Lionel Kieseritzky

KIESERITKY’S LAST GAMBIT

The Musée des Choses Déplacées, once the famous Café Brisé, can be found at the far end of a cul-de-sac called the rue Abandonné off the boulevard des Italiens in the 2^nd arrondissement of Paris.

Discreetly displayed on the wall alongside Achille Déverai’s lithographs of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo and de Lamartine is the lesser known one of Lionel Kieseritzky. The only other extant likenesses of Kieseritzky are an anonymous drawing made of a group of chess players and the famous photograph by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (more commonly known as ‘Nadar’). He had studied medicine at the Hôtel du Dieu and had written satires and essays for various Parisian publications before turning to photography.

The casual onlooker might be tempted to wander past for there is much to beguile the visitor in this enchanting museum. Amongst the many items on display in delicately lit cabinets are the score in the hand of Mozart of his comic opera (never performed) entitled ‘Boreas and Orithyia’; a Stradivarius harp whose strings are made from the gut of the wild Siberian Crane (Grus leucogeranus); Emile Littré’s translations of the Chinese ‘Yongle Dadian Encyclopaedia’ and ‘The Diamond Sutra’; an original Sainte-Croix music box which plays Chopin’s Étude number 13 (‘Mesmera’) in D Sharp; Madame de Sévigny’s letters to the young Montesquieu; Cicero’s great work ‘De Natura Risus’; and the boots worn by Marshall Ney whenever he visited his mistress Ida Saint-Elm. But it is with the lithograph that this story is concerned. At the time it was made (so one may learn from the brochure of the museum’s contents) Kieseritzky was resident in the Hôtel du Dieu, which nestles between the Quai de la Corse and Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité. This building, still in existence today, was a Hôpital d’enfermement, a place for the care of the insane. Déverai was friendly with Arnaud Trousseau, who held the Chair of Clinical Medicine at the Hôtel and various inmates were selected to pose for him as models. A few of Déverai’s more unsavoury erotic lithographs were inspired by some of those inmates, but these are in the hands of discreet private individuals and need not concern us here. It is Kieseritzky whose haughty bleak stare and semi-paralyzed face gives us pause. In the 1840s he was the monarch of the chess board in the Café de la Régence but is virtually forgotten nowadays. His name is attached to a seldom played line of the King’s Gambit opening.

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Little enough is known about Kieseritzky’s personal life. His father was a comfortably off Estate manager. Kieseritzky fils settled in Paris in 1839, having left Dorpat (now Tartu in modern Estonia) where he had taught mathematics. His departure from his home town had been under a cloud of scandal, involving a young woman’s honour and money. He was an excellent amateur pianist and composer, having staged dramatic and musical performances in Dorpat. The scores of some musical compositions in his rather crabbed handwriting are in the possession of the museum. One bears this notation by Chopin:

« Peut-être que si vous mettez des notes dans un ordre différent et la clé de la mélodie serait son plus doux à l'oreille sans formation »

Many of them seem to be unfinished (such as his Symphony based on the life of Samuel de Champlain) and they certainly have not been performed in public for several decades. Now and then such manuscripts turn up in auctions or are to be found on the second-hand bookstalls along the Seine, often folded as bookmarks in worm-eaten medical encyclopaedias. Without being regarded as eminently collectable they do catch the eye of the connoisseur.

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Amongst the collection of artefacts on display are the following written accounts of Kieseritzky’s stay in the Hôtel du Dieu:

1.

‘When the mind collapses and the brain degenerates it is a pathetic thing to see the shell that was the man. There he sits, the once famous chess master, his face upturned to the sun as its rays glide through the window like some stealthy predator come to suck out life rather than infuse his being with it. You would think that he was a mannequin in some department store’s tableau. In his prime he reigned supreme, the heir of Deschapelles and De Labourdonnais. Now he sits and waits for the great bell tower of the cathedral to boom out its daily message. This he gravely records in his notebook as though he were solving some universal mathematical conundrum. Each evening M. K- surrenders to me this diary (to call it that) for my perusal. At that moment, despite his pitiful physical state he seems to have the hauteur of a General turning over to a subaltern a briefing for the troops.

