Trictrac by Arnaud Berquin

The vocabulary of Trictrac in French literature

Trictrac

Arnaud Berquin, 1747-1791

« Great was the joy of Sophie and Adrien when Monsieur de Ponthis gave them a small mahogany trictrac board, with checkers of ebony and ivory, three mother-of-pearl markers, two morocco-leather dice cups, and several pairs of pretty English dice.

The children did not yet know this game; they asked their father to give them their first lessons in it. Monsieur de Ponthis, who gladly took part in all their amusements, made it a pleasure of his own to satisfy them. He played alternately with one and with the other, and whoever was not playing watched the game so as to learn.

I shall take care not to tell you how, at first, they counted with their fingertip the number of points marked on the dice; nor shall I record the blunders they made in the beginning; I would rather tell you that within a month they knew the moves of the game quite nicely. Soon they were able to play together on their own. Sophie was, for her age, of the first rank at petit-jan; Adrien, more ambitious, set all his ambitions on the jan de retour. Little by little they reached the point of turning to their father only in the greatest difficulties.

One day he happened to be watching their game. Adrien, after a few bad moves, had lost his head, and seemed to be playing backwards. Sophie, who kept her composure beautifully, was well on her way to a bredouille.

Adrien, as he rattled the dice in his cup before throwing them, never failed to call out the points he would need to hit or to fill a point. Five and four! Six and three! Not at all — it was two and ace, a terne (double three), or a double two that came up. He stamped his foot against the ground, leapt his checkers, threw the cup after the dice, and cried out:

Sophie, on the contrary, without calling out to her dice, sought to obtain a good number of favorable ones. If she found herself disappointed in her expectations, instead of upsetting herself with useless laments, she thought about how to guard against the mishap. Sometimes she managed to draw new resources from it, and everyone was astonished to see her restore, in the blink of an eye, the most hopeless of positions.

When victory had declared itself in her favor, with all the honors of triumph, she left the room, out of modesty, to escape her glory. Adrien, ashamed of his defeat, did not dare raise his eyes to his father. Monsieur de Ponthis said to him coldly: "Adrien, you well deserved to lose this game."

- That is true, Papa, this game and every other, for playing against someone who has so much luck.

- To hear you talk, one would think that in this game it is chance alone that decides absolutely everything.

- It would have been hard for her to roll unfavorable ones, given the way she had arranged her checkers. You paid attention only to her dice, instead of noticing how she was managing her game. What would you say of a gardener who, tending his trees at random and without adapting his labors to the varieties of the seasons, complained that his fruit did not turn out as well as his neighbor's, who took care to make the most of every circumstance for the benefit of his crop?

- I am ashamed for you, to see you resort to the tricks of small minds to defend their stubbornness in a bad cause. Did you really see, in the comparison I just used, anything that keeps it from applying to the matter at hand? I want you to tell me.

- Well, no, Papa, I hadn't even thought about it. It was just so as not to seem at a loss.

- You see what one gains by such cowardly evasions. At first there was only the fault of a small lapse of fairness in the heart: but by using such a feeble subterfuge with someone reasonable, do you think he is fooled by it? He will only ever see pettiness set against reason. At first one might at least have hoped for his pity; he feels nothing now but contempt, not to mention the contempt one owes oneself.

- You know that I show no leniency toward anything that comes even remotely near injustice or baseness. Such lessons should be received only from a father; and I give them with affection, so that no one else may have occasion to give them to you with bitterness. The admission you made to me at the first instance, and with a frank movement of your soul, persuades me that you will never need another warning. Come and embrace me, Adrien.

- With all my heart, Papa! I feel that you are sparing me a great many humiliations.

- It was the only way I saw to prevent them. But let us return to the comparison I made use of. We may, I hope, draw a broader lesson from it.

- Let's see, let's see, Papa! I won't quibble unfairly with you; but if I see it limp even a little, you will surely allow me...

- I ask nothing better, my friend; I shall be delighted to see you form sounder ideas: believe me, a noble self-regard can still find some satisfaction even in admitting an error. A great love for truth is never formed without a keen sense of justice, and reason that knows how to rise again after a fall comes very close to no longer stumbling at all.

