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Updated: June 23, 2025
Perhaps she might have made a superhuman effort had there been reasonable hope of anything to gain. But Madame d'Ambre had learned to read faces: and Mary's had told her that for a time there was nothing more to expect. She would be comfortably lazy while her money held out. Mary's seat was near the spinner, one of the croupiers who had seen her sensational wins twelve hours ago.
In fact, I cannot have been in possession of all my faculties, for I can remember the croupiers correcting my play more than once, owing to my having made mistakes of the gravest order. My brows were damp with sweat, and my hands were shaking. Also, Poles came around me to proffer their services, but I heeded none of them. Nor did my luck fail me now.
Calmly again flowed the waters in the harbor. More and more the autos honked outside the Casino. Within "the little ball ever goes merrily round," and according to the croupiers and the society reporters "the gentleman wins and the poor gambler loses!" To illustrate, I recall when on a certain season the lucky sport of print and fancy was an Englishman.
In spite of the blue-eyed man's implied acquiescence she felt qualms of responsibility. Why had she not played on an even chance, or one of the dozens, or even a transversale? To add to her discomfort no one else played the full seventeen. The whole table seemed silently jeering at her inexperience. The croupiers had completed the payments of the last coup.
"Merrymaking doesn't scare me," Retief said. "Come to think of it, I don't know what the word means." He started up, Magnan behind him. At the top of the long stair a dense throng milled in the alley-like street. A giant illuminated roulette wheel revolved slowly above them. A loudspeaker blared the chant of the croupiers from the tables inside.
The night was perfect, the season was at its height, the open windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts of unnatural light into the dusky woods, and now and then, in the intervals of the music, one might almost hear the clink of the napoleons and the metallic call of the croupiers rise above the watching silence of the saloons.
Every one has heard the adventure of the gambling-house, when he tore up the cards, upset the furniture, and beat both bankers and croupiers, to indemnify himself for the loss of his money; and the worst of it was, he was at that very time Governor of Paris. This might have been, from the sequel, taken as a prediction; for the unfortunate general died at last in a fit of mental aberration.
Those near her who understood French glanced up quickly. Croupiers smiled and said nothing. A murmur went round the table, and flowed like the rippling circles from a stone dropped in a pond, to the crowd which ringed it in. "What do you mean?" asked Mary. "Oh, the bank does not really break! They do not even stop play in these days. But they send for more money lest it be needed.
The croupiers who sat at the two ends of it had not only to watch the stakes, but also to calculate the game an immense amount of work for two men! As for the crowd itself well, it consisted mostly of Frenchmen. Yet I was not then taking notes merely in order to be able to give you a description of roulette, but in order to get my bearings as to my behaviour when I myself should begin to play.
The same heavy stillness, emphasised by the continuous chink, chink of gold and silver, and broken only by the announcement of events at different tables: "Onze, noir, impair et manque"; "Rien ne va plus"; "Zèro!" The same onze; the same rien n'va plus; the same zèro heralded in the same secretly joyous, outwardly apologetic tone, by the croupiers fortunate enough to produce it.
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