The complete book of solitaire and patience games [antikvár]

It b na tural to soppose that solitalre games preceded card games for two or more players. We can easily imagine how solitaire grew out of the rites of dealing and selection, the pictorial layouts, of fbrtune-telling, and dfvination is tbe first known use of the tarots. Akii this b conjecture. The historical record, none too certain in respect to games and sports generally, is paiticulariy wanting as to solitaire. The uWmate origin of playing caids is a matter of scholariy disputa Bot it is agreed that they were introduced to northem Europe, probably from Italy, during the fourteenth century. We even know the prindpaJ rules of game played at that time, tarocchini or tarok. (It survives to this day fai central Europe.) Bot not until the nineteenth century, It seems, did anyone trouble to record the rules of a solitaire game fór posterity. A news Ietter dated 1816 reports that Napoleon Bonaparte, in ezile at St. Helena, occupies his time in "playing patience." This is the earliest reference to patience as a game unearthed by the Oxford English Dictionary. It is evident that "patience" was no neologism, but on the contrary, was in such famüiar usage as to require no eluddation. We ourselves have found a reference to the playing of patience in Tolsto/s War and Peace, in a scené supposed to have taken place in 1808. We believe that Tolstoy was most careful in historical allusions; this reference can die more readily be accepted as not anachronistic since Tolstoy was hfanself a passionate devotee of solitaire. There are probably much earlier references in French Bterature. The earliest BngHh books on patience appear to have drawn on French sources; the vexy naraes of the games are almost aü French-La Belle Lude, Les Quatre Coins, LHorloge, La Niveniaise, La Loi Salique, Le Carré NapoKon, etc.