horus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the orchestra
contributes his share. You would see there plenty of respectable people
who have come in search of diversion, for which they pay as they pay for
the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as
to some garret where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to
come.

Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window. Only
with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in
its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither
eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge
of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of
_trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose
calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if
they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grandest
hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain has
bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud of her
Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to flow in
streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching without fear
of their feet slipping in it.

Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the convenience
of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the
middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold,
but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indifference to
luxury in the men who will lose their lives here in the quest of the
fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.

This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in silks,
would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she must lie
on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the summit of
power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman
stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion
for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejec