Piercing
the deep darkness of ancient ages,
The game, child of boredom, was born with the world;
One cannot doubt
this fact in any way.
The first two idle men, sons of Ham
or Japheth,
Who met each other in the deserts of Arabia
When the waters of heaven made
our earth amphibious,
Invented the game, upon a beaten path,
With flat pebbles and furrowed sand.
The
Greeks discovered, by a stroke of genius,
The game of the goose, hatched near soft
Ionia,
Where, leaning on a gentle lawn, the players
Rolled nonchalantly
the ivory of their dice.
The
old Romans lost their last few coins
At quoits, at mourre, at the game of the discus-throwers
;
And these conquerors of the Greeks and the Carthaginians
Amused themselves, like Aesop,
with the clatter of nuts.
When
besieged Ilium granted
a pause
To its thousand battles, the inventor Palamedes
Carefully carved likenesses of bone,
And to charm away the boredom of the Greeks
at Tenedos,
While awaiting the day of a new attack,
He played chess with
the sons of Ithaca,
The soldiers of Larissa,
weary of assaults,
And the seafaring folk who guarded the ships.
One
day the great Colbert,
whom France reveres,
Launched a very severe edict against
games:
The gambler remained forbidden for a while;
Then, seeking a way to dodge the edict,
He invented the Fly,
a rather useless pastime
Today, now that the Stock
Exchange opens its colonnade,
And lansquenet,
like a dish, holds its rank
At the public table, open to the restaurant.
So
they gathered around a dark tablecloth,
Fifteen, forty, twenty, ten,
no matter the number;
Each player took a little honey, very little,
But always enough for this strange game.
He
kept it in sight, level with his place;
One would have thought them children
on a classroom bench,
When, from atop his lectern, an irritated
pedant
Commands silence and stillness.
It
was forbidden to open one's mouth;
But one could open one's
eyes, follow a fly
In its flight, and each would beg heaven
To
send this insect to his portion of honey;
For,
once the honey was brushed by the long-awaited wing,
The players, as they left, counted
the sum owed
To the lucky owner who was favored
By that
capricious flight, or that final kiss.
Colbert's
henchmen would come raiding;
But no trace of gambling
was ever found;
And all they found was a broken beehive,
And solemn-looking thinkers gazing at the wainscoting.
II
The
child in the cradle plays, and man goes on playing,
And when tiresome old age has
come,
And when, feet nailed to the floor of his house,
He has
only a dark, bare wall for a horizon,
The game comes to soften his domestic boredom.
In
chess battles he shows his tactics,
On the resounding backgammon board he shakes his
fists,
With three opponents plays whist to ten points,
Pursues,
at piquet, an elusive repic,
Draws out for twenty
rounds the American Boston;
And finally, on the checkerboard, pushes
with a trembling finger
A black piece, victor over a white opponent.
Often
even the game's habitual routine
Seems so respectable in its regularity,
That Death, forgetting an old man, dares not
Disturb him, in his game, by
the hour of death.
Death
sometimes acts in a civil manner
We all knew Monsieur
de Barneville;
He lived a hundred years of a golden existence;
He had, at
the Procope
listened to Philidor,
In the age when that great master, instructing the audience,
Would tell what fortunate mate decides a victory.
Barneville,
a joyous centenarian old man,
Wrapped in the folds of a silken overcoat,
Leaving the Stock Exchange at the hour of the bond payments,
Would come to our
club in eighteen forty,
Punctual as a hand on a Bréguet
dial;
And his powerful mind, which nothing could tire,
Pursued the marvel
of some new checkmate;
He had no time to die, for, the evening before
Suspending the game halfway through,
He would always say: the game
continues tomorrow.
And
so he did not die; one evening at his home,
He returned in good health, always
at the same hour,
Fell asleep, quite joyful, in the sleep of the blessed,
And the calm old man never woke again.
III
The
game, alas, is good only for charming old age,
And the bitter regrets
that the past leaves us,
And even so, this amusement
must
Never give the heart the fever of a torment;
The
best game is always the one that steers clear
Of the stormy hazards of
dice or cards,
Enriches one's pride, and is not so demanding
As to ask the loser for his money.
Happy
is he who knows how to play with this one goal,
Who knows how to love the game
with a platonic love,
And, innocent victor of a wager without coin,
Has
never loosened the purse-strings of the vanquished!
How
many cozy parlors, where in winter, as a family,
Before the round table,
and near the glowing fire,
A patriarch, having invited his neighbor,
Puts on the green baize half of a six-sou coin,
And, the better to spare
his future victims,
Raises to twenty tokens the stake of five centimes!
These
are the only happy ones! They have at every moment
The gentle torment
of the persecuting game;
They love, by the candlelight of quiet evenings,
To leaf through the fan of beloved cards,
And when the finished game slips
from their hands,
Nothing brings a regret to the calm next day.
