certain gaming-tables, billiard-rooms, and other places, including your
races, where high play goes on; and by superior knowledge of chances, by
masking their play, by means of confederates, by means of bribery, and
other artifices, varying with the subject of their imposture, they rob
the unwary. But here it is more elaborately done, and with a really
exquisite _finesse_. There are people whose manners, style,
conversation, are unexceptionable, living in handsome houses in the best
situations, with everything about them in the most refined taste, and
exquisitely luxurious, who impose even upon the Parisian bourgeois, who
believe them to be, in good faith, people of rank and fashion, because
their habits are expensive and refined, and their houses are frequented
by foreigners of distinction, and, to a degree, by foolish young
Frenchmen of rank. At all these houses play goes on. The ostensible host
and hostess seldom join in it; they provide it simply to plunder their
guests, by means of their accomplices, and thus wealthy strangers are
inveigled and robbed."

"But I have heard of a young Englishman, a son of Lord Rooksbury, who
broke two Parisian gaming tables only last year."

"I see," he said, laughing, "you are come here to do likewise. I,
myself, at about your age, undertook the same spirited enterprise. I
raised no less a sum than five hundred thousand francs to begin with; I
expected to carry all before me by the simple expedient of going on
doubling my stakes. I had heard of it, and I fancied that the sharpers,
who kept the table, knew nothing of the matter. I found, however, that
they not only knew all about it, but had provided against the
possibility of any such experiments; and I was pulled up before I had
well begun by a rule which forbids the doubling of an original stake
more than four times consecutively."