The Arcades Project - Operi

way, in that red cotton fabric that is dear to African Negroes, and out of which
the curtains in little provincial inns are made. What covers them cannot be called
a dress; it is a beltless smock, puffed up with a crinoline. Exposing the shoulders
with an outrageously low cut, and coming just to the level of the knees, this outfit
gives them the look of large, inflated children, prematurely aged and glistening
with fat, wrinkled, dazed, and with those pointed heads that are the sign of
imbecility. When the inspectors, checking the registration book, call them and
they get up to reply, they have all the charm of a circus dog:' Maxime Du Camp,
Paris: Ses or ganes) sesfonctions et sa vie dans fa Jeconde moitii du XIX" siecle) vol. 3
(paris, 1872), p. 447 ("La Prostitution"). (012,2)
(,The basic principle ... of gambling . .. consists in this: ... that each round is
independent of the one preceding . ... Gambling strenuously denies all acquired
conditions, all antecedents . .. pointing to previous actions; and that is what. distinguishes
it from work. Gamhling rejects . .. this weighty past which is the mainstay
of work and which makes for seriousness of purpose, for attention to the long
term, for right, and for power . ... The idea of beginning again, ... and of doing
better, . . . occurs often to one for whom work is a struggle; but the idea is ...
useless . . . and one must stumble on with insufficient results." Alain , Les Idees et les ages , vol. 1, pp. 183-184 ("Le
Jeu"). [012,3]
The lack of consequences that defines the character of tl,e isolated experience
found drastic expression in gambling. During the feudal age, the latter
was essentially a privilege of the feudal class, which did not participate directly in
the production process. What is new is that in the nineteenth century the bourgeois
gambles. It was above all the Napoleonic armies that, on their campaigns,
became the agents of gambling for the bourgeoisie. [012a,l]
The significance of the temporal element in the intoxication of the gambler has
been noticed before this by Gourdon, as well as by Anatole France. But these two
writers see only the meaning time has for the gambler's pleasure in his wimrings,
which, quickly acquired and quickly surrendered, multiply themselves a hundredfold
in his imagination through the numberless possibilities of expenditure
remaining open and, above all, through the one real possibility of wager, of mise
en jell. What meaning the factor of time might have for the process of gambling
itself is at issue in neither Gourdon nor France. And the pastime of gambling is,
in fact, a singular matter. A game passes the time more quickly as chance comes
to light more absolutely in it, as the number of combinations encountered in the
course of play (of coups) is smaller and their sequence shorter. In other words, the
greater the component of chance in a game, the more speedily it elapses. This
state of affairs becomes decisive in the disposition of what comprises the authentic
"intoxication" of the gambler. Such intoxication depends on the peculiar
capacity of the game to provoke presence of mind through the fact that, in rapid
succession, it brings to the fore constellations which work-each one wholly