CARDS
There
once was a king, full of valor,
Skilled at wielding either dagger
or lance,
At beating the Normans, at taking a stronghold,
But who,
within a palace, was bored to death.
Each
day he would say, as he wandered the town,
To the viscount, steward of
his civil list:
« My dear fellow, do invent something; I believe
A game must be created to amuse kings
I
have no amusement but that of the hunt,
But, riding on horseback through
a wood,
Chasing the stag, a phantom always appears
In the stag's place, at the edge of the forest. »
That
evening the courtier racked his brains
To invent a game of a new
kind,
He dreamed of it that night, and came the next day
To present
himself to the king, cards in hand.
Honor
to Charles
the Sixth! Twenty epic poems
Have celebrated this king who gave us the spades,
The clubs, the diamonds, the hearts, the aces, the tens,
The jacks of the heroes of the age of Amadis,
The
four august kings, with their four queens,
All bearing the names given
by their godmothers;
Rather poorly painted portraits; but, after hard times,
Many a painter has sold all his own for their sake!
A flying
mosaic, which, beneath a skillful finger,
Slowly unfolds into a moving fan,
A gallery spread out upon the telltale table,
It has charmed,
ever since that royal creator,
By a divine secret that no gaze can fathom,
The relentless boredom that afflicts this world!
Beneath
the crushing roof of a dark prison;
On the ship becalmed by
a still horizon;
In the hut where winter, pale with fury,
Imprisons a traveler at the polar zone;
Through
nights of bivouac, as long as the nights themselves,
Everywhere, in short, where
the demon of boredom comes,
Playing cards, helpful spirits,
Softening ills, calm the sleepless hours,
By stealing from the clock, where
the hand dozes,
Those hours that life was borrowing from death.
Cards
still hold a magical mystery
Impossible to describe, and one
I cannot keep silent,
For I would fear seeing rise up at this very moment
Before my distracted eyes, the shade of Lenormand.
Despite
the freethinkers, those dogmatic rhetoricians,
Who chill the mind
with mathematics,
Calculate everything coldly, and dismiss as fiction
The wonders born of the necromancer's art,
Cards, in the hands of skillful
matrons,
Have among us replaced the oracle of the Sibyls :
The
future often holds true to what they predicted.
When
the magic finger, upon the table, traces
The magic arabesque before the eyes
of a lover
Whom heartache torments in her alcove,
If the
queen of spades or diamonds falls squarely
upon the cloth beside
a fair-haired king,
The Sibyl triumphs; one cannot doubt her;
The cards
have betrayed some unfaithful love.
The heart had every right
to nurse its torment,
And the future always proves the lover wrong.
What
is more, when a man alone, sorely weary of living,
Has read the last book
in his library,
He takes a full deck of cards; he shuffles them,
And like a necromancer, in the night of the sabbath,
He murmurs cabalistic
words under his breath,
And suddenly, rising to prophetic heights,
He predicts for himself, the evening before, card in hand,
All the misfortunes
he must suffer the next day.
DOMINOES
In
the realm of games, those amusements of men,
Nothing new is invented anymore,
in this century of ours,
On winter evenings, with their ever-long tedium,
When fashion banishes a game from our drawing rooms,
It calls
back an old one, from the former repertoire,
Whose memory the valets
have kept,
To charm their leisure hours, endlessly renewed,
In
deserted mansions, far from absent masters.
Their collection
is quite short; a single line lists them
These old games: écarté,
lansquenet and l'hombre,
And these three revenants, idols of the servants,
Climb back up from the servants' hall
to the drawing room of the mansion.
Ever
since the convents, the pious monasteries,
Lost their solitary monks
upon French soil,
After the children of the demolished cloisters
Were, before our eyes, buried in shadow,
No more games have been invented;
in the charterhouses
Once so full of happy lives
;
In the warm cell, and in the holy cloisters
That good Saint
Francis peopled with Capuchins,
Games were created, adorned with a Latin name,
Well-devised games,
which still charm us;
The
domino comes to us from there, that charming game
Dedicated to the Lord
by a German monk,
Who, to excuse his absence from matins,
Would utter, while playing, three Latin syllables.
This game
always offers innocent leisure;
The club regular plays his hundred-point game,
After
dinner, before the resonant little table,
Where the mocha he adores
sends up its steam.
The
bourgeois, foe of the libertine café,
Cultivates this game too,
adorned with its Latin name,
The sailor rattles it on board; it is revered
In a parlor peopled by an octogenarian couple;
And more than one
Philemon
adores his Baucis
Because she has kept her love of the double-six.
TRICTRAC
Trictrac
came to us from the convents, and history
Tells us that the abbots, leaving the refectory,
Would go to the parlor to indulge in this game,
Wagering their beards upon
the table.
