Lansquenet
Encyclopedia
Lansquenet is a card game
Card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games...

. Lansquenet also refers to 15th and 16th century German foot soldiers; the lansquenet drum is a type of field drum used by these soldiers.

Game 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 two cards, one to the right, - the latter for himself, the former for the table or the players. He then keeps on turning up the cards until either of the cards is matched, which constitutes the winning, - as, for instance, suppose the five of diamonds is his card, then should the five of any other suit turn up, he wins. If he loses, then 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, whereat of course it becomes doubled if met. He can continue thus as long as the cards turn up in his favour - 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 made up by contributions of all the players in certain proportions. 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.

There is a very easy means by which card sharpers manage a cheat to perfection. They prepare beforehand a series of a dozen cards arranged as follows:
1st Queen 6th Nine
2nd Queen 7th Nine
3rd Ten 8th Ace
4th Seven 9th Eight
5th Ten 10th Ace


Series thus arranged are placed in side pockets outside the waistcoat, just under the left breast. When the sharper becomes banker he leans negligently over the table, and in this position his fingers are as close as possible to the prepared cards, termed portees. At the proper moment he seizes the cards and places them on the pack. The trick is rendered very easy by the fact that the card sharper has his coat buttoned at the top, so that the lower part of it lies open and permits the introduction of the hand, which is completely masked.

Some sharpers are skilful enough to take up some of the matches already dealt, which they place in their costieres, or side-pockets above described, in readiness for their next operation; others keep them skillfully hidden in their hand, to lay them, at the convenient moment, upon the pack of cards. By this means, the pack is not augmented.

Cultural references

Lansquenet is played by D'Artagnan in the Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...

 novel Twenty Years After
Twenty Years After
Twenty Years After is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, père, first serialized from January to August, 1845. A book of the D'Artagnan Romances, it is a sequel to The Three Musketeers and precedes The Vicomte de Bragelonne .The novel follows events in France during La Fronde, during the childhood reign...

.

Lansquenet is played by various characters in the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses ....

 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Les Liaisons dangereuses is a French epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782....

.

A game in Le financier et le savetier
Le financier et le savetier
Le financier et le savetier is a one-act opérette bouffe of 1856 with words by Hector Crémieux and Edmond About and music by Jacques Offenbach...

(1856) by Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach was a Prussian-born French composer, cellist and impresario. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr....

 enables the cobbler to win the hand of the financier's daughter.

Mentioned briefly in the novel A Rebours
À rebours
À rebours is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans...

by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...

.

Mentioned briefly in the novel The General in his Labyrinth
The General in His Labyrinth
The General in His Labyrinth is a novel by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia...

by Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...

.

Lansquenet is played by two soldiers on a stone bench under an enclosed poplar
Poplar
Populus is a genus of 25–35 species of deciduous flowering plants in the family Salicaceae, native to most of the Northern Hemisphere. English names variously applied to different species include poplar , aspen, and cottonwood....

 as mentioned in Kinbote's note to line 130 in Pale Fire
Pale Fire
Pale Fire is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the poet. Together these elements form a narrative in which both authors are...

by Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

.

Lansquenet-sous-Tannes is a fictional village in Joanne Harris
Joanne Harris
Joanne Michèle Sylvie Harris is a British author.Biography=Born to a French mother and an English father in her grandparents' sweet shop, her family life was filled with food and folklore. Her great-grandmother had an odd reputation and enjoyed letting the gullible think she was a witch and healer...

' novel Chocolat
Chocolat
Chocolat is a 1999 novel by Joanne Harris. It tells the story of Vianne Rocher, a young mother, who arrives at a fictional insular French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes with her six-year-old daughter, Anouk...

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