commit and that you most readily see what is happening in the shallows
to which you yourself are descending. He who speaks ill of others is,
in short, merely his own traducer; and evil-speaking is, in essence,
but the story of our own falls, transposed or anticipated.
2
We surround ourselves with all the evil that we attribute to the
victims of our gossip. It takes form at our own expense; it lives
and feeds upon the best of our substance; it accumulates all about
us, peopling and encumbering our atmosphere with phantoms, at first
grotesque, inconsistent, docile, timid and ephemeral, which gradually
become persistent, add to their strength and stature, speak with louder
voice and develop into very real and imperious entities which ere long
will issue orders and assume the direction of most of our thoughts and
actions. We are less and less masters in our own houses; we feel our
character slowly sapped of its strength; and we find ourselves sooner
or later enclosed within a sort of enchanted circle which it is all but
impossible to break, a circle in which we no longer know whether we are
defaming our brethren because we are growing as bad as they, or whether
we are growing bad because we defame them.
3
We should accustom ourselves to judge all men as we judge the heroes
of this war. It is certain that, if any one had the pitiful courage to
undertake their belittlement, he would find, in any gathering of these
men, almost as many vices, pettinesses or blemishes as in any human
gathering chosen at random in any town or village. He would tell you
that it contained hopeless drunkards, unscrupulous libertines, uncouth,
narrow and greedy peasants, mean and rapacious shopkeepers, callous,
lewd and cheating artisans, sordid, envious clerks and, among young men
of better birth, idle, presumptuous, selfish and arrogant wastrels.
He would add that many of them did their duty only because there was
no way of avoiding it; that they went forward, despite themselves,
to brave a death which they hoped to escape, because they well knew
that they could not escape the death which would threaten them if they
refused to face the first. He might say all this and many other things
which would appear more or less true; but there is something far more
true, which is the great and magnificent truth that enfolds and uplifts
all the rest: it is the thing which they really did; it is the fact
that they willingly offered themselves to death in order to accomplish
what they regarded as a duty. It cannot be denied: if all those who
had vices and imperfections and the desire to shun danger had refused
to accept the sacrifice, no force in the world could have compelled
them to it; for they would represent a force at least equal to that
which would have sought to impel them. We must therefore believe that
these imperfections, these vices, these ignoble desires were very
superficial and in any case incomparably less powerful and less deeply
rooted than the great flood of feeling which carried all before it.
And this is why, when we think of those dead or mutilated heroes, the
petty thoughts which I have described do not even enter our minds. And
it is right that this should be so. In the heroic whole they count
for no more than rain-drops in the ocean. All has been swept away,
all has been made equal by sacrifice, suffering and death, in the one
untarnished beauty.
But let us not forget that it is almost the same with all men; and
that these heroes were not of a different nature from the neighbour
whom we are incessantly villifying. Death has purified and consecrated
them; but we are all of us daily in the presence of the sacrifice, the
suffering and, above all, the death which will purify and consecrate
us in our turn. We are almost all subject to the same ordeals which,
because they are less frequent and less glorious, appeal no less to the
same profound virtues; and, if so many men, chosen at hazard from among
us, have proved themselves worthy of our admiration, it is because,
after all, we are doubtless better than we seem; for, while those
others mingled in our life, even they did not appear to be much better
than ourselves.
OF GAMBLING
X
OF GAMBLING
1
_Paulo minora._ This essay, I need hardly say, consists of notes made
before the war and put in order now, at a time when victory allows our
thoughts to stray for a moment from the great tragedy in which the
destinies of mankind have been at stake. For the rest, the subject,
however frivolous it may at first sight appear, sometimes touches or
seems to touch problems which it is not unfitting to examine, were
it only to realize that they are perhaps illusive. Moreover it is
unfortunately probable that, when peace is restored, our allies will
visit in too numerous and confiding crowds the dubious havens of
delight which we are about to enter. I have no pretension to serve them
as a guide nor to teach them how to fight against the whims of fortune;
but a handful of them may find in these lines, if not useful hints or
profitable advice, at least some few reflections or observations which
will pave the way for their own experiments or render them easier.
2
Let us then pay a last visit to one of those green tables which spread
their length in the somewhat disreputable place of which I have written
elsewhere[2] as the “Temple of Chance.” To-day I would rather call
it the Factory of Chance, for it is here that, for more than half a
century, without respite or repose, on weekdays, Sundays and holidays
alike, daily from ten o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at
night, with croupiers unintermittently relieving one another, men have
obstinately manufactured Chance and doggedly consulted the formless and
featureless god that shrouds good luck and ill within his shadow.
