Part 5

Chapter 53,988 wordsPublic domain

Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their position and their extent. That already is something, pending the day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing in the presence of the mysteries all that the most upright intelligence can do to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does, with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively. He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more that they are incomprehensible.

EVIL-SPEAKING

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” say the three sacred monkeys carved over the gate of the Buddhist temple of Iyeyasu at Nikko.

We all of us speak ill of one another:

“No one,” Pascal remarks, “speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence. The union that exists among men is based solely on this mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each knew what his friend says when he is not there, though he be speaking of him in all sincerity and without passion.

“I lay it down as a fact that, if all men knew what they say of one another, there would not be four friends in this world.”

If you do away with evil-speaking, you do away with three-fourths of our conversation; and an unbearable silence will hover over every gathering. Evil-speaking or calumny--for it is extremely difficult to separate the two sisters; and in reality any evil-speaking is likely to be calumnious, inasmuch as we know others even less well than we know ourselves--evil-speaking, which feeds all that creates disunion between men and poisons their intercourse, is nevertheless the chief motive that brings them together and enables them to enjoy the pleasures of society.

But the ravages which it wreaks all around us are too well-known and have too often been described to make it necessary for us to portray them once again. Let us here consider only the harm which it does to him who indulges in it. It accustoms him to see only the petty sides of men and things; little by little it conceals from him the bold outlines, the great unities, the heights and depths containing the only truths that count and endure.

In reality, the evil which we find in others, the evil which we speak of them, exists within ourselves: from ourselves we derive it; upon ourselves it recoils. We perceive clearly only those defects which are ours, or which we are on the point of acquiring. Within ourselves is kindled the evil flame whose reflection we perceive on others. Each of us diligently searches out, among those who surround him, the vice or the defect that reveals to the clear-sighted the vice or the defect to which he himself is thrall. There is no more ingenuous or intimate confession, even as there is no better examination of conscience, than to ask one’s self:

“What is the fault which I most willingly impute to my neighbour?”

You may be sure that this is the fault which you are most inclined to 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.

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.

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

_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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.