in mets à Ra Poterie L241 6 INTRODUCTION They often lose with great coolness, or rather great endurance; but I have scarcely ever known one who possessed sufficient courage to win. Some exhibit a headstrong resolution whilst their doubled and tripled stakes are swept from before them; and yet a change of luck in their favour will act like a panicstroke: they pursue Fortune whilst she flies; but when she turns short, and consents to indulge them, they take fright, and shrink from her caresses. Foreigners, on the contrary, are apt to lose with impatience; but, should the game take a propitious turn, they stake with as much nerve as if they had had a secret whisper of assurance from the blindfold Goddess herself. I once saw a poor-looking wretch, whose threadbare military surtout, mustachoes, and tarnished croix denoted him a half-pay officer, deprived of nine or ten stakes successively, amounting to something about twenty-five Louis-d'or each: and, being reduced to his last five-and-twenty, he boldly abandoned them to their fate, till, by the repeated success of four following coups, they accumulated to a sum of four hundred. The under-breathed sacré Dieu! and the half-frantic bah! were frequently ejaculated during his losses; but whilst running this forlorn hope with his last stake, probably his last franc on earth,-resisting, besides, the strong temptation which presented itself every time the increasing gold was doubled, of securing what lay already won before him, he sat with as much composure - as if the money which he hazarded had not belonged to him; or as if he felt an absolute confidence in the very improbable result: and, finally, put up the whole with that au fait air, which one assumes in doing something that might be thought uncommon quite as a matter of course; although a summersault from the Pont Neuf, or a black bench at the Morgue, would perhaps have been the consequence of an unfavourable turn in the instance of a single card; for he was precisely the description of person who would lead one to suppose that he had come there with the desperate resolution of playing for life or death. When the allied armies occupied Paris in 1815, the Prussian officers, of all others, appeared to carry the heaviest purses; and con sequently were in the habit of exhibiting the most dashing experiments that perhaps had ever been displayed at the Rouge et Noir salons. Blücher himself is said to have broke the banque more than once; but in the result, as will be the case with all who persist, lost twice as much, in the usual course of play, as those extraordinary whims of chance had lavished upon him for the moment. In Paris the Rouge et Noir tables rifle the public to the amount of 12,000,000 francs per annum; but considerably more than a half of that sum is paid to the government for its recognition. If then the Parisian Administration, as the proprietors are designated; can pay a direct tax of 8,000,000 francs, independent of the expenses of their several establishments, and make fortunes beside-to what must the unincumbered profits of the London Adminis tration amount? for it will be necessary to apprize but few, that Rouge et Noir has found its way to England; or that Pall Mall is hardly surpassed by the Palais Royal itself in the number of its Maisons de jeu. The universal passion for play in Paris, and the facilities which attend its indulgence, are the source of incalculable calamity: life, character, and fortune are the daily victims. Suicide is more prevalent here than in any other city of Europe-so is gaming: I shall leave these two facts to explain each other. One morning in the beginning of last May, a captain of the Garde Royal, who occupied apartments above mine in the hotel where I |