Bio of Paul Morphy

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     The stories about Morphy being crazy are greatly exaggerated, perhaps entirely fictitious. A lot of it stems from slanderous gossip initiated by friends of John Sybrandt, his brother-in-law. He and Morphy had a decades-long feud as Sybrandt was administrator and executor of the estate of Alonzo Morphy, Paul's father. Alonzo was a wealthy Louisiana Supreme Court justice and his wife--Paul's mother Louise Therese Felicite Thelcide Le Carpentier--had considerable wealth herself and the family financial affairs took some time to sort out--during the time Paul spent in Europe. What may have happened to the different properties and investments  Sybrandt had put Alonzo's funds into became hopelessly muddled because of the financial and legal upheavals caused by the Civil War. Paul thought Sybrandt had embezzled a lot of Morphy money but documents were lost, banks had failed, etc so legal proceedings stalled, failed, were re-started and went nowhere.

     Paul and Sybrandt became hostile toward each other and Paul was sometimes involved in public arguments with Sybrandt's friends. In 1882 one such heated debate resulted in Morphy being challenged to a duel. He accepted, but his family knew that a short, frail, sickly Morphy would likely be killed in a swordfight so they tricked him into going to the Louisiana Retreat, a mental asylum run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society. When they arrived, Paul convinced the nuns running the hospital that he was perfectly sane and quoted several sections of the Louisiana legal code that would expose them to serious penalties should they try to detain him. He never was committed to any mental hospital, but his opponent was too embarrassed by the potential dishonor of killing a "madman" to fight the proposed duel.

     It is true that Morphy became exasperated by the fact that most of the people coming to his law office only wanted to talk about chess, challenge him to a game, or ask for lessons, causing him to abandon his public practice and confine his legal work to friends and family. And he developed a short temper with those who approached him on the streets or in the cafes where he spent much of his time to talk to him about chess. In his point of view, chess was not a proper career for a true gentleman (something all who knew him agreed he was) and the brief time he spent on the game while waiting after finishing law school to reach the minimum age for taking the Louisiana bar exam was the kind of pleasant interlude many young gentlemen took advantage of to have a bit of a lark. So chess writers, newsmen looking for stories, etc, got short shrift from him and contributed to his reputation for eccentricity.