The Arcades Project - Operi

the Palais-Royal of 1789 . ... In spite of the incessant burials and exhumations
"'
going on there, it was a public lounge and a rendezvous. Shops were established
before the charnel houses, and prostitutes strolled under the cloisters." J. Huizinga,
Herbst des Mittelalters (Munich, 1928), p. 210." [013a,l]
Are fortunetelling cards more ancient than playing cards? Does the card game
represent a pejoration of divinatory technique? Seeing the future is certainly
crucial in card games, too. [013a,21
Money is what gives life to number; money is what animates the marble maiden
(see 07,1). [013a,31
Gracian's maxim-"In all things, know how to win time to your side"-will be
understood by no one better and more gratefully than the one to whom a
long·cherished wish has been granted. With this, compare the magnificent defini·
tion which Joubert gives of such time. It defines, contrariwise, the gambler's
time: "There is tinle even in eternity; but it is not a terrestrial or worldly time . ...
It destroys nothing; it completes:'J.Joubert, Pensees (Paris, 1883), vol. 2, p. 162.
[013a,4]
Concerning the heroic element in gambling-as it were, a corollary to Baudelaire's
poem "LeJeu": ''A thought which regularly crosses my mind at the gambling
table . .. : What if one were to store up all the energy and passion . .. which
every year is squandered ... at the gaming tables of Europe-would one have
enough to make a Roman people out of it, and a Roman history? But that's just
it. Because each man is boru a Roman, bourgeois society aims to de-Romanize
him, and thus there are games of chance and games of etiquette, novels, Italian
operas and stylish gazettes, casinos, tea parties and lotteries, years of apprenticeship
and travel, military reviews and changing of the guard, ceremonies and
visits, and the fifteen or twenty close-fitting garments which daily, with a salutary
loss of time, a person has to put on and take off again-all these have been
introduced so that the overabundant energy evaporates unnoticed!" Ludwig
Borne, Gesammelte Schrifien (Hamburg and Frankfurt mn Main, 1862), vol. 3,
pp. 38-39 ("Das Gastrnahl der Spieler"