The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims (Vol.I&II). Andrew Steinmetz
looking at the first card, to know its colour, puts it on the table with its face downwards. He then takes two cards, one red and the other black, and sets them back to back. These cards are turned, and displayed conspicuously, as often as the colour varies, for the information of the company.
'The gamblers having staked their money on either of the colours, the dealer asks, "Votre jeu est-il fait?" "Is your game made?" or, "Votre jeu est-il piet?" "Is your game ready?" or, "Le jeu est pret, Messieurs," "The game is ready, gentlemen." He then deals the first card with its face upwards, saying "Noir;" and continues dealing until the cards turned exceed thirty points or pips in number, which number he must mention, as "Trente-et-un," or "Trente-six," as the case may be.
'As the aces reckon but for one, no card after thirty can make up forty; the dealer, therefore, does not declare the tens after thirty-one, or upwards, but merely the units, as one, two, three; if the number of points dealt for Noir are thirty-five he says "Cinq."
'Another parcel is then dealt for rouge, or red, and with equal deliberation and solemnity; and if the players stake beyond the colour that comes to thirty-one or nearest to it, he wins, which happy eventuality is announced by the dealer crying—"Rouge gagne," "Red wins," or "Rouge perd," "Red loses." These two parcels, one for each colour, make a coup. The same number of parcels being dealt for each colour, the dealer says, "Apres," "After." This is a "doublet," called in the amiable French tongue, "un refait," by which neither party wins, unless both colours come to thirty-one, which the dealer announces by saying, "Un refait Trente-et-un," and he wins half the stakes posted on both colours. He, however, does not take the money, but removes it to the middle line, and the players may change the venue of their stakes if they please. This is called the first "prison," or la premiere prison, and, if they win their next event, they draw the entire stake. In case of another "refait," the money is removed into the third line, which is called the second prison. So you see that there are wheels within wheels, and Lord Chancellor King's dictum, that walls can be built higher, but there should be no prison within a prison, is sometimes reversed.
When this happens the dealer wins all.
'The cards are sometimes cut for which colour shall be dealt first; but, in general, the first parcel is for black, and the second for red. The odds against a "refait" turning up are usually reckoned as 63 to 1. The bankers, however, acknowledge that they expect it twice in three deals, and there are generally from twenty-nine to thirty-two coups in each deal. The odds in favour of winning several times are about the same as in the game of Pharaon, and are as delusive. 'He who goes to Hombourg and expects to see any melodramatic manifestation of rage, disappointment, and despair in the losing players, reckons without his host. Winners or losers seldom speak above a whisper; and the only sound that is heard above the suppressed buzz of conversation, the muffled jingle of the money on the green cloth, the "sweep" of the croupiers' rakes, and the ticking of the very ornate French clocks on the mantel-pieces, is the impassibly metallic voice of the banker, as he proclaims his "Rouge perd," or "Couleur gagne." People are too genteel at Hombourg-von-der-Hohe to scream, to yell, to fall into fainting fits, or go into convulsions, because they have lost four or five thousand francs or so in a single coup.
'I have heard of one gentleman, indeed, who, after a ruinous loss, put a pistol to his head, and discharging it, spattered his brains over the Roulette wheel. It was said that the banker, looking up calmly, called out—'Triple Zero,' 'Treble Nothing,'—a case as yet unheard of in the tactics of Roulette, but signifying annihilation—and that, a cloth being thrown over the ensanguined wheel, the bank of that particular table was declared to be closed for the day. Very probably the whole story is but a newspaper canard, devised by the proprietors of some rival gaming establishment, who would have been delighted to see the fashionable Hombourg under a cloud.
'When people want to commit suicide at Hombourg, they do it genteelly; early in the morning, or late at night, in the solitude of their own apartments at the hotels. It would be reckoned a gross breach of good manners to scandalize the refined and liberal administration of the Kursaal by undisguised felo-de-se. The devil on two croupes at Hombourg is the very genteelest of demons imaginable. He ties his tail up with cherry-coloured ribbon, and conceals his cloven foot in a patent-leather boot. All this gentility and varnish, and elegant veneering of the sulphurous pit, takes away from him, if it does not wholly extinguish, the honour and loathing for a common gaming-house, with which the mind of a wellured English youth has been sedulously imbued by his parents and guardians. He has very probably witnessed the performance of the "Gamester" at the theatre, and been a spectator of the remorseful agonies of Mr. Beverly, the virtuous sorrows of Mrs. B., and the dark villanies of Messieurs Dawson and Bates.
'The first visit of the British youth to the Kursaal is usually paid with fear and trembling. He is with difficulty persuaded to enter the accursed place. When introduced to the saloons—delusively called de conversation, he begins by staring fixedly at the chandeliers, the ormolu clocks, and the rich draperies, and resolutely averts his eyes from the serried ranks of punters or players, and the Pactolus, whose sands are circulating on the green cloth on the table. Then he thinks there is no very great harm in looking on, and so peeps over the shoulder of a moustached gamester, who perhaps whispers to him in the interval between two coups, that if a man will only play carefully, and be content with moderate gains, he may win sufficient—taking the good days and the evil days in a lump—to keep him in a decent kind of affluence all the year round. Indeed, I once knew a croupier—we used to call him Napoleon, from the way he took snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then he temporizes; remembers that there is a capital reading-room, provided with all the newspapers and periodicals of civilized Europe, attached to the Kursaalian premises. There can be no harm, he thinks, in glancing over "Galignani" or the "Charivari," although under the same roof as the abhorred Trente et Quarante; but, alas! he finds Galignani engaged by an acrid old lady of morose countenance, who has lost all her money by lunch-time, and is determined to "take it out in reading," and the Charivari slightly clenched in one hand by the deaf old gentleman with the dingy ribbon of the Legion of Honour, and the curly brown wig pushed up over one ear, who always goes to sleep on the soft and luxurious velvet couches of the Kursaal reading-room, from eleven till three, every day, Sundays not excepted. The disappointed student of home or foreign news wanders back to one of the apartments where play is going, on. In fact, he does not know what to do with himself until table-d'hote time. You know what the moral bard, Dr. Watts says:—
"Satan finds some mischief still, For idle hands to do."
The unfledged gamester watches the play more narrowly. A stout lady in a maroon velvet mantle, and a man with a bald head, a black patch on his occiput, and gold spectacles, obligingly makes way for him. He finds himself pressed against the very edge of the table. Perhaps a chair—one of those delightfully comfortable Kursaal chairs—is vacant. He is tired with doing nothing, and sinks into the emolliently-cushioned fauteuil. He fancies that he has caught the eye of the banker, or one of the gentlemen of the croupe, and that they are meekly inviting him to try his luck. "Well, there can't be much harm in risking a florin," he murmurs. He stakes his silver-piece on a number or a colour. He wins, we will say, twice or thrice. Perhaps he quadruples his stake, nay, perchance, hits on the lucky number. It turns up, and he receives thirty-five times the amount of his mise. Thenceforth it is all over with that ingenuous British youth. The Demon of Play has him for his own, and he may go on playing and playing until he has lost every florin of his own, or as many of those belonging to other people as he can beg or borrow. Far more fortunate for him would it be in the long run, if he met in the outset with a good swinging loss. The burnt child DOES dread the fire as a rule; but there is this capricious, almost preternatural, feature of the physiology of gaming, that the young and inexperienced generally