Cards and Dice

An Insight Into the Poetry and Vice of Gambling—Historical, Contemporary and Eternal

PAUL MORAND

LIKE everyone else, I have known both good days and bad. I have left money at Deauville, at Biarritz, and on no small number of liners, on the Atlantic and the Pacific, as well as the Indian Ocean. I have taken money with me from Monte Carlo, Madrid, San Sebastian—and even Macao. I do not play for big stakes, nor (and the two are not the same thing) am I an inveterate gambler. But gambling has diabolic virtues, incredible powers. To say nothing of the unforeseen, which possesses all the beauty of magic things, the incendiary and devastating passion of gambling has always fascinated me. It is traditional with dramatists to say that plays on gambling never succeed. I do not understand why. What opportunities for an author! There is an engraving by Holbein, in the Danse Macabre, which represents a game of dice interrupted by death. I believe that death should be much less terrifying to a gambler than to many enthusiasts, such as lovers of food or of sport, for example; because the gambler is continually on the edge of the abyss, the unknown. He courts danger; he lives on risks. An uncertainty as to the hereafter, as to whether one should lay his bets on this world or on the next, is a perfect instance of gambling. It has often been said that love and death are the great levelers, but is this not also true of gambling? It enriches the poor, ruins the prosperous and debases the intelligent; yes, it is a veritable preparation for death, a lesson in annihilation.

GAMBLING exhausts and stupefies, which is its greatest merit. I know Orientals who play straight through the night, until dawn. At what an enormous expenditure of intelligence! Baudelaire wrote that gambling is a mechanical contrivance for suspending thought. This is true, but it does not suspend intellectual effort, and I hold rather with Leibnitz that man has never shown more acuity than in the various games which he has invented. People once spoke of "doctors of all games" as they now speak of "doctors of law", of "bachelors of philosophy"; and it is, on the whole, an enviable title.

The stakes last season at Deauville were higher than ever. An American, the manager of a large department store, lost $200,000 in one evening. Another won $3oo,ooo. The protracted struggle between the state and its citizens, wherein the legislator attempts to restrain the individual from causing his own ruin, is ending in our day to the advantage of the former. The edicts of the past against gambling are innumerable. Charlemagne deprived gamblers of holy communion. Saint Louis, returning from the Crusades, saw men gambling on the boat which was bringing him home; in a fit of anger he cast the dice into the sea. The political regimes in control at present are draconian: Mussolini and Primo de Rivera forbid gambling; while as to the French government, it lays such heavy taxes on the casinos that they can barely make expenses. In Europe, there is hardly any place left but Monte Carlo where the games of pure luck, "roulette" or "30 & 40," are still played. And Monte Carlo itself, with its hordes of tourists in Harris tweeds alighting from the steamships on their way round the world, and its influx from the low-exchange countries of the Balkans, is much different from what it once was in the fashionable past. And now that money has been replaced by dull chips, where is the marvellous clinking of gold which used to greet the ear on first entering, even before the sight of it could incite desire, avidity, and despair? Gold! A little gold! Magic words! Today the winners depart with an unseemly bundle of paper, and it is doubtless such people that Juvenal had in mind when he wrote: "A purse is no longer enough; to-day the gamblers come with trunks."

