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8 Whist, or the Aristocracy of Mystery: Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Beneath the Cards in a Game of Whist" For all their variety, card games embody a unique and unrivalled gaming idea: that of things mysterious on one side and obvious on the other, whose exercise involves unravelling the mystery from glimpses of the obvious in time to put that understanding to good use. - David Parlett, The Oxftrd Guide to Card Games WHEN BARBEY D'AuREVILLY BEGAN WRITING "Beneath the Cards in a Game of Whist" in 1849, several questions may have occurred to him involving that game. Was it true, as many claimed, that Charles X had spent the entire three days of the Paris uprising that forced him into exile so engrossed in whist that he refused to leave the table as his regime fell to pieces around him? In a more personal vein, was it true, as Barbey's family legend had it, that a game of whist had almost been responsible for his death on the day he was born in 1808? Had his mother's insistence on finishing the game she was playing before sending for a doctor as her labor began led to there being no one there who knew what to do when the umbilical cord was dangerously twisted around the infant's neck? While such questions can never be answered, they point to the public and private lore that had become associated with the game of whist in mid-nineteenth-century France. Even unanswered , they were part of the reasons why Barbey made of this story centered on whist, the gambling game preferred by polite society of the time, a symbol of transformations that had redefined the balance of power within French society at mid-century. Whist, or the Aristocracy of Mystery 151 Whist could be described as a simpler forerunner of modern bridge. Like bridge, it uses a deck of fifty-two cards, but it has neither a bidding process to determine the trump suit nor a dummy, the hand laid face up for all to see as play begins. In whist, thirteen cards are dealt to each of the four players, with the dealer's last card, the fifty-second, being turned over to determine the trump suit. Once the trump suit is established , play begins with the person to the dealer's left leading a card. Also as in bridge, whist is played as a partnership, the dealer being allied with the person directly opposite while the players to the dealer's left and right make up the opposing team. A hand of whist consists of thirteen tricks, or confrontations of four cards, with each player providing one card. The highest card in the suit led takes each trick, unless one or more of the players hold no card in the suit led and can then play a trump which will win the trick unless it happens that another trump of higher rank is also played. Scoring is usually done by awarding one point for each trick above six that is taken by one of the teams. The stakes on each point can be as high or as low as the players wish. The title of this story, Le Dessous des cartes dJune partie de whist, usually translated as "Beneath the Cards in a Game ofWhist;' points to the defining challenge of that game: discovering what is hidden from view. The unknown faces of the cards, the values hidden by their anonymous backs, create and sustain the social interaction initiated by this game. At whist, each player is a mystery for the others, a repository of guessed-at and only hypothetical forces posing questions that remain unanswered until the final trick is played. Whist creates a relation to the other people at the table unlike that generated by the immediately visible bets made in games like pharaon or trente et quarante where each wager proclaims for all to see the bettors' courage in confronting chance. Unlike the libertine's brelan, whist has no spiral of bets and raises allowing the bluff to redefine the value of one's hand. To play whist is to enter an unstable and uncentered world where the cards I hold and how I play them will win or lose as a function of their constantly changing relation to what has been played and to what might be played. Each player's dependence on partners and on a finesse at outwitting opponents makes it the...

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