Franklin’s Gambit
One evening in the fall of 1777, Benjamin Franklin was sitting at the chess table, deep in a game with close friend and neighbor Louis-Guillaume Le Veillard. Le Veillard was the mayor of Passy, the elegant Parisian suburb where Franklin resided. The Sage of Philadelphia had arrived the year before, commissioned by Congress to negotiate an alliance with France, but seemed to spend more time absorbed in pastimes like the one before him than engaged in diplomacy.
The players had an audience of one. As was her habit, Franklin’s mistress, Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy, was watching the game from her enclosed bathtub, whose wooden cover preserved her modesty. The play lasted into the small hours. Immersed so long, Brillon’s skin turned prunish, later prompting her lover to apologize by post. “I’m afraid that we may have made you very uncomfortable by keeping you so long in the bath,” Franklin wrote. “Never again will I consent to start a chess game with the neighbor in your bathing room. Can you forgive me this indiscretion?”
“No, my good papa, you did not do me any ill yesterday,” Madame Brillon replied. “I get so much pleasure from seeing you that it made up for the little fatigue of having come out of the bath a little too late.”
IN HIS LIFELONG ENTHUSIASM FOR CHESS, Benjamin Franklin had company among his fellow revolutionaries. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison competed avidly in four-hour games. In a pen-and-ink sketch artist John Trumbull showed George Washington and Israel Putnam at the board. But Franklin stood head and shoulders above them all, not only as a player of the game but as a writer on the subject. The practice and discipline that chess instilled in
