"For Heaven's sake,"
said I to my friend, "let us go somewhere where we can see a
little genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken gaming with no false
gingerbread glitter thrown over it all. Let us get away from
fashionable Frascati's, to a house where they don't mind letting
in a man with a ragged coat, or a man with no coat, ragged or
otherwise." "Very well," said my friend, "we needn't go out of
the Palais Royal to find the sort of company you want. Here's the
place just before us; as blackguard a place, by all report, as
you could possibly wish to see." In another minute we arrived at
the door, and entered the house, the back of which you have drawn
in your sketch.
When we got upstairs, and had left our hats and sticks with the
doorkeeper, we were admitted into the chief gambling-room. We did
not find many people assembled there. But, few as the men were
who looked up at us on our entrance, they were all
types--lamentably true types--of their respective classes.
We had come to see blackguards; but these men were something
worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all
blackguardism--here there was nothing but tragedy--mute, weird
tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard,
long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the
turning up of the cards, never spoke; the flabby, fat-faced,
pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly,
to register how often black won, and how often red--never spoke;
the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and the darned
great-coat, who had lost his last _sou,_ and still looked on
desperately, after he could play no longer--never spoke.
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