Bezique

La Partie de Bésigue -Gustave Caillebotte 1880

 Bezique - History

Bezique was originally a French card game called Besigue, a member of a large family of earlier ‘trick and marriage’ melding games such as Marjolet, Briscan and Cinq-Cent. It had become a popular pastime in the fashionable gaming halls of Paris by the 1860s. Some sources say the earliest version of the game known as Besi or Bezy came from the Limousin area of South-West France in the early 1820s, and that it reached Paris about twenty years later. The game maintained a strong hold In France throughout the Second Empire and well into the period of the Third Republic. The French novelist Emile Zola discovered while researching his novel Nana (1880), that courtesans and actresses of the Parisian theatrical demi-monde in which Nana is set still liked to fit a game of Bezique after lunch into their busy schedules.

David Parlett in his History of Card Games (OUP-1991) notes that the introduction of Bezique into Britain is unusually well documented. William Pole writing in the December 1861 edition of Macmillans Magazine recommended Bezique as the third and newest of three card games for readers to amuse themselves with over the Christmas period (The other two were the older games of Quadrille and Piquet which Pole conceded were ‘both much out of mode’ but deemed eminently worthy of revival). Pole actually referred to the game as Basique which was a more common spelling at first, before Bezique was adopted as the standard name in Britain.

Bezique was documented again in Geoffrey Pardon’s 1863 ediiton of Hoyles Games Modernised, and later the same year a small monograph on ‘Besique’ attributed to J.R.W also appeared in print. The introduction to the latter credits the patronage of H.R.H. Lord Alfred the Duke of Edinburgh and second son of Queen Victoria as having been influential in establishing the popularity of Bezique in England. In much the same way that his father Albert’s interest in playing Patience, and his mother Queen Victoria’s passing interest in playing the new American game of Poker helped to establish a vogue for these in polite society, so Lord Alfred’s taste for the new game he had discovered in the salons of Paris helped to establish a fashion for playing Bezique in the drawing rooms of Britain as well.

The London firm of Charles Goodall began producing luxury box-set editions of cards and markers for ‘The Royal Game of Bezique’ in 1868 complete with a rule book credited to ‘Camden’ with an endorsement saying ‘Patronised By His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh’. A second edition was published in 1869, and the company were already up to a tenth edition by the end of 1870 which indicated quite how popular this box-set had become.

Berkley writing in 1901 says that the game had caught on by 1869, and the well known authority on Whist ‘Cavendish’ (Henry Jones) produced a monograph on Bezique in 1870 that rapidly went into a second printing. Not everyone was pleased with the new game however. Lord Aldenham writing in the Westminster Papers in 1870 dismisses Bezique as “that slowest of slow games” and tried to promote his own long-standing idiosyncratic interest in reviving the old game of Ombre at the expense of the new fad for Bezique.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) the author of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking-glass published a poem called  The Three Voices (21st November 1869) which includes the verse

He felt it was his turn to speak,

And, with a shamed and crimson cheek,

Moaned "This is harder than Bezique!"

which once again chimes with the year of 1869 being the one by which Bezique had found a popular following in Britain.

Bezique which was originally a game for two played with a 64 card deck soon began to evolve more complex versions. In 1880 the Paris card clubs agreed upon a new set of rules for a four pack version known as Bezique Japonais, and the English Portland club followed suit in 1887 but renamed it Rubicon Bezique. A six pack version known as Chinese Bezique was created in 1899 and an eight pack version followed a year or so later. A three handed version played with three decks was known by 1890, as was a version known as Fildinski or ‘Polish Bezique’. The latter had become so popular in Britain that Thomas De La Rue began producing box sets of Bezique with printed rules and markers for both versions of the game. The Victoria & Albert Museum has a box set for Polish Bezique dated to 1901 in its collections.

