The Man Behind the Myth

DID BERNARD DE MARIGNY REALLY BRING THE GAME OF CRAPS TO THE NEW WORLD?

By Kent J. Landry

Picture the old man on a quiet morning, walking slowly along the banquette through the neighborhood that bears his name—perchance reminiscing about his younger years, back when his feet were nimble and his dueling hand steady. Right in the middle of this early suburb of New Orleans lays the street now known as Burgundy. Once, though, it had another name: that of the game that brought the old man much notoriety: Craps St.

In 1868, Jean-Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville—better known as “Bernard de Marigny”—was eighty-two years old; just a shell of his former self. Having lost most of his fortune, he spent his days wandering his neighborhood, the Faubourg Marigny (pronounced Mary-Knee), the tract of land carved out of his father’s former plantation. Sitting out on his front porch in his night clothes, this man wrote down his memories of past exploits and Louisiana’s storied history. Looking at him, passersby would hardly believe that the man was once a rich landowner, stately politician, real estate developer, and author; but also a playboy, a rogue, slave owner, and gambler extraordinaire. Those same people would have no idea that this old man hosted the Duke of Orleans; would scarcely believe that he helped persuade Andrew Jackson to allow the pirate Lafitte and his ragged band of Baratarian pirates to assist in defending the city against the British on the plains of Chalmette. They wouldn’t know that the tired old man was once President of the Senate, helped write the first state constitution, and twice was a candidate for governor.

Within the lore of New Orleans’s history, the story goes that Marigny died nearly penniless, his fortune drained from his gambling debts, most notably from craps, and was thus forced to partition his family’s land, living out the remainder of his life in relative poverty and obscurity. This tale has been retold and perpetuated so often to each successive generation that it is now stated as fact. However, Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville’s story should not simply be distilled to the whims of a dice game, since the true story of his life, in truth, is grander and more intertwined in the fabric of New Orleans than a game of chance. So, it is into this assertion and the life of the man himself—a model of Creole aristocracy, fond of wine, women, duels, and dice—that we delve.

Jean-Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville is the namesake not only of the city of Mandeville just over Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, but also to the funky neighborhood just east of the French Quarter, commonly known as Faubourg Marigny. And of all the enigmatic and eccentric people that are a part of the rich history of gambling in Louisiana, he was one of the most colorful.

Marigny was a leading man of his time. Born in New Orleans in 1785, he was the son of a prominent French family who had ties to the early settlement and administration of the Louisiana colony. After his father died when he was fourteen, Marigny, headstrong and spoiled, was sent by his guardian first to Pensacola, Florida and then overseas to England, perhaps to be polished into a respected gentleman. Due to his insouciant attitude toward commerce, however, and the fact that he spent more time in gambling establishments than in respected places of business, Marigny was eventually summoned back to Louisiana. It was said that during this sojourn overseas he learned the game of hazard, a forerunner of craps. While the actual inventor of craps may never be known with certainty, it is widely accepted that Marigny brought the game back to New Orleans in the early 1800s, and was responsible for its rapid spread in the New World.

The much-repeated apocryphal tale seems to have come from one main source: a small opuscule by the writer Edward Tinker called the Palingenis of Craps. Published in 1933, this unsourced book—of which only four hundred copies were printed—paints a glowing picture of Bernard Marigny, described as a “swaggering, gallant, fantastic figure,” who lit his cigars with ten dollar bills. Though Tinker was a respected writer of his time, this fanciful book is steeped in the oft-exaggerated, glorious mythos of old New Orleans.

Other writers took hold of this story and expounded upon it. John Churchill Chase, in his entertaining and enduring book, Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children and other Streets of New Orleans, detailing the origin of street names in New Orleans, expands on this craps theory by explaining that the term “craps” was itself derived from derisive comment made by Kentuckians who floated down the Mississippi River to unload their goods in the port of Orleans. The Creoles and “Kaintocks”—as the Americans were derisively known—were at odds over the economic soul of the city. Chase espouses the Kentuckians responded to the slur by calling the French Creole elite "Johnny Crapaud". In French, "Crapaud" means “Frog,” and the insult was thought to be either in reference to the fact that the French ate frog legs or because they appeared froglike, bent over the tables playing the game introduced by Marigny. The scornful term was shortened to simply ”craps” after the American gamblers took up the game. No frog legs needed.

Other sources dispute these claims, and any gambling historian worth their dice surely knows that a version of craps had been played for hundreds of years before Marigny. Roman soldiers were said to have played an early version of the game using pig knuckles as dice and their shields as a table, from which we deduced the term “rolling the bones.” And an early cousin of craps, the English game called hazard, was said to have been invented by Sir William of Tyre while he laid siege to the city of Hazarth during the Crusades. Arab people also have claim to craps, as they played a similar game called Al-Dar, which means “dice” in Arabic.

What we do know, as pointed out in The History of Gambling by the prolific underworld writer, Herbert Asbury, is that craps was played in pre-revolutionary France, and that bets had been wagered on rolls of the dice long before the sharpening of the guillotine and the rolling of heads. Based on Asbury’s contention, I would have to concur that it is more than likely the game, instead of being brought back to New Orleans from his journeys abroad, was rather introduced to Marigny by the Duke of Orleans during his visit to Marigny’s father in 1798. It is wholly conceivable that the Duke, the future King Louis Philippe, waiting out the bloody revolution in his home country, taught the promising young lad the game as they enjoyed long afternoons escaping from the stifling Louisiana heat.

Though there is little doubt that Marigny was responsible for spreading the game and increasing its popularity, the unsubstantiated claims of Marigny teaching everyone he knew the dastardly dice game and then losing to everyone he played until his fortune was vanquished, thereby having to subdivide his property to pay for his debts, is hyperbole at best.

In truth, Marigny did lose much of his fortune and sold off the vast majority of his property, as he himself admit- ted in his twilight writings. However, author Scott Ellis in his book The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans makes the claims that Marigny’s economic downfall was more the result of the Panic of 1837—which ended the tariff on imported cotton and caused many plantations to file for bankruptcy—and the disastrous crop failures of 1850 and 1851, than it was to craps. This was also, lest we forget, the era of the American Civil War—which devastated the slave-dependant economy of the entire region. It was a recipe for dwindling fortunes.

Today, craps is played in every major casino in the world. If it’s not the most popular table game, it is usually the one where people are having the most fun. All the yelling and hollering you hear in a casino is probably coming from the craps table. All those things would have probably happened anyway, if it weren’t for Bernard Marigny—but then again, possibly not.

So, as we tumble over Bernard Marigny’s bones and ponder his influence on the game of craps and New Orleans, it’s impractical not to acknowledge all that he was: the gambler, the politician, the scamp and mogul, the real estate tycoon, the slave owner, and the head of the Creole aristocracy. A man of his time, for sure—carrying with him all that implies—but to anyone who has ever rolled the dice and prayed for their point to hit, or strolled down Frenchmen Street to hear some cool jazz, or by chance were able to enjoy a lazy afternoon under the oaks at the beautiful Fontainebleau State Park in Mandeville, we owe Bernard Marigny at least a nod of recognition. He was one of the main men who put Louisiana on the map, both literally and figuratively, and to any person from Louisiana his story should roll on. •