Life is an extremely difficult part to play and greatly subject to chance.

This point of view is the favorite idea of this book: from it comes all its developments. To play with talent, following the rules and making no false moves: this is the art of life, but if the science of the game is unified, the contests are very varied. We take the greatest and most beautiful:

There is the game of politics; the game of love; the games of fortune; and the game of celebrity.

Each of these games is more or less difficult, and demands talents of a particular order. To know how to play one: this is much. To know how to play them all: this is the unity of science; it is the supreme science. Thus, if one aims of seeking advice here, the author begins by asking: What game do you want to play?

Chance holds such a great place in life that, from a certain side, there is only chance. You are beautiful, well made; you bear a distinguished name; you will be rich; you are what one calls born with the trumps [atouts] in your game; and one can say the same of education, manners, natural aptitudes and talents, because it is still chance that provides them. To succeed or fail are practically fated, because one succeeds:

1) because one has in oneself the qualities that act upon society and people; [and]

2) because one is served by circumstances, and one fails due to contrary causes. "Circumstances" are all the events, fortunate or unfortunate; [they are] all the successful occasions that presented themselves in life, independently of one's will.

From the preceding, one can envision chance from the same point of view that Catholic spiritualism envisions sanctifying grace: a Christian (no matter his or her merits) cannot, one says, win his salvation without the help of grace; thus, the ambitious would not be able to make their way without the help of chance. However, fortunate chances are less unequally distributed than one supposes in general. Aptitude in profiting from them is what distinguishes individuals and it is here that one encounters the well played [le bien jouer]. There are men who by an organic ineptitude always turn their backs on fortune.

The diversity of chance is infinite. Some chances come soon, others later; sometimes they occur slowly and successively, other times they act suddenly and directly on destiny. Perhaps there is no more curious example of the pure influence of chance than the following historical fact that we have noted as one of the types of the genre:

Under the Regency, there was a certain Chavigny, an obscure schemer, who had made useless efforts to worm his way into court. Having not obtained any favor, and tired of war, he left the place and departed for Holland, where family affairs summoned him. Arriving at The Hague, he fell sick and was forced to stop at an inn. Those who have traveled in these countries know that one is served there by innkeepers who are quite far from cruel. Nursed with the greatest devotion by the young woman of the inn at which chance had wanted him to stop, Chavigny -- once cured -- contrived to be . . . recognized. One can see if such an adventure is common; but how could a fortune be obtained from it? Here is how: one day when he was with the young lady in a room of the inn, he heard the lady of the house coming towards that room, calling for her servant. At that moment, the servant was leaving and closing the door of the room, which was precisely the one that her lady had ordered her to prepare for two foreign ministers who were to arrive and wanted to eat in private. Impossible to make Clavigny leave. She imagined hiding him in an closet and locking him in.

It was time. With difficulty, she got the key that the two travelers brought. Believing themselves to be alone, they carried on, without distrust, a political intrigue that was the goal of their meeting: the affair was not slight; it was a question of a conspiracy of which the object was nothing less than carrying off the regency for the Duke of Orleans. One of the two travelers was the adventurer bribed by Cardinal Alberoni to carry off the Regent to the woods of Boulogne and whom, not having been successful in his project, took refuge in The Hague, where he hatched a new plot. Separating, the two travelers gave themselves a set day for another meeting at the same spot.

Chavigny felt the advantage he could take from such a discovery. It was easy for him to obtain from the servant the promise that she would hide him in the same room on the indicated day. The meeting took place; the conference was even more explicit.

Master of their secret, Chavigny wrote to the Regent that he had to make a revelation of the highest importance to him and, upon his return to Paris, managed to obtain an audience with the Duke of Orleans.

Chavigny took care not to make known the circumstances that had so well served him; he attributed his revelations to more elevated relations. The prince treated him like a visionary and ordered him to stand in his presence. Chavigny, without being disconcerted, supported what he had advanced, and proposed to the regent that he be placed in the Bastille if what he said did not take place. The prince consented, things took place as Chavigny had announced and from that day his fortune was made.

One will not find a better a definition of chance than this: the actions of men with respect to other men.

But here is another source of chance on which one has not reflected. Who can task himself with saying what he will dream of in five minutes? Thus chance is even in the thought that engenders action; it is even in the variations of temperament that act upon thought, that react upon action, without speaking of the purely physical external causes, the intervention of which is never foreseen.

When one is embarked upon a bad affair, there is a species of calculation that one can try on occasion: seek to determine the different results that the complication can end up in; it will easily happen that it will not unravel by any means that one has foreseen; and as for the unexpected incidents that ordinarily cross enterprises, it is not even possible to judge if they are fortunate or unfortunate.

It is in political life that these marvelous nuances are sensible, because politics is playing with men and events. One can see in the Contemporary Memoirs that Napoleon, one of those to whom human life hid the least [number of] secrets, mocks in his particular way those who loaned to him combinations of great reach; he literally confesses that he lived on the events from hand to mouth. In matters of chance, perhaps one cannot find in a life other than his a more striking period than what is described here:

On 23 August 1798, Bonaparte left Egypt and, unknown to his army, embarked upon a return to France; he left in Kleber's hands a sealed envelop that [contained a document that] named him Chief General of the Egyptian Army in his place.

Bonaparte's crossing presented immense perils. He would need to have favorable winds, to escape English fleets, and to finally arrive in France before the arrival of the threatening dispatches that Kleber would not fail to send to the Directory as soon as the situation became known to him.

