The Arcades Project - Operi

that only the superior strength of the police force ean keep within certain harely
adequate hounds the bestiality of' the Paris crowds." [04,2]
The 'Original"-a sort of primitive man with enormous heard who can he seen in
the Palais-Royal-is callNI Chodruc Duclos. [04.3]
"Is it an insignifieant delight to tempt fortune? Is it a pleasure devoid of intoxication
to taste in one second months, years, a whole lifetime of fears and hopes? I was
not ten years old when M. Gn§pinet, my master in the junior class, read us the
fable L 'Homme et le genie . Yet I rememher the talc
hetter than if I had read it yesterday. A genie gives a boy a ball of thread, and tells
him: This is the thread of your life. Take it. When you find time heavy on your
hands, pull it out; your days will pass quick or slow, according as you unwind the
ball rapidly or little by little. So long as you leave the thread alone, you will remain
stationary at the same hour of your existence.' The hoy took the thread; first he
IHllled at it to become a man, then to marry the girl he loved, then to see his
children grow up, to win offices and profit and honor, to abridge anxieties, to
escape griefs and the infIrmities that come with the years, and finally, alas! to cut
short a peevish old age. He had lived just four months and six days since the date
of the genie's visit. Well, what is gambling, I should like to know, hut the art of
producing in a second the changes that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the
course of many hours or even many years, the art of collecting into a single instant
the emotions dispersed throughout the slow-moving existence of ordinary men, the
secret of living a whole lifetime in a few minutes-in a word, the genie's ball of
thread? Gambling is a hand-to-hand encounter with Fate . . . . The stake is
money-in other words, immediate, infinite possibilities . . . . Perhaps the next
card turned, the hall now rolling, will give the player parks and gardens, fields and
forests, castles and manors lifting heavenward their pointed turrets and fretted
roofs. Yes, that little bouncing ball holds within it acres of good land and roofs of
slate with sculpted chimneys reflected in the hroad bosom of the Loire; it contains
treHsures of art, mHrvels of taste, jewels of price, the most exquisite bOflies in all
the world, nay! even souls-souls no one ever dreamed were venHI, all the decorHtions,
all the distinctions, all the elegance, and all the puissance of the world . ...
And you would have me give up gamhling? NHY; if gamhling only availed to give
endless hopes, if our only vision of' it. were the smile of its green eyes? it would he
loved less fanatically. But it has nails of adamant; it is cruel and terrible. At. its
caprice it gives poverty and wretchedness and shame-that is why its votaries
adore it. The fascination of danger is at the bottom of all great passions. There is
no fullness of pleasure unless the precipice is Ileal'. It is the mingling of terror with
delight thHt intoxicates. And what more terrifying than gamhling? It gives and
takes away; its logic is not our logic. It is dumb and hlind and deaf. It is almighty.
It is a God . ... It has its votHries and its saints, who love it for itself, not for what
it promises, Hnd who fall down in adoration when its hlow strikes them. It strips
them ruthlessly, Hnd t.hey lay the hlame on themselves? not on their duty. "I played