That
is where the saying game for game came from.
They played
every day, except Sunday,
And since ducats, louis,
sequins
Were quite unknown in Franciscan convents,
Disdainful
of coin, and living on alms,
The loser would bow his venerable
head,
And braving the mocking smiles of the witnesses,
Would grant
a hair of his beard to the winner.
This
peculiar stake, worthy of monasteries,
Still continues in the eves
of military life,
But our young soldiers, lacking the adornment
That
the chin used to pay for this amusement,
Carve,
before the table where the candle smokes,
Those wooden
clothes-pegs, with their cruel grip,
Which, amid the conscripts, the crafty
veterans
Gather, laughing, upon aquiline noses.
BILLIARDS
Billiards
is the king of noble games of skill,
For it, the young man's eyes are full
of tenderness,
And to judge the shots, drowsy old men,
Form a circle
around its baize.
Twenty
revolutions, since our youth,
Have shaken up the mass shot and
the carom.
There was a happy time, a golden age of billiards,
Mocked by the young man, adored by the old,
When the innocent cue, fresh
out of the cupboard,
Untouched by chalk, would ring upon
the ivory,
And into an old net, the pocket's ornament,
Amid the
applause, would send a smoking ball.
At
last Maingault
appeared, and of the old-fashioned cue,
He made a sacrifice to the Romantic billiards
;
Maingault had, in his eye, the set-square and compass!
And the
old men said, this will never catch on.
He
came to dethrone the mass shot; he made us believe
In the fabulous effects
of his chalk upon the ivory;
The innovator, driven by the zeal of art,
Tore out the old nails that bordered the table;
He narrowed the circumference
of the six over-large pockets;
Fixed the cushions upon
elephant-foot legs,
And, delivering the old rulebook to a thousand bonfires,
Granted his charter to the people of the cafés.
There
was long protest. The friends of the old ways,
Refusing to touch a heretical
cue
And to sacrifice at the altar of Moloch,
Widened the pocket, and kept the mass shot.
These
pure-hearted men would go to solitary clubs,
To bury the mysteries
of the orthodox cue;
Far from mockers, and sure of not being
troubled,
Only, by fluke, would they make doubles
;
They practiced the same and the Russian with five balls,
And swooned with joy over the game of skittles.
Vain
efforts! Youth, leaving the old men to their A B C D
Took up the chalk technique instead
And,
moving from theory to practice,
Nipped the round ivory ball under the magnetic blue chalk,
Caromed off the longest angles,
And made the ball advance
backward.
Alas
! Like Columbus, who discovered a world;
Like the one who said that the
earth was round;
Like Fernand Cortès, whose thunder set ablaze
The pyres in the lands dear to Montezuma,
Maingault did not shine
long upon this arena,
Upon this new kingdom where his cue had been queen.
His
art was surpassed, his name grew dim;
Must I, for my
readers, list them here,
Those marvelous players, Nanteuil, Romain,
Eugène?
By daylight, as by the flame of the hydrogen lamp,
All Paris has seen them, raising billiards
And the carom to
the level of an art.
The
fatal hour tolled for the classic players.
Then, far from the capital,
was exiled
The Gothic arsenal of the old bourgeois game,
The old cloths
were sent to village auctions;
The country houses, where the man of leisure
grows bored,
Shut away in a wood, seasoned with rain,
Opened their parlors to the exiled billiard tables,
All covered in cloths
that the oil had striped like a tiger's coat.
Even
today, when chance leads you,
On a Sunday, to the parlor
of some rustic estate,
One beholds, seized by a long fit of joy,
These ancient billiard tables, beloved of our forebears.
These
three ivory balls, rounded into an oval,
And these good country folk, living
parodies,
Who gravely push cue and heel
Across cloths crisscrossed
with hills and valleys.
MOURRE
This
game, recorded by no academy,
Strikes one, at first glance, by
its economy;
It is revived from the Greeks or the Romans,
And to play it well, one needs only two hands.
To
the golden age, this popular game is linked;
It reigns in the ports
of fair Italy,
Where the players, showing four hands at
once,
Call out, at the top of their voices, the number of their fingers.
The
cabin boys who go off to fetch water from the fountains,
The sailors, perched
atop the yardarms,
The idle helmsmen, the solemn Levantines
Serve
as an audience for these childish games.
The
traveler, seeing the crowd gathered,
And two gladiators bent
low in the fray,
Rushes over to record, pencil in
hand,
Some incident that chance has thrown in his path,
And finds these
players, who, eyes ablaze,
Put their whole soul into the tips of their ten fingers,
Utter sharp cries, plant themselves like a compass,
Threaten each other
with their fists, yet never touch.
This page is a translated archive of the original Académie des jeux oubliés, created on July 1, 2026, from the French original at salondesjeux.fr.
