with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over it all.  Let us get away from fashionable Frascati’s, to a house where they don’t mind letting in a man with a ragged coat, or a man with no coat, ragged or otherwise.”  “Very well,” said my friend, “we needn’t go out of the Palais Royal to find the sort of company you want.  Here’s the place just before us; as blackguard a place, by all report, as you could possibly wish to see.”  In another minute we arrived at the door, and entered the house, the back of which you have drawn in your sketch.

When we got upstairs, and had left our hats and sticks with the doorkeeper, we were admitted into the chief gambling-room.  We did not find many people assembled there.  But, few as the men were who looked 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 practiced 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.