- I see that I shall still have to keep a tight rein on mine for a long while yet.

- Very well; but loosen the reins on your imagination a little to follow me: I was telling you that a trictrac player must do for his game what a skillful gardener does for his garden. If the one thinks at first only of giving his tree a fine trunk, and of properly developing its branches so as to gather more fruit from it, the other, at the outset, concerns himself only with filling his points, and arranging his checkers in an advantageous order, so as to easily complete his prime, manage it once it is made, and draw from it the greatest possible number of points. The outcome of the dice depends no more on the one than the changes of weather depend on the other; but what depends equally on both, is being on guard against the uncertainties of time, and exposing the object of their labors only with caution. The course of a game is mixed with favorable or unfavorable chances, just as that of a season is mixed with harmful or beneficial influences. Happy chances resemble those gentle warm spells that prepare fertility, and sudden reversals of fortune resemble those sudden storms that threaten young growth. The supreme skill lies in foreseeing these ups and downs; in revealing, at the right moment, the one his game, the other his espalier, when there is no danger to be feared, so as to hasten their growth, and then in carefully protecting them once the game or the weather turns stormy.

- Very good, Papa! So far everything fits together beautifully: but in a game of trictrac a good player does not only benefit from his own advantages, he also profits from his opponent's mistakes and blunders; whereas the gardener plays entirely alone in your comparison.

- That is true; but a comparison can never encompass every parallel. Mine is limited to all those I have just pointed out.

- Do you think so? Well then, I shall push it further myself: I regard all the gardeners of a village as playing among themselves to see who will bring the most fruit to market: whoever knows best how to manage his game will have fruit that is earlier, finer, and more plentiful; he will sell it better if the others, through ignorance or blunders, have less to sell; and it is he who will win the game.

- Why, indeed! That is very well put, my son. You see what benefits one can draw from such a reasonable conversation, in which one does not seek to lay traps for one another out of contemptible vanity, but rather to instruct each other mutually and to enlighten one another through an exchange of insight. I had noticed only one of the faces of the matter I was presenting to you; by drawing your gaze to it, I gave you the chance to notice one that had escaped me, and which might in turn lead me to discover others. Sciences are formed only by the gradual assembling of all the various ideas that reflection has brought forth in the mind of those who cultivate them. I compare them to lamps that would burn before reflectors of a thousand uneven facets, but each of which would cast back toward a common focus the rays it receives. It is the bundle of all these gleams, more or less bright, but all reinforced one by the other, that produces the great blaze of light one sees shining at their point of convergence: I shall be delighted if you accustom yourself early on to considering the objects that you wish to know through their relations with others that are familiar to you ; to comparing them carefully with one another, and to grasping clearly in this comparison everything that brings them together or sets them apart. This method is the most natural, the most fruitful, and the most reliable: it is the one that, applied to the exercise of the imagination, produced the Homers, the Miltons, the Ariostos, and the Voltaires; applied to the deep study of the human heart, the Shakespeares, the Molières, the Racines, and the La Fontaines; applied to the search for the origin of our ideas, the Lockes, the Clarkes, and the Condillacs; applied to the boundless observation of nature, the Aristotles, the Bonnets, and the Buffons; applied to reflection on laws, on the development of societies and empires, the Montesquieus, the Rousseaus, the Fergusons and the Mablys; and finally, applied to penetrating the mysteries of the sublime order of the universe, the Copernicuses, the Newtons, the Keplers, the Halleys, the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the d'Alemberts, and the Franklins: all of them foremost among men in the various branches of the highest learning, whose names and glory I already delight in citing to you, so as to inspire in you the noble ambition to study one day their immortal works. »

Arnaud Berquin, born in Bordeaux on 25 September 1747, died in Paris in 1791, wrote, notably between 1782 and 1783, a series of short moral tales gathered under the title The Children's Friend, including the one entitled Trictrac, published in November 1783. His work was often reprinted during the 19th century.

Updated on 4 October 2006: engraving by Léo Drouyn taken from the « Magasin Pittoresque » of 1858, depicting the house of Arnaud Berquin in Langoiran, near Bordeaux. By that time this house had undergone some alterations, including an extension.