d up
at us on our entrance, they were all types--lamentably true types--of
their respective classes.

We had come to see blackguards; but these men were something worse.
There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism:
here there was nothing but tragedy--mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in
the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose
sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke;
the flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of
pasteboard perseveringly, to register how often black won, and how often
red, never spoke; the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and
the darned great-coat, who had lost his last sou, and still looked on
desperately after he could play no longer, never spoke. Even the voice
of the croupier sounded as if it were strangely dulled and thickened in
the atmosphere of the room. I had entered the place to laugh, but the
spectacle before me was something to weep over. I soon found it
necessary to take refuge in excitement from the depression of spirits
which was fast stealing on me. Unfortunately I sought the nearest
excitement, by going to the table and beginning to play. Still more
unfortunately, as the event will show, I won--won prodigiously; won
incredibly; won at such a rate that the regular players at the table
crowded round me; and staring at my stakes with hungry, superstitious
eyes, whispered to one another that the English stranger was going to
break the bank.

The game was Rouge et Noir. I had played at it in every city in Europe,
without, however, the care or the wish to study the Theory of
Chances--that philosopher's stone of all gamblers! And a gambler,
in the strict sense of the word, I had never been. I was heart-whole
from the corroding passion for play. My gaming was a mere idle
amusement. I never resorted to it by necessity, because I never knew
what it was to want money. I never practised it so incessantly as to
lose more than I could afford, or to gain more than I could coolly
pocket without being thrown off my balance by my good luck. In short,
I had hitherto frequented gambling-tables--just as I frequented
ball-rooms and opera-houses--because they amused me, and because I
had nothing better to do with my leisure hours.

But on this occasion it was very different--now, for the first time in
my life, I felt what the passion for play really was. My successes first
bewildered, and then,