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 11, pp. 500–515; Walker, “Deschapelles, the Chess-King,” Fraser’s Magazine 19, no. 111, pp. 310–19; Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 4 (1836): 147–48; no. 5, pp. 186–91; no. 6, pp. 208–16; no. 7, pp. 256–58; no. 8, pp. 292–94.

“Chronique,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 2, no. 12 (15 November 1842): 233.

Quoted in William Hartston, The Kings of Chess: A History of Chess Traced through the Lives of Its Greatest Players (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 25.

There are three principal biographical sketches, and they are quite sketchy, of Labourdonnais: George Walker, “Derniers moments de Labourdonnais,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 1, no. 1 (15 December 1841): 11–14 (trans. of “The Last Moments of Labourdonnais,” which first appeared in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle sometime in 1841); [Pierre-Charles Fournier de] Saint-Amant, “Mort de M. de Labourdonnais,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 1, no. 1 (15 December 1841): 15–19; Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, pp. 680–82. Three others contain little additional information: [first name unknown] Fayolle, “Labourdonnais (Mahé de),” in Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, 2d ed., ed. Michaud, 45 vols. (Paris: Desplaces, 1843–65), vol. 22, pp. 319–20; O. Koch, “Louis Charles Mahé de la Bourdonnais,” Deutsches Wochenschach und Berliner Schachzeitung 28, no. 1 (7 January 1912): 1–7; Anon., “La Bourdonnais,” Cahiers de l’échiquier français, no. 2 (2d trimester 1925): 35–45. Concerning the question of when Labourdonnais was born, Walker says the inscription on his gravestone reads “mort le 13 décembre 1840, à l’âge de 43 ans,” implying a birth year of 1797, while Saint-Amant says explicitly that he was born in 1795. Unless otherwise noted, all information on Labourdonnais in this section, including quotations of him, derives from the two articles by Walker and the one by Saint-Amant.

Saint-Amant, “Deschapelles,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 7, no. 11, pp. 504, 509, 510.

Auguste Mongredien, quoted in G. H. Diggle, “The Labourdonnais-MacDonnell Matches of 1834,” British Chess Magazine 54, no. 7 (July 1934): 281.

Walker, “Café de la Régence,” pp. 677, 681–82; idem, “Battles of M’Donnell,” in Chess and Chess-Players, p. 372.

Brad Leithauser, “Computer Chess,” New Yorker 63, no. 3 (9 March 1987): 48.

Murray, History of Chess, p. 882, including footnotes.

[Louis-Charles de Labourdonnais], intro. to “Une Partie d’échecs, poème par M. Méry,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 1 ([15 March] 1836): 26; [Pierre-Charles de Saint-Amant], “Labourdonnais et MacDonnell,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 4, no. 6 (June 1844): 265–66; Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, p. 681; idem, “Battles of M’Donnell,” in Chess and Chess-Players, pp. 364–84; Diggle, “La Bourdonnais-MacDonnell Matches,” British Chess Magazine 54, no. 7, pp. 277–86.

Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, p. 245; B. H. Wood, “Books about Chess,” in The Treasury of Chess Lore, ed. Fred Reinfeld (New York: Dover, 1959), p. 269.

For three capsule accounts of the history of chess problems: Murray, History of Chess, pp. 870–72; Eales, Chess, pp. 205–7; Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, pp. 256–59.

[Joseph] Méry, “Deux parties d’échecs sans voir,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 2, no. 1 (15 March 1837): 5–8; George Walker, “Chess, without the Chess-Board,” Fraser’s Magazine 21, no. 123 (March 1840): 312; Joseph Méry, “Let-tre sur Philidor,” La Régence, 1st ser., 3, no. 5 (May 1851): 129–32.

For a contemporary engraving of Morphy’s eight-game exhibition: David Lawson, Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess (New York: McKay, 1976), p. 133; Hartston, Kings of Chess, p. 47. On Paulsen’s fifteen-game exhibition: Anne Sunnucks, ed., The Encyclopedia of Chess (New York: St. Martin’s, 1970), p. 347. On Pillsbury’s twenty-one-game exhibition: Hooper and Whyld, Oxford Companion to Chess, pp. 37, 253. On Koltanovski’s exhibitions: Ridka Belkadi, Les Échecs, de l’initiation…à la maîtrise (N.p.: Société Tunisienne de Diffusion, 1972), p. 279.

