In the 1840s, French chess lost not only Labourdonnais but also an important correspondence match and the second international championship match. In the previous decade the Paris players had twice defeated the London players in correspondence games, that is, games played by mail, necessarily lasting many months, in which the moves were decided upon through consultation among the members of a team. But the Paris players’ century-long tradition of superiority proved to be a dead letter in the mid-1840s, when they lost two correspondence games to the Budapest team of József Szén, the victor over Labourdonnais in 1838, Vincenz Grimm, the pianist, and János Löwenthal.^[80] In 1843, Howard Staunton of England stormed the fortress of the Café de la Régence itself, defeating Saint-Amant there eleven games to six, with four draws, in the second match to be generally recognized as a championship. Staunton carried the flag of European chess back to London, where both Philidor and Labourdonnais had found their last refuge, and where the first international championship tournament, with not just two but a whole field of contenders for the championship, was to be held in 1851.

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 a broader societal context, out of the Café de la Régence period emerged the idea that chess greats are cultural heroes. A prominent French poet wrote that Labourdonnais had avenged Waterloo with his victory over MacDonnell in 1834. The French government bestowed a pension on Labourdonnais for his contribution to the national culture. Since then, becoming a great chess player has been regarded as a great accomplishment, without qualification. And one need not be a great chess player to justify taking a serious interest in the game: Playing chess has become a legitimate activity in and of itself. Prefaces to chess books no longer argue for the game as they once did, adducing such reasons as that it teaches military science or moral values. Arguments for chess, no longer deemed necessary, are no longer made. The development of the idea that playing chess is self-justifying ran parallel to or perhaps was an offshoot of the development of the idea of art for art’s sake. It reached its epitome at the end of the nineteenth century in the formula of Ernst Cassirer: “What chess has in common with science and fine art is its utter uselessness.” ^[87]

Simultaneous blindfold chess exhibition, given by Paul Morphy at the Café de la Régence. Courtesy of the John G. White Collection, Special Collections, Cleveland Public Library. Photograph by the Cleveland Public Library Photoduplication Service.

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.