The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, where the circle is more aristocratic and thousands can be lost and won in a night. Everybody looks tired, absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of his neighbour or of the spectators looking on; nobody cares to speak; a finger suffices to direct the croupier to push the stake on to the desired spot, a nod or a look to indicate the winner. The game goes on in a dull uniformity; nobody varies his stake; a few napoleons are added to or subtracted from the heaps before each as the minutes go on; sometimes a little sum is done on a paper beside the player; but there is the same impassive countenance, the same bored expression everywhere. Now and then one player gets quietly up and another sits quietly down. But there is nothing startling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of rolls of napoleons pushed from one colour to another, or of gold raked about in little heaps, there is something very difficult to understand in the spell which a gaming-table exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, as it is more intelligible to the looker-on. The stakes are smaller, the company changes oftener, and is socially more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy earnestness about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about the more desperate gamblers of rouge-et-noir; the outside fringe of lookers-on bend over with their stakes to back "a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet buzz of interest when the game seems going against the bank. There is always someone going and coming, over-dressed girls lean over and drop their stake and disappear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary, the casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at roulette.
But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest and dullest order. The only player who seems to throw any kind of vivacity into his gambling is a gaudy little Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates between one table and another, sees nothing of the game save the dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to drop another stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in his marches to spare a merry little word to a friend or two. But he is the only person who seems to know anybody. Men who sit by one another year after year never exchange a word. There is not even the air of reckless adventure to excite one. The player who dashes down his all on any part of the table and trusts to fortune is a mere creature of fiction; the gambler of fact is a calculator, a man of business, with a contempt for speculation and a firm belief in long-studied combination. Each has his little card, and ticks off the succession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is in the careful study of these statistics that each believes he discovers the secret of the game, the arrangement which, however it may be defeated for a time by inscrutable interference of ill-luck, must in the end, if there is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about and talked about, for "reckless" is the very last word by which one would describe the ring of business-like people who come day after day with the hope of making money by an ingenious dodge.