PAUL MORPHY, THE PRIDE AND THE SORROW OF CHESS

A site about Paul Morphy____New Orleans chess world champion____prodigy, genius, tragedy
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The Pride and the Sorrow

 

The Pride and the Sorrow is a novel about famous New Orleans chess player, Paul Morphy, and his passionate but destructive love for a prostitute, Clara. A story of Creole family, fame and love, the novel depicts the high life and the underbelly of New Orleans, London and Paris.

 
 
Background

  

Above is Paul Morphy's house, 89 Royal Street, with its port-hole windows. Today it is 417 Royal Street between St. Louis and Conti Streets. Born at 1113 Chartres Street, Paul soon moves to Royal Street, where he grows up under the chess tutelage of his father Alonzo and uncle Ernest, after they discover his talent. Paul's exceptional ability alters the Morphy family, as he is projected towards the possibility of foreign fame and takes on the chess players of Europe, the best in the world.

 

New Orleans is divided by race, gender and social position, power shared unequally between politician and public, black and white, Creole and American, men and women. The Morphys cross from the upper to the lower class. They attend the opera and play chess on Sundays against visiting champions of the royal game. So too they trade in slaves with pirates, duel, drink and wandering into the red light district. So long as secrets remain, all will be well. Paul's infatuation with la belle Clara Young opens the possibility of social transgression.

  

But for how long? Paul must take a respectable career, and Clara must consider her future. Dark clouds gather over the forgotten Crescent City, and the country itself. Mardi Gras must end one day, as every game has an end. Yet uniting divided people holds more fantastical promise, it seems, in New Orleans than anywhere else... 

 

 
Above is a Creole corner house with wrought iron balconies. These buildings look the same today as they did during Paul Morphy's life and when this photograph was taken at the turn of the twentieth century.
 

The Brothels of Basin Street
 
Paul Morphy is today remembered as "the pride and the sorrow" of chess, a short-lived genius. Clarabelle and her fellow tricksters of Basin Street, New Orleans, have been forgotten by history. These image shows the townhouse brothels of New Orleans, and Basin Street as it is today. 
 
The Boy Genius
 
 The Pride and the Sorrow is the story of the famous
 New Orleans chess player, Paul Morphy, and 
 his impassioned but destructive love for a prostitute, Clara. 

 
 

The Big Easy

 
The Pride and the Sorrow takes place at a time when prostitution in the Big Easy was legally sanctioned, before child prodigies and mental illness were better understood. In the mid-nineteenth century chess matches were fought as duels, with seconds, monetary stakes and gambling, and true genius was lauded but not without jealous undercurrents. Mismatched love could be fatal.

Before modern chess competition but not before Mardi Gras, operatic funerals, destructive hurricanes, Creole slavery, Civil War Union soldiers lining Bourbon Street, or real passage d'armes fought for love and honor…a chess player caught the national interest, a gentleman with a calm passion for the royal game but a troubled obsession for an unsuitable woman.
 
 
Passion and Destruction

 

Who was Paul Morphy? Paul Morphy grew up in a wealthy Creole family in the French Quarter in 1837. He grows up to become the unofficial chess world champion, 'breaking' Europe while only twenty-one, and defeating all challengers, performing miraculous blindfold feats along the way. No one dares play him.

After astounding Paris and London, he returns to New Orleans, lionized, but misunderstood. Rooted in Paul is an irrational obsession for the red-light district crib-girl, Clara. Paul abandons chess and grows reclusive in his love. A strict amateur on the board, off the board he develops a misconceived love for a professional working girl who cannot understand his world, or he hers.
 
 
Young and Immortal