The crossing had to be made along the African coast, by skirting the rivers of the Mediterranean, and the difficulties of execution were such that, in case of pursuit, the two frigates that carried Napoleon's fortune would be beached on the sands; so that, at death's door, the crew could gain by land the port that was closest to the coast.

The beginning was not fortunate; for twenty-one days contrary winds repelled the ships to the waters of Egypt or Syria. One spoke of returning to port, but soon the winds changed and, in several hours, one was running alongside Carthage, then Sardinia.

With Sardinia scarcely passed by, the winds changed again; one was forced to put in at Ajaccio.

The next day, one wanted to set sail; it was impossible to leave the gulf; it was necessary to return to port; seven days passed, during which the danger grew.

If the English who cruised these parts learned of Bonaparte's forced landing at Corsica, good-bye to the Great Emperor of France! The English still knew nothing; one had quite turned them. No sail was spotted on the horizon; one placed oneself on the sea for Toulon, after having purchased a longboat provided with twelve rigorous rowers who, in case of distress, would try to save the General and several men in his escort. Nevertheless, up to the next morning, the navigation went well; the ships reached port.

But, upon the setting on the sun, an English fleet of fourteen sails was suddenly spotted. The English, favored by the disposition of the light, very distinctly recognized the frigates. The signals of the enemy fleet appeared. Had they been turned? No. It happened, O Fortune! that the frigates were of Venetian construction, and the English took them for a convoy of provisions traveling from Toulon to Genoa.

But the situation remained critical. The English fleet, it is true -- thanks to the falling night -- did not recognize the passengers. But the next day, the English recognized their error, and disaster was certain. Gantheaume lost his head; he proposed to return to Corsica. Bonaparte refused; one made forced-sails towards the Northwest and, during the night, one prepared for any possible event. The roles were already distributed; the dispositions were taken. Bonaparte, decided upon throwing himself into the lifesaving longboat, had designated the people destined to share his fate, which was still doubtful if one was still in view of the fleet. It would be a question of being captured or thoroughly sunk; but throwing them in the air always fell back upon the same faces. The first rays of the day lit up the English fleet, which instead of pursuing the frigates, went further off to the Northeast!

And this was not all, because -- arriving at Frejus -- the crew was obliged to make a quarantine; the dispatches from Kleber could still reverse Bonaparte's fortunes if they arrived ahead of him; and the heroes of Arcole, accusing him of leaving his army without orders from the Directory, could end up like Custine; but the enthusiasm of the populations forewarned of the arrival of Bonaparte set passengers into motion towards the land . . . The circumstances would be accomplished!

All of the theory of chance is in this crossing; one could study it, like the practitioner studies the phenomena of life on the basis of still-lifes.

But is chance really a disordered force beyond all rules? It is not necessary to imagine so.

Who has not been struck by the unshakable confidence with which the gambler perseveres in the search for the combinations that will make him win? What does he seek? The law of chance and the most mistreated gamblers are those who believe the most firmly that -- by well-made and exactly followed observations -- chance can be dominated; and they are not the least deceived of the world; their downfall only derives from the falseness of their calculations or the enthusiasm of their passions.

Chance is a phenomenon that one envisions here in the same connection. It is an element composed of two contrary currents -- the good and the bad luck of which the flux and the reflux, the oscillations or the swerves only appear irregular when one observes them in a limited space or in a limited period of time. For example, one learns to know the direction of the fortunate and unfortunate currents, and here (among other things) is what one observes.

The events of life appear dominated by what we willingly call a law of sequencing, a law of succession, with the result that fortunate or unfortunate accidents all seem to derive from a primary success or a primary failure. A favorable or unfavorable event contains in itself a certain series of fatal or propitious deductions that must all exhaust themselves over a given period. Likewise, an affair that has turned out well -- by a mysterious connection -- has led to other, equally fortunate results. This is what one collectively calls a vein by a very striking assimilation with the precious lodes that miners encounter in their patient explorations.

Thanks to what precedes, we now have an excellent definition of success. To succeed is to be in the current of fortunate chances; to not succeed is to have lost the meaning of their direction.

Can one now understand what superstition exists among the lovers, the gamblers, and especially the politicians? It is nothing other than a calculation or an intuition of chance. When Polycratus threw his ring into the sea, he felt that its string had run out. When Caesar threw himself into a boat of sinners, saying to the frightened pilot in the middle of a tempest: "Reassure yourself: you carry Caesar and his fortune," it was as if he had said: "Fear nothing: you carry a chance that is in the law of its development." And the pilot, without analyzing, thus would have understood perfectly.

Superior skill in politics consists in taking the chance and not submitting to it. In business, there are also people who take the chance; one used to call them rascals.

One has understood that what we have called playing well in the preceding chapter is only the art of conducting one's designs and governing in the different circumstances of life; the field that opens up is immense, but the subject in itself can be reduced to general terms of an extreme simplicity: the goal, the means.

This presents for the least permeable minds very clear ideas and, if many scholarly writers would like to express themselves with this clearness, they will soon have to make the tour of their knowledge. The goal is naturally all that one can humanly desire or have ambition for; the means are the forces of which one disposes to equal oneself to one's ambitions and desires; these are all the faculties and all the talents, manners, external forms and combinations of mind, with the aid of which one acts on society and people.

As the secret of attaining is only the art of making men serve the success of their designs, it is at first necessary to see how men enter into the general elements of the calculation; this will be the object of the chapters that follow.

(Anonymous [Maurice Joly], first published 1868 by Editions Amyot. Reprinted by Editions Allia, 1992. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! February 2008.)