He spent his final two decades living as a vagabond on family money, growing increasingly paranoid and haunted by his former fame. He walked away from competition and opened a law office, but the business quickly failed. But Morphy grew bored he was so gifted at chess that he began to consider it a child’s game. He played for ten hours straight, without stopping to eat, and ended the night with six wins and two draws.
In 1858, Morphy held a notorious “blindfold” exhibition, in Paris, at the Café de la Régence: he sat in one room while eight opponents sat in another and called out his moves without looking at a single board. By the time he was twenty, he was the United States champion, and by the time he was twenty-one, many considered him to be the best player on earth. Morphy had begun winning citywide tournaments in his native New Orleans at the age of nine. “The pride and the sorrow of chess is gone forever,” the Austrian chess master Wilhelm Steinitz wrote in an elegy, the following year. In 1884, the American star chess player Paul Morphy was found dead in his bathtub, at the age of forty-seven.