IT is essential to know the gambling halls in Spain. San Sebastian during the war, with its extraordinary population of Spanish grandees, Belgian croupiers, all in black, like legal men of the time of Balzac, German spies, Russian suspects, jockeys, and traders grown rich on army contracts. Madrid, with its semi-private, semi-public clubs, its old marqueses or condes no longer able to walk, led up to the green carpet on the arms of two servants, and playing the last of their land and their cattle. One of them, disgusted at his losses, bought a racing automobile. And when his friends warned him that he was sure to break his neck, in his rage he made the amusing answer: "But one must do something for one's children!" And that astonishing roulette of Algeciras, in ambush at the gateway of the Mediterranean, with its windows turned towards the liners stopping at Gibraltar, and always prompt to rifle the passengers! A young Spanish officer, who afterwards became minister, and even a conservative minister, once made a name for himself here. He had the habit of entering a room brusquely and interrupting the game by placing a large pistol on the gambling table. Then he would demand the surrender of the stakes, and he would never be seen there again. . . . Today all this picturesque element has vanished from the European casinos, and along with it the extravagant young lords, the Russians who wagered their wives on one spin, the beautiful Austrian "cocottes," all that class which the moral La Bruyère speaks of as "ruining themselves at gambling and telling you coldly that they could not get along without gambling." One of my friends, a confirmed gambler, was seized with remorse each time he lost. He would become again (for several days) a good husband and a model pater familias. Whenever I saw him coming home loaded with gifts for his wife and toys for the children, I would know that he had been stripped. "There are few games which are not carried too far," says the host in Moliere.

I no longer know of many picturesque dens in Europe (now that those of the suburbs of Madrid, particularly the extraordinary Rosales, are closed) except the Soviet Casino at Moscow. . . . Silence and dust, in a large, barren and abandoned palace. All the players, even the rich merchants, are dressed as workmen, as "counterfeit poor," with black leather jacket and kerchief, and big beards; they hide their winnings in their boots. There are also the little clubs of Lisbon, where one must go through a mysterious initiation ceremony before entering, as with the Turf in London or the Jockey at Paris. Do you, passing stranger, need witnesses who will stand surety for your honour? The porter will quickly have some found for you on the street, among those waiting mendigos, bedded at the doors. You will penetrate magnificent palaces which the Portuguese aristocracy have left untenanted since the Revolution. There, in gilded salons devoid of furniture, and with a single green carpet surrounded by deserters from the navy who are playing alongside their officers, you find American bank clerks, French girls and German traveling salesmen betting at a kind of local roulette. In the dining room, couples are dancing among the tables. Suddenly, at a signal from the orchestra, the dancers stop where they are. At the same time, a number is lighted above one couple. They are the winners, and are entitled to 100,000 reis! But there is one place more Portuguese than Lisbon, and that is Macao, the last colony of Portugal in the Far East. One can go there in a day by steam from Hongkong. The city lives on gambling. The houses, open to all comers, are all sporting places. The game here is fan-tan: from a circular gallery, situated on the second floor, the punters lower their bets to the carpet with the aid of little baskets. One does not know what a real gambler is until he has seen the Chinese gambling, with their straining eyes and their drawn features, the intensity of the passion permeating their whole being.

VERYTHING is lost. At present, in Europe, games are for the most part honest. Or, at least, trickery has ceased to be the accepted thing it once was. It is no longer smiled upon with indulgence. At the table of Louis XIV, at Versailles, there were fashionable sharpers like the celebrated Chevalier de Gramont, or others like the Chevalier d'Antin, who stole the stakes without their social position suffering particularly as a consequence. The salons of the highest society were not much safer than the highways, and well deserved their title of "gilded gambling dens," tripots dorés. Under Louis XV, and in England under the first Georges; at the time of the French Revolution, and in the Italy of Casanova, "to be skilful at cards," "to remedy fortune" was not at all a dishonour.

Today in the higher circles, untoward practices are extremely rare. One must go to the little casinos along the coast to find the elderly ladies who "play pushpins" (which is to say, who place one chip astride the edge of the table to indicate that they are playing but half of it, and then push it discreetly onto the carpet once the cards have been laid down). The banker knows them, smiles tolerantly, and when the thing is too obvious he is content to tap them lightly on the fingers with his rake, like elderly schoolgirls. In such places as these one finds the players with the queer superstitions. I knew one who kept a live rabbit under his chair and touched it before taking up his cards!

