Past Notation

     I'm not a collector by nature. I don't collect books, coins, stamps or even baseball cards.  I do, however, tend to collect examples of chess notations, as evidenced by : Notation

     While working on something else that involved the  term le piège, I was perusing French books for early usage of that chess term and came across an example of notation I hadn't seen before.

     In 1847 the Jesuit priest, Abbé and Count Louis Marie Joseph François de Sales de Robiano published a book entitled, "Les échecs simplifieś et approfondis"  or more fully:

    The Count de Robiano was born in Brussels, Belgium on July 1, 1793 and died in Lyon, France in 1858. A Belgian citizen of Italian descent, he was something of a polymath - a historian, theologian, philologist who wrote books on religion, philosophy, history hieroglyphics (as they pertained to the Rossetta Stone) and, of course,  chess. 

     In parts of the book the graphics improved:

Black did not release move his first pieces of attack and defense (the Bishop and Knight); he has no center and the weak point f7 is not defended.
Besides, no piece defends his line of pawns.
Nor did he bring out any of his pieces; he has no position. It is a matter of skirmishers, against an army corp.

    Abbé de Robiano also supplied a kind of database of variations. It looks like:

   Here is a digitized version of the first variation from the above page:

     At 568 numbered pages, "Les échecs simplifieś et approfondis" is a long book.  As one can see, Robiano used a hybid figurine/alegraic notation but not only did he fail to explain what the symbols mean, he altered them part way through as the book.  I got the impression this book took a long time to write and set up for printng which might account in part for the variations. 

Here are the symbols he used: 

     Some of his graphics seem a bit primitive while some of those that show with the pieces on the board are quite nice.

:

         Differentiating the ranks and files -both numerically denoted- by using different sizes of numbers is clever, and works until you try to verbalize the moves.    

    As for the term le piège that brought me to Rabiano,   it means "trap." 
Count de Robiano's use of the term, as it pertains to chess, is the earliest I've been able to find in any language. 
     Robiano wrote:

     "It is true that if this sacrifice was very considerable, by either the value or the number of the annihilated pieces, and that its real object did not appear very visible to the adversary, your demonstration takes the name of trap and stratagem...."