We do not yet know what he is nor what he wants; we are not even sure
that he exists; but surely it would be astonishing if no result of any
kind, no clue to the tantalizing puzzle, had emerged from this endless
effort, the most gigantic, the most costly, the most methodical that
has ever been made on the brink of this gloomy abyss, if nothing had
been born of all this furious work, however trivial, however unhealthy
and useless it may appear.
In any case, at these tables, as at all places where passions become
intensified, we are able to make interesting observations and, among
other things, to behold at first hand, violently foreshortened and
harshly illuminated, certain aspects of man’s lifelong struggle with
the unknown. The drama, which as a rule is long drawn out, projecting
itself into space and time and breaking up amid circumstances that
escape our eyes, is here knit together, gathered into a ball, held,
so to speak, in the hollow of the hand. But, for all its speed, its
abruptness of movement and its extreme compression, it remains as
complex and mysterious as those which go on indefinitely. Until the
ivory ball that rolls and hops around the wheel falls into its red or
black compartment, the unknown veiling its choice or its destiny is as
impenetrable as that which hides from us the choice or the destiny of
the stars. The movements of the planets can be calculated almost to a
second; but no mathematical operation can measure or predict the course
of the little white ball.
Your most skilful players, indeed, have given up trying. Not one of
them any longer seriously relies on intuition, presentiment, second
sight, telepathy, psychic forces or the calculation of probabilities
in the attempt to foresee or determine the fall of a destiny no larger
than a hazel-nut. All the scientific part of human knowledge has
failed; and all the occult and magical side of that same knowledge has
been equally unsuccessful. The mathematicians, the prophets, the seers,
the sorcerers, the sensitives, the mediums, the psychometrists, the
spiritualists who call upon the dead for assistance, all alike are
blind, confounded and impotent before the wheel and before Destiny’s
thirty-seven compartments. Here Chance reigns supreme; and hitherto,
though it all happens before our eyes, though it is repeated to satiety
and may be held, let me say once more, in the hollow of our hand, no
one has yet been able to determine a single one of its laws.
3
Yet such laws seem to exist; and thousands of players have ruined
themselves in following their forms or their elusive and deceptive
traces. Let us take a bundle of those records or _permanences_,
published at Monte Carlo, which give day by day the list of
all the numbers that have come up at one of the roulette or
_trente-et-quarante_ tables. As everybody knows, these numbers are
arranged in long parallel columns, the black on the left and the red
on the right. When we look at one of these sheets, containing as a
rule ten columns of sixty-five numbers each--dead and harmless cyphers
now, though once so dangerous, once destructive of so many hopes and
perhaps inspiring more than one disaster--we observe a tendency towards
a fairly perceptible equilibrium between the red and the black. Most
often the two chances balance each other, singly or in little groups,
a black, a red, two blacks, three reds, three blacks, two reds and so
on. When we come upon a series of five, six, seven, eight, sometimes
eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve consecutive blacks, we are almost
certain of finding not far away a compensating series of five, six,
seven, eight or ten reds. There is a very real rhythm, a sort of
breathing or a cadenced movement to and fro of the mysterious creature
which we call Chance. This rhythm or balance is moreover confirmed by
the final statistics of the day, from which we learn that, in a total
of six hundred and so many spins of the ball, the difference between
the black and the red very seldom exceeds twenty or thirty; and this
difference is even smaller in the total for the week, that is to say,
in a total of nearly five thousand spins, when it is usually reduced to
a few units.
4
The monster has other strange habits. We see, for instance, that it is
not uncommon for a number to come up twice in succession; and it is
undeniable that, in each day’s play, two or three numbers are obviously
favoured, so much so that we may hurl out a challenge to logic and
declare that the more frequently a number occurs the more chances it
has of reappearing. This seems to conflict with the law of equilibrium
which we have remarked; but it must be observed that this equilibrium
will be recovered later, that by the end of the week the difference
will no longer be very great and that they will almost disappear when
the month is over. The equilibrium is more slowly restored because we
must multiply the number of series by eighteen and a half to reach the
proportions of the even chances.
Players note yet another law which, for that matter, is but a corollary
of the former habit, but which has something curiously human about it:
the chances which lag behind show a greater eagerness to regain their
lost ground at the moment that follows more or less closely upon a
halt, as though they had recovered their breath after a brief rest on
the landing of a staircase.
Let us add at once that it is wise to distrust these fluctuating habits
and these gropings after laws. For instance, red has been known to beat
black by seventy per cent. in the course of a day’s play. Black, on
the other hand, as people still remember at Monte Carlo, one day came
up twenty-nine times in succession and the second dozen twenty-eight
times without a break. Chance has not our nerves; it is not, like us,
impatient to make good its losses or to carry off its gains. It takes
its time, awaits its hour and does not trouble to keep step with our
ways of life.
