The game of Chess is less an amusement than a vain occupation, a toilsome frivolity, which does not exercise the body, which tires the mind instead of refreshing it, which dries up and hardens the soul. It is neither a sociable game, nor a link of friendship; it is a simulacrum of war, this cruel game for which only necessity can serve as an excuse. Feeding the pride of one, and mortifying the self-esteem of the other, is the least harm and the greatest good that it can produce.

Chess Players are almost always uneasy, anxious, distrustful, inaccessible, captious, disdainful; prosperity inebriates them and swells their conceit, adversity casts them down. They never forgive each other anything, and they are continually suspicious of even the onlookers, when the ennui they inspire doesn't suffice to drive away everyone around them.

A curious observation is that the game of chess diminishes perspiration and increases urine, while most other games cause less urine than perspiration, which is much more favorable to good health. But this is the least of reproaches to be made against it: what I cannot pardon is that, far from developing useful talents, it seems to smother any grain of public virtue in the hearts of the players. The sight of a chess-board so fascinates such as number of excellent minds, that the Fatherland finds only players in subjects well-born enough to be thought able to count among its finest citizens.

Don't chess lovers delude themselves in thinking of their favorite game as an image of human life, that will teach them to better understand and carry out their duties in life? What disparities between the two!

1. In the game of chess, time does not count at all. In the course of life, it is not inconsequential to know how to make one's move quickly, if need be: to know the value of time is one of the most important sciences of man.

2. In the game of chess, one is constantly pitted against a single opponent. In the course of life, one must frequently defend oneself against several at a time, and one always has occasion to be helped by many, and to aid many reciprocally.

3. In the game of chess, the difference is always precisely from losing to winning. In human life one can have small and large losses, small and large gains, according to whether one acts more or less wisely, and to whether one finds oneself in more or less favorable circumstances.

4. The game of chess allows for thousands of combinations, but all of the same order, dependent on calculation alone and absolutely independent of chance. In the course of life, fate influences all events more or less. Wisdom and chance alternately intertwine then repel each other; they combine, separate and recombine in so many ways that there results not only an infinity of gradations, but an infinity of nuances as well.

Piquet is incomparably more spirited, more social than chess, and more proper if not to form, then at least to shape men; but no game is intended to teach us the rules of life; their use is wholly limited to innocently filling a few of life's empty spaces; and the happiest of all mortals is he who is left with the fewest such gaps.