The stroke that has paralyzed his left side seems paradoxically to have stimulated his mind in certain ways and at certain times. Usually listless, he will be clothed and unclothed, bathed and examined, fed and assisted with his toilet. His stool is like rock or shrapnel. When animated he will write feverishly in his notebook and is heard muttering about ‘the small and humble star rising in the west’. It is as though he is prophesying the fate of mankind. His sole consolation is his chess set. He had been slumped over it in his lodgings when found by the police who had been called by his landlord. My assistant Foch felt that this one familiar object might be helpful in his stabilisation and therapeutic recovery. For this I hold out little hope, despite his relatively young age of 47. Recovery is as much a matter of volition as it is a neurological healing and functionality. The sad truth is that friendless and penniless M. K- has little for which to live. His debts are considerable as letters found in his lodgings reveal. ‘La Régence’, the magazine which he had published having failed, his sole source of income was the daily games of chess he would play for a fee with all comers. Debtors have already sold off those volumes and other belongings found in his apartment. Were it not for the Sisters who daily tend and feed him, he would simply starve and rot in his own filth. Faith of any sort, Catholic or Protestant, does not seem to have featured in his life. The most we are doing for this poor unfortunate is keeping him comfortable until death finally embraces him. That, in my view, will come soon…’

(Extract from the hospital log of Claude Bernard, quoted in “Bulletin de L’Académie Nationale de Médicine”.)

2.

‘I once made the rounds of his wards in the Hôtel du Dieu with Roux. I heard his lectures and saw his operations. There are many great medical men here in Paris and they treat me as an equal or colleague, not as some frail and witless inferior species. Dr. Francois Magendie is a physiologist who works here as a physician. He has been kind enough to give me access to his personal library, from which I have borrowed ‘Traité des maladies du cerveau et ses membranes’ by Antoine Bayle, ‘La Folie’ by Louis Florentine Calmeil and ‘Des Maladies Mentales’ by Jean Esquirol. Dr. Bernard has taken me under his wing. Knowing of my interest in literature he has kindly presented me with a copy of M.Viennent’s newly published ‘Mélanges des Poésies’ and his own prose drama ‘Arthur de Bretagne’. Because of my study of the workings of the diseased mind he took me to see his patient M.K-, the once famous chess player who was suffering from ‘reamollissement de cerveau’. He had a pallid complexion though at times his face would become florid. I spoke with the poor man, who was having quite an animated spell following a course of electric stimulation of the skin, as recommended for melancholia by Dr. Bucknill. He was playing chess with one of the male nurses, convinced that his adversary was a M. Staunton, an English exemplar of the game. “And how is M. Le Roi today?” asked Dr. Bernard as we approached. “Still in zugzwang, M. Count Saint-Germain,” the patient replied. His vocal chords had been affected by the stroke and he had little control over the pitch of his voice. At times he sounded like a mouse squeaking behind the skirting boards; at other times you would have thought you were hearing Levasseur. When introduced to me by Dr. Bernard M.K- gravely handed me one of his printed cards which read: ‘On presente M. Kieseritzky, Bibliothéque vivante!’ I watched as he moved the pieces with a rapidity and jerkiness occasioned by spasms which now and then rippled through his arm and shoulder. He invariable won and at the end of each game M.K- would make a notation in a book on the table by his side. When I asked what this was he told me it was a tabulation of his winnings. Of course there were no stakes, but it was his belief that his ‘winnings’ would defray the cost of his treatment…On a table beside his armchair I espied a book. It was ‘Souvenirs de la marquise de Crépuy’ by Cousin de Courchamps. The nurse told me that, precisely at noon, when the pigeons took flight from the square as the bells of Notre-Dame sounded, he was to begin reading at random from that book to the patient. This act had a strangely calming effect on M.K- should he be in agitated mood. When I enquired as to whether or not this book might be a favourite of M.K- I was informed that the book had been in the ward at the time of M.K-‘s admission and had belonged to another now deceased patient. Somehow M.K- was accepting it into whatever constructs his damaged mind retained of the world. I wondered if any other book might have the same sedating effect and Dr. Bernard told me they had once removed this book and replaced it with ‘Mémoires d’une contemporaire, ou souvenirs d’une femme sur les personages principaux de la République, du Consulat, de l’Empire.’ As soon as the nurse had begun to read from that book M.K- set up such a howling that the only way to placate him was to return to the original. I found this to be a fascinating symptom, without being clear as to of what it was a symptom…”

