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The first thing which met my eye, when waking in the morning, after the affair at the salon, was the rouleau of billets de banque which I had won at play; and it took several minutes before I could persuade myself that the entire recollection of the evening had any more solid foundation than a heated brain and fevered imagination.
There was a tolerance, almost a standard, of such actions among the men of Tahiti, though of course consuls, high officials, a banker or two of the Banque de l'Indo-Chine, and a few lawyers or speculators sacrificed their flesh to their ambitions or hid their peccadillos.
In fine, the Banque Générale is to become the Banque Royale. His Majesty of France, represented by his Grace the regent, is to become the head banker of France and Europe! Monsieur L'as is to be retained as director-general of this Banque Royale.
Of course we were just as delighted at his losing, for it would have been altogether too bad if fortune had favoured the scoundrel. The wealth of your banque has dazzled the old noodle. He thought he was going to pluck you, but he has lost his own feathers. But the thing I can't understand is how he can have made up his miserly mind to play so high.
All delusion, for Satan was freely empowered to blind and deceive me in a more terrible manner than ever. I heard of your luck, Chevalier. Every day I was told of this one and the other having beggared himself at your banque. Then it came to me that I was destined to pit my luck, which had never failed me, against yours that I was destined to put an end to your career.
I will tell you, then, that I was once a gambler like yourself; that capricious fortune was as kind to me as to you; that I travelled over the half of Europe, stopping wherever high play and the expectation of large winnings attracted me to remain; that the gold in the banque which I kept was heaped up as mountain high as in your own.
The alarm was sounded; all but Vulich jumped up and rushed to arms. "Stake, va banque!" he cried to one of the most ardent gamblers. "Seven," the latter answered as he hurried off. Notwithstanding the general confusion, Vulich calmly finished the deal seven was the card. By the time he reached the cordon a violent fusillade was in progress.
And this idea, which nothing but madness of the most extraordinary kind could have suggested to me, left me no further peace or rest. Thus I came to your banque. Thus my terrible folly did not leave me until my fortune no, my Angela's fortune was all yours. But you will let my daughter take her clothes away with her, will you not?
He was, as Carlyle puts it, "a swallower of formulas," and it seems he had the ability to digest such food thus taken. Therefore, upon his return to Paris in April, 1785, he made a series of attacks upon agiotage, or stock jobbing, most effectively assaulting the Compagnie des Eaux and the Banque de St. Charles.
As Madame Savarin was about the same age as the Signora, and dressed as became her years and in excellent taste, Isaura thought this an admirable suggestion; and pressing into her chaperon's hand a billet de banque sufficient to re-equip her cap-a pie, dismissed the subject from her mind.
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