The unique and distinctive feature of Polish Bezique that sets it apart from all other versions of the game is that melds are scored from cards you have already won in tricks, as opposed to cards in hand that you are waiting to play to tricks. There is some mystery as to quite where this version of Bezique came from. The name often given to it Fildinski (also given as Fildniski in Encyclopaedia Britannica) doesn't appear to be a Polish word at all. Cavendish first published A Pocket Guide To Polish Bezique in 1873 for Thomas De La Rue, but his notes shed litlle light on the origin of the variant. According to Cavendish, Polish Bezique was normally played 2000 pts up because the scoring tends to be heavier in this version of the game. It is sometimes also known as ‘Open Bezique’. A four-handed version of Polish Bezique is played as a partnership game using either four or five Piquet packs. Quite a number of players regard Fildinski as a superior game to standard Bezique.

Winston Churchill was a great fan of Bezique who favoured the six pack version known as ‘Chinese Bezique’. He liked to play it with his wife Clemmie, and also at his clubs, and was regarded as a considerable expert at this version of the game. Churchill was once said to have remarked that winning the war was easier than managing the end game at Chinese Bezique. His love of Bezique is documented in his private letters as far back as 1895 when he was 21 years old and newly commissioned as a 2nd Lt. in the 4th Hussars at Aldershot. In those days he played Whist and Bezique. In later life he experimented with other games, including memorably Stud Poker with US President Harry Truman in 1946, but he always favoured Bezique over any other. His daughter-in-law Pamela recalled sitting up with him all night playing Bezique with her as Churchill waited for news of the Allied landings in Sicily on 10 July 1943. The six-pack version of Bezique is played by dealing 12 cards apiece, and the Rubicon is set at 3000 points. Trumps are established by the first Marriage, sequences can be scored in plain suits, and a player can claim for a carte-blanche if dealt a hand with no court cards.

Another famous set of Bezique players were the royal Imperial Romanoff family of Russia. In their final exile at Yekatarinburg, Csar Nicholas, the Tsaritsa Alexandra and their five children often played Bezique together to pass the time. The final entry in Tsaritsa Alexandra’s diary on 17 July 1918, just a few hours before the family were executed reads “Played Bezique with Nicholas, to bed 10&1/2.  —15 degrees”.

The French novelist George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin 1804 -1876) was yet another devotee of the game. In her letters she recounts that while living in Gargilesse in the Loire, she often used to play Bezique for an hour or more in the early evening before proceeding to stay up for the the rest of the night writing.

The19thC English novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) who wrote The Woman in White  and The Moonstone was said to have been fond of playing Bezique, as was the poet and writer Christina Rossetti (1830-1869) according to several biographical notes. She was introduced to the game by her brother’s friends the painter William Bell Scott (1811-1890) and his companion Alice Boyd whose family owned Penkill castle.

Bezique found its way over the Atlantic to the USA. A box version was published by toymaker Albert Swift in 1865, and it was mentioned in print by Dick & Fitzgerald’s Modern Pocket Hoyle (1868). Bezique however was quickly eclipsed however by a related German game that became known as Pinochle, a mispronounciation of Binokel, which was a similar game originally popular in the Wûrtemburg area of Germany. This game which was originally played with a 24 card deck that became doubled to 48 cards swiftly evolved into a variety of forms. Two-handed Pinochle is almost identical to Bezique, but three-handed Pinochle and four-handed partnership Auction Pinochle are quite different games that have more in common with Bid Whist. By 1945 Pinochle was the fourth most popular game in the USA, especially among Jewish and germanic immigrants, although many of the latter subsequently preferred playing the newer and more sophisticated German game of Skat. Pinochle was later displaced in popularity by Gin Rummy and later Canasta in USA but still retains a following, especially in urban blue-collar circles, and in more rural areas.

One odd account of the origins of Bezique and Pinochle can be found in the American Hoyle of 1864. The editor ‘Trump’ claims that Bezique originated in Sweden when a schoolmaster called Gustav Flacker entered a public competition for a cash prize offered by the monarch for a new card game. The schoolmaster’s creation supposedly won and was called Flackernuhle in Sweden before becoming popular in Germany and France. Some other secondary souces say that the Swedish schoolmaster actually lived in Scotland  - The whole story appears to be an absurd fiction and unfounded. The American author Charles Scarne repeated it however, and some US sources uncritically cite this fiction as an authority. Swedish researchers who have examined Swedish archives can find no trace of any such story.

