Jacob Duck - Soldiers Playing Cards in a Guardroom

Lansquenet is a banking game played with cards, named after the French spelling of the German word

Landsknecht The (singular: , ), also rendered as Landsknechts or Lansquenets, were German mercenaries used in pike and shot formations during the early modern period. Consisting predominantly of pikemen and supporting foot soldiers, their front line was ...

('servant of the land or country'), which refers to 15th- and 16th-century German

mercenary A mercenary is a private individual who joins an armed conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military. Mercenaries fight for money or other forms of payment rather t ...

foot soldiers; the lansquenet drum is a type of field drum used by these soldiers. It is recorded as early as 1534 by

François Rabelais François Rabelais ( , ; ; born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author. A Renaissance humanism, humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholars in the Renaissance, Gr ...

in ''

Gargantua and Pantagruel ''The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel'' (), often shortened to ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' or the (''Five Books''), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the advent ...

''.

Cards

Lansquenet is played with an Italian pack of 40 cards.

Play

The dealer or banker stakes a certain sum, and this must be met by the nearest to the dealer first, and so on. When the stake is met, the dealer turns up one card and lays it to his right, for the table or the players, and another card in front of himself for the bank. He then keeps on turning up cards (while keeping the first two cards visible), until a card turns up with a value matching either of the first two cards. For instance, if the five of diamonds has been laid down for the bank, then any other five, regardless of suit, constitutes a win for the banker. If the table's card is matched first, he loses, and the next player on the left becomes banker and proceeds in the same way. When the dealer's card turns up, he may take the stake and pass the bank; or he may allow the stake to remain, whereupon it becomes doubled if met. He can continue thus (doubling on each win) as long as the cards turn up in his favour (i.e., before the table's card appears, causing the banker to lose only his original stake) – having the option at any moment of giving up the bank and retiring for that time. If he does that, the player to whom he passes the bank has the option of continuing it at the same amount at which it was left. The pool may be re-made up by contributions of all the players in certain proportions (now including the previous bank player). The terms used respecting the standing of the stake are "I'll see" (''à moi le tout'') and ''Je tiens''. When ''jumelle'' (twins), or the turning up of similar cards on both sides, occurs, then the dealer takes half the stake. Robert-Houdin explained a mechanism by which a

card sharp A card sharp (also card shark, sometimes hyphenated or spelled as a single word) is a person who uses skill or deception to win at card games (such as poker). "Sharp" and "shark" spellings have varied over time and by region. The label is not a ...

could cheat at lansquenet, by palming and then placing atop the deck a packet of cards in prepared order.Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin
''Les tricheries des Grecs dévoilées: l'art de gagner à tous les jeux.''
Librarie Nouvelle: Paris, 1861. Pages 285–287.

Cultural references

Lansquenet is listed by

in ''

Gargantua ''La vie tres horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel jadis composée par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme'' according to 's 1542 edition, or simply Gargantua, is the second novel by François ...

'' in 1534. The game is played by Porthos in the

Alexandre Dumas Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas , was a French novelist and playwright. His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the mos ...

novel ''

The Three Musketeers ''The Three Musketeers'' () is a French historical adventure novel written and published in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is the first of the author's three d'Artagnan Romances. As with some of his other works, he wrote it in col ...

''. Lansquenet is also played by D'Artagnan in the Dumas novel '' Twenty Years After''. Lucien Debray imagines Baroness Danglers might occupy herself with lansquenet in the Dumas novel '' The Count of Monte Cristo''. Lansquenet is played by various characters in the

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (; 18 October 1741 – 5 September 1803) was a French novelist, official, Freemason and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel '' Les Liaisons dangereuses'' (''Dangerous Liaisons ...

novel '' Les Liaisons dangereuses''. A game in '' Le financier et le savetier'' (1856) by

Jacques Offenbach Jacques Offenbach (; 20 June 18195 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera ''The Tales of Hoffmann''. He was a p ...

enables the cobbler to win the hand of the financier's daughter. It is mentioned briefly in the novel '' À Rebours'' by Joris-Karl Huysmans, and in the novel '' The General in his Labyrinth'' by Gabriel García Márquez. Lansquenet is played by two soldiers on a stone bench under an enclosed poplar as mentioned in Kinbote's note to line 130 in ''

Pale Fire ''Pale Fire'' is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic co ...

'' by

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov ( ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Rus ...

, and is also played by Fatima and her family in

Charles Perrault Charles Perrault ( , , ; 12 January 162816 May 1703) was a French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from earlier folk tales, published in his ...

Bluebeard "Bluebeard" ( ) is a French Folklore, folktale, the most famous surviving version of which was written by Charles Perrault and first published by Barbin in Paris in 1697 in . The tale is about a wealthy man in the habit of murdering his wives an ...

. '' Lansquenet-sous-Tannes'' is a fictional village in Joanne Harris' novel '' Chocolat''. It is mentioned in '' The Prague Cemetery'' by

Umberto Eco Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian Medieval studies, medievalist, philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular ...

. The game is mentioned in several of Georgette Heyer's historical novels. For example, in Chapter Thirteen of " The Masqueraders", Lansquenet is played in the novel '' The Luck of Barry Lyndon'' by

William Makepeace Thackeray William Makepeace Thackeray ( ; 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist and illustrator. He is known for his Satire, satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel ''Vanity Fair (novel), Vanity Fair'', a panoramic portra ...

. Lanquenet is played by the protagonist in the 2022 video game '' Pentiment''.

Notes

Sources

*Steinmetz, Andrew
''The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, In All Times and Countries, especially in England and France''
Tinsley Brothers, 1870.

External links

* * {{Banking games 16th-century gambling games Banking games French gambling games