5
Players as a rule attribute these habits or caprices to a trick of the
croupier’s hand. This is hardly tenable. After all, we know how the
thing is done. The ball drops into its compartment and the croupier
announces, for instance:
“13, black, _impair_ and manque.”
The losses are raked in, the winnings are paid out, the players renew
their stakes, there is sometimes a brief dispute, somebody asks for
change and so on. These operations vary a good deal in length; and
all this time the wheel carrying the ball is making hundreds of
revolutions. The croupier stops it at last, takes the ball, reverses
the wheel and sends the ball spinning in the opposite direction. It is
impossible under these conditions for his particular trick of the hand
to exercise any influence whatever. Besides, we can easily see from
the chart of the _permanences_ that the change of croupier does not
perceptibly affect the rhythm of the even chances. It is not the man
who controls the rhythm but the rhythm that controls the man.
6
These gropings after laws in what would seem a negation of all or any
law; these strivings on the part of Chance to quit its own domain
and to organize its chaos; this god who denies himself and seeks to
destroy himself by his own hand; these incomprehensible stammerings,
these awkward efforts to achieve utterance and assume consciousness are
rather curious, we must admit. For the rest, it is these efforts, these
hankerings after equilibrium, this embryonic rhythm that constitute
the gamblers’ good and bad luck. If Chance were simply Chance as we
conceive it on first principles, one would stake any sum anyhow and
at any moment. I am well aware that, according to the most learned
theorists on roulette, each _coup_ is independent of all the others
and begins as if nothing had happened before, as if nothing were to
happen afterwards, as if the table were fresh from the shop, the wheel
from the factory and the croupier from the hands of God. In theory
this is quite accurate; but we have just seen that in practice it does
not seem to be so. For that matter, it seems impossible to explain the
reason. Players are satisfied to observe the fact, while yielding to
a dangerous but very human tendency to exaggerate the scope and the
certainty of their observations.
They are too ready to see laws where there is only a mass of
coincidences as fleeting as clouds. It is of course necessary that
the reds and blacks, emerging successively from nowhere, should find
a place somewhere and form certain groups; and, if it is rather
surprising that at the end of the month their numbers are nearly equal,
it would be no less surprising if one of the colours were to prevail
largely over the other. It is perfectly true that, at first sight, the
reds and blacks seem to balance on the _permanence_ sheets; but it is
also true that, when we examine more closely, a series of five or six
reds, for instance, interrupted by one or two blacks, not infrequently
begins a fresh run; and ill-luck may well have it that, at this moment,
the player, in his search for equilibrium, will start punting on the
black and in a few _coups_ behold the disappearance of all the winnings
slowly and laboriously wrested from Chance, which is niggardly when one
is winning and extremely generous--to the bank--when one is losing. For
that matter, he will suffer the same disappointment if he bets on the
variation, in other words, against the equilibrium, and will too often
discover that these laws, when he puts his trust in them, are writ in
water, whereas they seem to be graven in bronze so soon as they betray
him.
7
In order to profit by these laws, which are perhaps fallacious and in
any case untrustworthy, and to secure himself against their treachery,
he has contrived a host of ingenious systems which sometimes enable him
to win but most often merely retard his ruin.
But, before speaking of these systems, let us begin by saying that
we shall concern ourselves here only with the even chances, red or
black, _pair_ or _impair_, _passe_ or _manque_. These are sufficiently
complicated in themselves and set us problems that would be enough
to exhaust all the shrewdness of a human life. As for any other than
the even chances, _en plein_, _à cheval_, _transversales_, _carrés_,
_douzaines_ and so forth, these, both in theory and in practice, escape
all control, calculation or explanation.
Whatever system he adopt, the gambler is always tossing heads or tails
against the bank. He has a chance and the bank has a chance; but zero
gives the bank odds against him; and, though zero is apparently a very
mild tax, since at _rouge-et-noir_ in thirty-six chances the bank has
only half a chance more than the player, it is bound to be ruinous in
the end. To escape the abruptness of a decision which, if he placed
all that he possessed on the red or the black, would end the game at a
single stroke, the player divides his stake, so as to be able to defy a
large number of chances, hoping that, thanks to a skilfully graduated
progression, he will end by lighting on a favourable series in which
the gains will exceed the losses. This is the underlying principle of
all the systems, which are never anything but more or less ingenious,
prudent and complicated martingales. There are not, there never will be
any others, in the absence of a miracle which has not yet occurred, of
an intuition which foresees what the ball will decide, or of an unknown
force which will oblige it to act as a player wishes.
