I thought Jeremy Spinrad had covered the basics well enough already? See http://www.chesscafe.com/text/spinr... and also .../spinrad32.pdf.

In the spinrad32.pdf, there's a non-working weblink to page that confirms that Moreau was a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur. The error is that of the web site -- it cites the wrong URL. But if you start at the root URL, and 'recherche' for 'legion d'honneur' you'll find the search function for the rolls of the order.

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/spinr...

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/spinr...

http://www.chesscafe.com/text/spinr...

There are a chessplayer Colonel Moreau and a French officer Moreau, and one question is whether both men are the same person. This question is considered in detail by J.Spinrad in his articles, and he suggests that the answer is in the affirmative, but he notes that this is not a proven fact. (Only btw, the current version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charle... states with references to the same articles that Spinrad identified both men as the same.)

Our biography respects the situation in some sense by the formulation "Believed to be...". However, since Spinrad himself reports on some non-believers, I don't like this phrase. Moreover, the date of birth of the chessplayer is already that of the French officer.

The French officer did also some mathematics, but in our biography he is "an internationally respected mathematician", which is in fact a quote from the first of Spinrad's articles. I know that Spinrad is an international respected mathematician is his field, but he did not prove that Moreau was, simply because all of the mathematical sources are French!

Finally, the second sentence from our biography: "He was invited to the 1903 Monte Carlo tournament as a last-minute replacement for Mikhail Chigorin ...". This is simply wrong!

Spinrad discussed this point and proved that Moreau's participation was planned already in 1902. Moreover, Spinrad writes: "Furthermore, other sources have named Wolf, not Moreau, as the substitute for Chigorin." I can easily provide one such source: Emil Kemeny's tournament book, which appeared only a few months after the tournament as "The American Chess Weekly, Special Series No. 1" has a chapter on page 2 entitled "Tschigorin Not Permitted To Participate". There it is clearly stated with a lot of details that Wolf was admitted to play instead of Chigorin.

I can but hope he took the losses with equal parts humor and stoic hardening of resolve. Clearly he never lost heart, and kept competing despite it all.

How many of us know players that will withdraw from a tournament at the slightest prompting, citing lame reasons when so often it is just cowardice and the fear of enduring further humiliation that causes them to quit.

Source: "Deutsche Schachzeitung", July 1903, page 227. No joke.

<SteinitzLives> I know what you mean: the history is full of withdrawels of players who had bad results. But the meaning of bad results depends on the player's expectation.

Described by Sherlock Holmes as "The second most dangerous man in London" [after Moriatry].

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebast...>