this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. Was it not the
artless idea of playing truant that still had charms for me?

"I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone counted my
father's money with smarting eyes and trembling fingers--a hundred
crowns! The joys of my escapade rose before me at the thought of the
amount; joys that flitted about me like Macbeth's witches round their
caldron; joys how alluring! how thrilling! how delicious! I became a
deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor the violent
beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc pieces that I seem
to see yet. The dates had been erased, and Bonaparte's head simpered
upon them. After I had put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to
the gaming-table with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp
hands, prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop of
chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror, I flung a sudden
clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure that I was seen by
none of my acquaintance, betted on a stout, jovial little man, heaping
upon his head more prayers and vows than are put up during two or
three storms at sea. Then, with an intuitive scoundrelism, or
Machiavelism, surprising in one of my age, I went and stood in the
door, and looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing; for both
mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth.

"That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a physiological
kind; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain mysteries of our
double nature that I have since been enabled to penetrate. I had my
back turned on the table where my future felicity lay at stake, a
felicity but so much the more intense that it was criminal. Between me
and the players stood a wall of onlookers some five feet deep, who
were chatting; the murmur of voices drowned the clinking of gold,