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Updated: May 3, 2025
Dupontel, watching him, had a moment of consternation; the Prince seemed a thing too supremely complete, too perfect as a product of his world, to risk upon the turn of the cards. A club servant entered, bearing a card on a salver, and the talk stilled as he presented it to the Prince.
It had occurred to him vaguely that he might propitiate his fortune by sacrificing this money make himself, as it were, by a timely generosity, the creditor of good luck. But it was not the kind of thing he was used to do. "Eh bien!" he said, and put the notes out of sight. "And now," said Dupontel, "let us eat." "Yes," said the Prince slowly. "That is the next thing, I suppose.
But I offer you half the stakes now, if you like; two hundred thousand instead of four and we will not play that last card." "Eh?" The blind man hid his card with his hand. His son bent over him, whispering. A man next to Dupontel nudged him. "What is Monpavon's card?" he murmured. Dupontel did not know. The cards had been the least part of the affair to him. The Prince sat still, waiting.
The pretence that the onlookers were present by chance was gone when the Prince and his adversary sat down opposite to each other at the little green table. The onlookers thronged about them, frankly curious. The young man, Carigny's son, stood leaning over his father's shoulder. Dupontel was at the back of his friend. He saw the green table across the Prince's white head.
The hand and the skinny wrist, protruding from the frayed sleeve and searching the empty air, affected Dupontel unpleasantly; they touched the fund of credulity in him which is at the root of all men who believe in nothing. He watched the blind man like an actor in a scene till he moved on again, with his stick tracing the edge of the curb and his strained face unresponsive to the sunlight.
In the Place de la Concorde they actually did meet a blind man a lean, bowed man feeling his way along the curb with a stick deftly enough, so that, as he was on the wrong side of the sidewalk, it would have been easy enough to brush against him in passing. It was the Prince who first perceived him approaching. He touched Dupontel and pointed. "Parbleu!" exclaimed Dupontel.
"No wonder," said the Prince to himself, as he knotted his necktie before the mirror "no wonder the day felt wrong! There is bad luck in the very air. I must be very careful today." M. Dupontel, waiting for him in the salon, saw him enter between the folding doors with a face upon which his distaste of the day had cast a shadow.
But Dupontel remained quite imperturbable; he had not the slightest suspicion, and was the first to laugh when anybody told him some good story of a husband who had been cuckolded, although his wife repelled him, quarreled with him, and constantly pretended to be out of sorts or tired out, in order to escape from him.
"Take us up again at once," he ordered the attendant. "I will not keep you a moment," he said to Dupontel, when the elevator had reached his own floor again, and he entered his apartment quickly. He found his valet still in the bedroom, putting it deftly in order, always with that secret and furtive quality of look and movement.
"Sure it's convenient?" For answer, Dupontel showed him his pocketbook, with still half a dozen thousand-franc notes in it. "I see," said the Prince. He still hesitated for a moment or two, as if touched by some compunction, before he put the notes into his pocket.
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