The account of Bezique in the American Hoyle  is quite orthodox in other respects and mentions one variant not documented elsewhere called Bezique Panache which has a requirement that a holding of four Aces, Kings, Queens or Jacks must be a holding of four cards of identical ranks in four different suits in order to score.

The popularity of Bezique led to several attempts by entrepreneurs to market similar looking rival games that used special proprietary packs of non-standard cards. The earliest such attempt was a game called Zetema launched in 1871 by Messrs Joseph Hunt & Sons. Zetema used a special 65 card pack created by adding an entire duplicate suit, and was designed for three players. Six cards were dealt to each player. The game was 300pts, and players scored either by making Bezique type melds in hand, or by making a ‘Zetema’ achieved by playing the fifth card of a rank to the table where the discards were grouped as community melds. Zetema was rapidly forgotten, and was only rediscovered as a Victorian curiosity in 1969 by games researcher Sid Sackson.

In 1891 a colourful boxed game called Khanhoo was marketed by the well known Charles Goodall company. Devised by the Sinologist and HBM Consul Sir William Henry Wilkinson, Khanhoo was actually based on a real Chinese card game dating from the Ming dynasty  called kan-hu ( 看虎 )  or “Watching the the tiger” in mandarin.  The English adaptation like Zetema also used a special 65 card deck. The game involved a mixture of trick taking and meld declaration, but like Zetema, Khanhoo never achieved any popular following.

There is a form of solitaire known as ‘Bezique Patience’ although it is usually better know nowadays as ‘Persian Patience’. The only connection to Bezique is that it uses the same 64 card deck that ordinary Bezique does, i.e. a double pack of two 32 card decks from which the  2.3.4.5.6 in each suit have been removed. The patience is played  by dealing out all 64 cards face-up in a tableau of eight colums of eight overlapping cards. The aim is to free the eight Aces which are placed as foundations above the tableau. The Aces are built upwards in suit, while cards can be moved and built downwards in alternating red/Black colours on the  tableau columns. Only the bottom-most card of each column can be moved, and only one card at a time. Play any foot card to an empty space.Three deals are allowed. (Don’t forget there are no  2.3.4.5.6 cards, the foundations build up in suit as A.7.8.9.T.J.Q.K).

There is an impressive array of Bezique related memorabilia to be found online. Highly decorative box sets of cards and score markers can be found that were manufactured in places as far apart as Krishnagur in the Indian Raj, and the cities of Meiji era Japan. Elegant Bezique packs were printed not only in French suited designs, but also in the distinctive Spanish sword-coin-cup-staff suit packs used in Valencia and other parts of the Iberian peninsula.The game was known across the whole of fashionable Europe in the 19th century,  including Scandanavia and the Russian empire.

One unusual modern centre of popularity for Bezique is in the French speaking Caribbean island of Haiti. A version of the game known as Bésigue Haïtien is still widely played there as a form of four pack Rubicon Bezique with the addition of four jokers. Nine cards are dealt to each player. The local players in Haïti believe the game was originally invented by a man called Charles Bezique. An account in French is available at   http://planetehaiti.com/ayitim/besigue-haitien/

Bezique has maintained a small but  loyal following into the modern internet age. There are apps and online game websites that enable people to play networked games of Bezique with each other, or against a computer, but it remains a niche hobby that appeals most often to card connoiseurs and historians interested in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

September 20

Tomorrow we arrive at Port Said. The weather is beginning to get hot and the troop decks are awful. They say we shall experience great heat in the Red Sea, I feel sure I shall stand it well - being very fat with lots to come off. Will you send me 1 dozen packs of Rubicon bezique white (Turf Club) cards? We have none but horrid green ones - very stiff. 

(Winston Churchill  -  Letters 1896)