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There was no shouting or needless noise. When the oars touched the mole, a bridge was sent out from the helmsman's deck. Then the tribune turned to his party and said, with a gravity he had not before shown: "Duty now, O my friends." He took the chaplet from his head and gave it to the dice-player. "Take thou the myrtle, O favorite of the tesserae!" he said.
The idea that Satan would gamble for a human soul is of mediaeval origin and may have been taken by Baudelaire from Gérard de Nerval, who in his mystery play Le Prince des Sots has the devil play at dice with an angel, with human souls as stakes. As a dice-player Satan resembles Wuotan. Mr. H. G. Wells in The Undying Fire has Diabolus play chess with the Deity in Heaven.
We pulled, pulled, lustily forgetting the strain and pain of innards torn and racked from pain, vomiting oblivious of blistered hands and wet, half frozen feet. Then a nodding of that finger of light a happy, snapping, crap-shooting finger that seemed to say: "Come on, you men," like a dice-player wooing the bones led us to believe that our lights had been seen.
Contarini glanced at him and smiled with some constraint. "On such evenings," he continued, "I admit my guests myself, and they wear masks when they come, for though my servants are dismissed to their quarters, and would certainly not betray me for a dice-player, they might let drop the names of my friends if they saw them from an upper window."
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