The Immortal Game by David Shenk Page B

agreed to take part—and now likely realized that chess had been a diplomatic tool all along. It would continue to play an important role: under cover of social chess games, Lord Howe and Franklin embarked on a secret two-month project. Publicly, Franklin kept visiting Lady Howe’s home to play chess. Once inside, however, they schemed on how to prevent a real war.
    The chess intrigue worked perfectly; the diplomacy failed miserably. After much discussion, it became apparent that Lord Howe and his group could not win enough government support to stop the momentum toward war. Franklin was finally forced to give up. He left for America on March 20, 1775.
    His boat trip lasted six weeks; the spark of war did not take even that long. Two weeks before he landed, in the early morning of April 19, the Revolutionary War began with Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord.
    A year later, after helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, Franklin, now aged seventy, traveled to Paris to negotiate treaties and secure a critical military alliance. There, he was thrilled to be surrounded by an overwhelming abundance of top-quality chess players. “I rarely go to the operas at Paris,” Franklin said in designating chess as his cultural priority. “I call
this
my opera.” He played whenever he could with colleagues and admirers, including games in the boudoir of his friend Anne-Louise Boivin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy as she took exceptionally long baths.
             
    C HESS PLAY was exploding. Throughout Europe and Russia, crowds packed chess cafés to play friends and strangers. Men and women of means, leisure, and intellectual ambition played chess just as princes and knights had centuries earlier, but now many aspired to excel at it. Much of the surging popularity and higher quality of play was due directly to the Italian master Gioacchino Greco’s new popular style of chess guide. In the early seventeenth century, Greco had become the first chess instructor to chart out entire games in order to demonstrate the trajectory of various openings. That led to a dramatic public breakthrough. In the same way that
National Geographic
magazine made anthropology more accessible to a wider public in the twentieth century, Greco’s full-game illustrations gave the seventeenth-century public a tangible hold on what a strategic chess game could look and feel like. The English poet Richard Lovelace later paid tribute to Greco’s games (as published by the Englishman Francis Beale in 1656):

    Men that could only fool at fox and geese
    Are new made polititians [
sic
] by thy book *16

    With Greco’s chess guides, the restless energy of the Enlightenment, and an increase in available leisure time, all of Europe now had a growing chess culture. In France, the mix was particularly combustible. Greco’s games were published there in forty-one separate editions, and chess became a vital part of the Parisian landscape, played avidly in just about every café in the city.
    Around 1740, the most ambitious players in Paris began to gather daily at Café de la Régence, a dingy bistro on the rue Saint-Honoré near the Louvre. Chessboards there were rented by the hour, with a higher fee at night to pay for the candlelight. The Régence quickly became not just the most popular chess café in France, but the undisputed center of the chess universe. Improbably, it stayed that way for a long time. “The Régence represents the sun, round which the lesser spheres of light revolve,” reported the English chess author and collector George Walker a century later, in 1840. “It is the centre of civilised Europe, considered with regard to chess. As Flanders in days of yore was the great battle-ground…at which nations engaged in the duello, so for above a hundred years has this café served as the grand gladiatorial arena for chess-players of every country and colour.”
    Part of the electric quality of the