I cannot abide a gambling hall. This attitude, which is of long standing, has nothing to do with morality. I will not, though I have been in the States since 1920, so much as enter the state of Nevada, and my dislike of gambling extends to such harmless diversions as buying a chance on a raffled Thanksgiving turkey. I will not even watch a performance of the Tchaikovsky opera Pique Dame, nor so much as read the Pushkin story from which it was made.
It was not always so. In my youth-which was a very long time ago--I took what was then called the Grand Tour; and in the course of it our travels led us to the French Riviera, and to Monte Carlo. At that time, foremost among tourist sights were the great casinos; and though I had neither funds nor the desire to gamble, I visited more than one of the great halls devoted to gambling.
How can I make you see the ambiance of those palaces; those great parlors devoted to games of chance? The crimson draperies covering windows where neither day nor night has ever entered; the green baize tables; the great roulette wheels spinning night and day, the throngs of brightly garbed devotees, the whirring and rumbling of the old-fashioned slot machines they had then, the calls of the croupiers, the sound and smell of money--and to me, the very sound of despair.
On one of these occasions, as our little party thrust its way through the brightly adorned rooms, my eyes fell upon an old woman. She was garbed in the fashion of twenty or thirty years before; which is to say in high Victorian fashion, with bows and flounces and shiny jet beads and draperies. Her hair, done high upon her head, was pretty obviously a wig, elaborately curled and ringletted and puffed in the high style of that day. But the whole toilette was shiny and all but threadbare.
"Oh!" said one of my companions, apropos of nothing at all, "Now I know the day. That is the ancient archduchess Maria; I had forgotten that today is the Feast of the Assumption, which she treats as her name day. She always comes here to celebrate; I could set my clock by her, she is so regular. It is a dreadful tale, that."
I thought then of the magical opera Pique Dame, by Tchaikovsky, which had premiered a few years before, and of the old Countess with her legendary secret of three cards which could not lose. As I pocketed my modest winnings--I did not gamble much even then--I asked, "Is it said the lady has much success in gambling?"
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