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Now it is only in the ports of the Levant, or on the boats and trains, that you risk being duped, at ecarte for example, by an accomplice sitting behind you who blows his nose to indicate to your opponent, his confederate, that you have no trump, or touches his eye to signal that you are holding the king. In the large casinos, at Ostend, Nice, Cannes, and so on, the dealers earn so much money in commissions and tips, and there are so many candidates for their position, that none of them would dare take the risk for the sake of a few louis more. Marked cards or decks with cut edges, trick clothing with double pockets, chips spirited away in sleeves or vests —all such things are relegated now to the movies (which are always so far behind the times). The treacherous dealer who, under the pretext of wiping his neck, contrives to drop motherof-pearl counters to the value of $100 into his shirt, no longer exists in an era when many of these men can clear as much as $20,000 annually. What I am about to say may seem extraordinary, but it is the "game among friends" which is the most dangerous; and at the risk of being blunt, I will add: especially if there are women. Was it not one of them, the novelist George Sand, who wrote that the majority of womon cheat at cards?

Formerly the banker had to know how to "make the salade," that is, how to mix the cards in such a way as to make them favourable to a confederate, or to rearrange them in the bottom of the deep basket into which they are tossed when the hand is over. But though the dealer may be more honest now, he is no less partial. Every habitue of the clubs knows that the banker can manage to seat at his table whomever he wants whenever he wants. He holds off the petty players and favours the large. If a play is doubtful, the dealer will give the advantage to his regular clients.

One reason why, to my mind gambling is so diabolic and will never cease to enlist new victims, is that no one can understand the primordial axiom that in gambling "nobody wins." "I have seen games last all night," a dealer of the Cote d'Azur said to me last year. "At dawn, when the game broke up, everyone had lost!"—less the rake-off naturally, which with its slow but sure percentage finally accumulates to millions. But this does not keep the eternal dupes from coming back; not the rich (for the fluctuations of fortune cannot do much to the rich) but the poor, the eternally poor, conquered by the contingencies of the game as they are by life. Sorry derelicts of the Cote d'Azur, elderly ladies lament, "And to think that I must leave just when I was about to win! Luck turned, but I had nothing left!" Who can say that the form of Baccarat known as "railroad" has not caused more casualities than the railroads themselves?

Strange power of cards, mysterious as the East, as India where they originated, and whence they were brought to Europe by the gypsies. Originally, it is said, they were designed in imitation of warfare, each player thus being the leader of an army; and they have retained that element of vacillation, hazard, and restlessness which is also the destiny of battles. "Poker," I have written somewhere, "is the rugby of cards"; it is likewise the image of life. The more strenuous a game, the more beautiful it is; gambling is not a thing of beauty until it has become a Balzacian vice, an Aeschylean passion. People speak only of the vices engendered by gambling, and not of the qualities which it develops; the selfmastery, confidence, optimism, energy, ingenuity, and love of effort. One cannot over-praise this unknown force which propels like a wind astern, and which is called good luck, this elder sister of chance, of inspiration, the mother of poetry and genius!

What combinations! Consider, for instance, that two players using each a deck of fifty-two cards can make six million billion possible combinations! And how many treatises, how many guides there are, each claiming to have found the formula of fortune! Martingales ascending and descending, games with arithmetic or geometric progression! Naive inventions which could never deceive the mathematician, who would immediately descry their weak point. They serve at best to make one lose less rapidly.

I know of nothing more amusing than the Revue de Monte-Carlo with its fallacious announcements on the back page. You can find there, for instance, all the plays that occurred at table 2 on the day of October 8th. What a beautiful instrument for the statisticians to labour over! And what beautiful names they bear, all these martingales: la montante de d' Alembert, la montante beige, américaine! One reads there such things as this: "200 francs a day return to collaborator for exploitation original formula at roulette. Write general delivery." Or again: "Respectable lady desires to enter into relations with a gentleman having 5,000 francs for a sure combination!" Alas, nothing is sure except the age of the lady, who has been playing here since her youth: a lamentable ruin now, the very picture of bad luck, with her darned stockings, her old bag, her clothes in tatters. "I am just sixty-five years old to-day; give me a louis to play my age on the odd numbers; I am sure to win, good sir, for I have always had good luck!"