This article, from Founders Online, should delight the chess aficionado, providing as it does the curious backstory to Franklin's didactic bagatelle. Here is a vignette that smacks of the apocryphal:
Franklin played chess with a single-mindedness that threatened to exclude all else. The story has already been told in these volumes of Mme. Brillon’s being detained in her tub while he, oblivious, played chess in her bathing room well into the night.
What gentleman would keep a lady submerged in 18th century bathwater the whole night through?
In his "Morals of Chess," Franklin informs us of the attributes requisite for good play, among them, foresight, circumspection, caution, and courageous perseverance. These attributes, learned over the 64 squares by Caïssa's docile devotees, are, he thinks, applicable to life in the large, chess being life in the small, or as Franklin phrases it, "a little life," a claim closer to the truth than Bobby Fischer's "Chess is life." Bobby, of course, would have cleaned Ben's clock in every game. But better to be a polymathic founder of a great republic than an anti-semitic Jewish monomaniac.
This patzer, however, must register his skepticism at the supposed transferability of the attributes inculcated by our mistress Caïssa to life in the large. But it's a large topic and other matters press upon me.
Also of interest: Benjamin Franklin: Diplomat, Libertine, Chess Master
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