“Revue,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 3, no. 12 (15 December 1843): 538–39.

Murray, History of Chess, p. 885.

Joseph Méry, “Les Joueurs d’Échecs—Le Chevalier de Barneville,” La Régence, 1st ser., 3, no. 4 (April 1851): 118. The chevalier Brisout de Barneville was born in 1747 and died in 1842; “Nécrologie,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 1, no. 5 (15 April 1842): 234.

[First name unknown] Saint-Elme Le Duc, letter to the editor, Le Palamède, 2d ser., 4, no. 4 (April 1844): 167–68.

On the Paris-London correspondence games: “Un Défi par correspondance,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 1, no. 1 ([15 March] 1836): 14–17; “Défi entre le cercle des échecs de Paris et le club de Westminster,” Le Palamède, 1st ser., 2, no. 1 (15 March 1837): 10–16. On the Paris-Budapest correspondence games: “Chronique,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 2, no. 11 (15 October 1842): 183; see also “Chronique” in many subsequent issues of Le Palamède, concluding with “Défi par correspondance, entre Paris et Pesth (Hongrie), commencé en novembre 1842,” Le Palamède, 2d ser., 5, no. 5 (15 May 1845): 202; 6, no. 2 (February 1846): 70–71.

There are two principal biographical sketches of Saint-Amant: J[ean-Louis] Préti, “A la mémoire de M. de Saint-Amant,” La Stratégie 5, no. 12 (15 December 1872): 353–55; G. H. Diggle, “Pierre Charles Fournié [sic] de Saint-Amant,” British Chess Magazine 53, no. 10 (October 1933): 405–9; no. 11 (November 1933): 449–56. There is also quite a bit of information about him in the columns of Le Palamède, 2d ser. (1841–47), and in George Walker’s chess columns (1835–73) in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, especially the column of 24 November 1872, an obituary of Saint-Amant.

Since Saint-Amant was the editor of Le Palamède and Staunton the editor of the Chess Player’s Chronicle, innumerable reports, letters, proposals, claims, challenges, charges, and countercharges were published in those two journals concerning the three matches, counting the two that were actually played and the one that was only planned. There was also one pamphlet, published by the English side: [Thomas J. Bryan], Jeu des échecs; historique de la lutte entre l’éditeur du “Palamède” …et l’éditeur du “Chess Player’s Chronicle” (Paris: Tresse, 1845).

Walker, “Café de la Régence,” Fraser’s Magazine 22, no. 132, p. 675.

The principal biographical sketch of Alexandre is [Pierre-Charles Four-nier de] Saint-Amant, “Nécrologie: A. Alexandre,” La Régence, 1st ser., 3, no. 1 (January 1851): 3–13.

There are two principal biographical sketches of Kieseritzky: F[riedrich] Amelung, “Lionel Kieseritzky,” Baltische Schachblätter, no. 2 (1890): 55–87 (including selections from Kieseritzky’s letters); Bachmann, Aus vergangenen Zeiten, vol. 1, fasc. 5, pp. 90–101 (chap. entitled “Lionel Kieseritzky”). There is also quite a bit of information about him in La Régence, 1st ser. (1849–51), edited by Kieseritzky himself.

The source of the quotation: Rev. W. Wayte, quoted in Diggle, “Pierre Charles Fournié de Saint-Amant,” p. 408. On Kieseritzky’s four-game simultaneous blindfold exhibition: “Mélanges” and “Quatres parties jouées simultanément par M. Kieseritzky, sans voir les échiquiers,” La Régence, 1st ser., 3, no. 5 (May 1851): 135 and 149–54, respectively. On earlier simultaneous blindfold exhibitions given by Kieseritzky and his contemporaries: Henry Cohen, “Un Mot sur les deux parties jouées simultanément à Glasgow, par M. Harrwitz, sans voir l’Échiquier,” La Régence, 1st ser., 1, no. 11 (November 1849): 329–30.

Quoted in Reinfeld, ed., Treasury of Chess Lore, p. xii.

Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 217, 342, 426–27.