(Extract from a letter from Mademoiselle Clémence Juillac, first French woman to become a Doctor, to her sister Madeleine.)

3.

‘On the 18^th of May the Emperor and Empress took a walk in the Champs-Elysées. As was the custom among those attending them was M. Mépris whose sole task was to keep count of the number of paces the Emperor made. At the end of each walk the number of steps was to be added to the total already kept in a leather bound ledger. Every thousandth step warranted the ceremonial firing of cannon. During their promenade the Emperor had one of his attendants (preferably the one who did not lisp) read discreetly to him from Napoleon et la Conquête du Monde by Louis Geoffrey; and the red-haired Empress had one of her ladies recite to her from the poem Tristan et Iseut by Béroul (1835 edition edited by Francisque Michel). When, occasionally- and without missing their step- their majesties would exchange a word (it didn’t matter which word) all conversation about them would cease.

Mademoiselle Flore, a well-known variety theatre actress, died aged 63 after a long illness, but this did not trouble their majesties as they strolled.

At the Porte-Saint-Martin was performed ‘Le Vieux Caporal’ (by Alphonse d’Ennery); at the Gaité ‘Le Chien de Montargis’ (by de Pixerécourt); at the Cirque National ‘Les Pilules du Diable’ (by Ferdinand Laloue); at the Palais Royal ‘Le Bourreau des Crânes’ (by Édouard Lafargue); at the Gymnase ‘Philiberte’ (by Emile Augier); at the Odeon ‘L’Honneur et L’Argent’ (by F. Ponsard); at the Opéra Comique ‘La Fille du Regiment’ (with Mademoiselle Caroline Duprez as ‘Marie’); at the Théatre-Lyrique ‘Les Amours du Diable’ (by the Belgian composer Albert Grisar) ; and singing at the Théatre-Italien were Mademoiselle Sophie Cruvelli and Madame Anna Caroline de Lagrange.’

Their imperial majesties attended none of these, the Emperor being engaged with his current mistress Mlle Harriet Howard (who had trouble with the shoe-horn) and the Empress being closeted with her confessor Father Basilare, of the Order of Jesses.

(Extract from the diary of Sébastien Pommepois, Director of Musée des Choses Déplacées 1850-1860)

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Nobody counted the steps or breaths of those in the Hôtel du Dieu and the Emperor and Empress, along with their entourage, gave not a thought for any of this nor for the fact- unknown to them as it was to most of the inhabitants of that beautiful city, about to be rearranged into boulevards and parks by Baron Haussmann- that Lionel Kieseritzky, re-arranged by his Maker, expired on that very day, his last words being: “Ombre de Philidor, je t’évoque! Allons! Je suis échec et mat!”

As he died a volley of a dozen pigeons- whether Carneau, Jacobin or Mondain wasn’t clear- took flight from the square, in a formation known by the locals as ‘Fit Res Amarissima’. One of their number it was that muted on the Empress (who was not carrying her usual parasol made from the skins of a thousand voles specially bred for that purpose). This caused consternation to the royal bodyguard who suspected a republican assassination attempt.

‘Enlevez le chaperon de le faucon!’ cried the Emperor.

Alas one was not to hand; but who could tell the Emperor this?

As her confessor remarked to Empress Eugénie much later: ‘Mais Votre Majesté, il est que de la merde d'oiseau. Amor Volat Undique.’

© R.L.Paige 2010