8
I have no intention of reviewing all these systems, which are
innumerable and of unequal value: the _paroli_ pure and simple, that
artless, violent, doubled stake which leads straight to disaster;
the D’Alembert and all its variants; the descending progressions; the
differential methods; the _montant belge_; the _parolis intermittents_;
the snowball; the _photographie_; the staking of equal amounts on
certain groups of figures, which is a Chinese puzzle demanding days
of patient observation before it is attacked; and many others which I
forget, from the most clear-cut to the most mysterious, which are sold
at a high price, to credulous beginners, in sealed envelopes containing
what is everybody’s secret and with all or nearly all of which I
have become acquainted thanks to the kindness of an erudite player.
A detailed account of those most frequently used will be found in
D’Albigny’s treatise _Les Martingales modernes_, in Gaston Vessillier’s
_Théorie des systèmes géométriques_, in Hulmann’s _Traité des jeux
dits de hasard_, in Théo d’Alost’s _Théorie scientifique nouvelle des
jeux de la roulette, trente-et-quarante, etc._, and, above all, in the
_Revue de Monte Carlo_, which has given a system in every issue since
the day of its foundation some fifteen years ago.
Whether mystic or transparent, all these methods present more or less
the same dangers, being all founded on the quicksands of equilibrium
and temporary disturbance. If they are very cautious, the loss is
trifling, but the gain is still smaller; if they are bold, the gain is
great, but the loss is two or three times greater. The best of them,
in order to continue the defence of a moderate stake and of what has
already been sacrificed, involve the risking on the cloth, at a given
moment, of all the previous winnings, which are soon followed by the
sums held in reserve. This is the inevitable revenge of the bank, at
which you thought that you were nibbling with impunity, but which
suddenly opens wide its jaws, like a blind and drowsy crocodile, and
swallows profits and capital at a single gulp.
9
The players hearten themselves by maintaining that they have an
incontestable advantage over the bank. They begin to play, they “punt”
when they like and as they like and they withdraw when they please,
whereas the bank is compelled to play without stopping, to accept every
stake and to meet every _coup_ up to the limit of the maximum, which,
as we know, is six thousand francs on the even chances. This advantage
is a real one if the player, after winning a big sum, goes away and
does not come back again. But the lucky gambler, even more infallibly
than the one who has no luck, will return to the enchanted table and
in so doing loses the only elective weapon that he had against his
enemy. To choose your time for punting is but an illusory privilege,
because everything, at any moment, is equally shifting and uncertain;
and you never know beforehand when the precarious and deceptive law of
equilibrium will reassert itself. After a long sequence of blacks, you
wager on a fine series of reds, a certain run, you would say; but no
sooner have you staked your money than the series gives up the ghost
and remorseless black resumes its devastating course; or else you do
the opposite: you bet on black and it is red that settles down for a
run. At whatever moment you start punting, you are always fighting
red against black, that is to say, one to one. Once more, the only
real advantage is that you can go away when you like; but where is the
gambler, whether losing or winning, who is able to go away and not come
back?
10
After mature examination, all these systems merely carve the brutal
and crushing mass of luck into small pieces. They act as a defensive
padding against the blows of Chance, making them less grave. They
prolong the player’s life or his agony. They enable the owner of a
modest purse to stake as often as the multimillionaire, who would
confine himself to betting double or quits indefinitely, if he were
not stopped by the fatal barrier of the maximum. But all mathematical
operations, all combinations of figures flutter and struggle like
blind captives between bronze walls. They merely dash themselves
in vain against these walls, whether black or red: both remain
invulnerable and impregnable; and from their imprisoning embrace there
is no escape.
11
Does this mean that there is no such thing as a defensible method
and that the most skilful calculations have not revealed a means of
defeating Chance? In theory, I cannot bring myself to believe that
baseless calculations will ever do what they have not done up to the
present. It is none the less true that, in practice, we come upon
some which struggle with fair success against ill-luck. For instance,
a friend of mine, a British officer, has a system which he has been
using for a long time and which yields astonishing results. It is, of
course, a progression, the whole of whose virtue lies in an ingenious
and very simple key that seems to act as a sort of talisman. I have
not found this method in any of either the recognized or the catchpenny
treatises. It has its dangers, like the others; it has its difficult
moments, when, to save your anticipated profits and your earlier
losses, you have to risk a rather large amount. But, if you prudently
stop playing during runs which are too obstinately hostile, if you
allow the storm to pass as it spreads over a large number of chances,
you end by obtaining the necessary compensation. At any rate, it has
never seriously failed my friend so far.
12