Casino

“ In the afternoon light that came through the great silken-blinded windows of the Casino, all the gilded decorations, all the chandeliers, the mirrors, the polished floor, the painted ceiling, the horses galloping round their green meadow, the fat rouleaux of gold and silver, the ivory rakes, the fanned and strange frocked crowd of dandy gamesters looked magnificently rich and warm. ”

“ On every hand, within and without the little place, the view is superb. In the fine square before the Casino the gardens are brilliant with flowers and shady with palms; the cafés overflow with visitors, waltz music sounds by night and day, and from noon till the early hours there is life and movement everywhere. The game fascinates, and the climate acts upon the organism of all who go there. The exquisitely beautiful surroundings of the Casino exert a deleterious influence. ”

“ The Casino, in its extravagance, is indeed just such a castle in the air as a young man would build, a fabric of his dream, his palace of delight. The very town tingles with life, with excitement, with restlessness, with the playfulness of everything. ”

“ Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped and kissed.
On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so impressive in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a stockbroker’s wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd, immersed in ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the glaring flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an enthusiasm for the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else had escaped the hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly and freely. Care seemed to be leaving us ”

“ In the casino a crowd is gathering round the roulette wheel. Three-deep they stand. A woman rushes out from the dance-hall and pushes her way through the throng. She is very young, very fair and redundant of life. A man jostles her. From frank blue eyes she flashes a look at him, and from lips sweet as those of a child there comes the remonstrance: "Curse you; take care."
The men make way for her, and she throws a poke of dust on the red. "A hundred dollars out of that," she says. The coupier nods; the wheel spins round; she loses.
"Give me another two hundred in chips," she cries eagerly. ”

“ The gorgeous white Casino would seem to realise, in such a city, the fantasy of youth. It is so immense, so impossible, so unlike any conception of sober middle age, so unreal, so daring. It conforms to the type of no ordinary building. ”

“ They are appropriate to a gambling hell. That is all that can be said of them.
"The Casino," says Miss Dempster, the authoress of Vera, "is the thing that all Europe, Asia, and America talk of, that all moralists decry, and that all pleasure-seekers declare to be a paradise. It is the Casino that gives wealth and fashion to this section of the coast. It is the Casino that causes a dozen trains to stop daily at Monte Carlo; that keeps up the palace, the army, the roads, the opera-house, and the Hôtel de Paris. It is the green table that keeps the gardens green and the violins in tune ”

“ We reached the stone steps of the imperial casino, after a melting and toilsome walk, hungry and thirsty, and were happy to fling ourselves upon broken chairs in the denuded drawing-room, and wait for an extempore dinner of twelve eggs and a bottle of wine as bitter as criticism. A farmer and his family live in the house, and a couple of bad busts and the fire-places, are all that remain of its old appearance. ”

“ I sat facing the sea, with my back to the casino. The hour was late, there were few people about. I heard the swing-door behind me flap open, and was aware of a sharp snapping and crackling sound as a lady in white passed quickly by me. ”

“ The Casino, however, is a handsome edifice, with spacious grounds and gardens, to which visitors subscribe, and have the privilege of a reading-room, a café, and restaurant; a military band plays morning and evening, and in the dancing and concert halls. The most corrupt places are the public gambling-rooms, where are seen groups of both sexes around the roulette tables, and the bankers with their little rakes in hand drawing in or paying out; the glittering gold dazzles the eye of the novices, and frequently induces them to stake their last Napoleon. ”

“ The Casino, which had been the cause of their ruin, lets them thus eke out a miserable existence. Threadbare creatures with vulturish faces, they hang over the tables, quick-clawed to clutch up the stakes of the unwary. ”

“ The peculiar traits that his one unique experience of the world had developed—his coolness, his courage, his discernment of strategic resources—stood him in good stead, and long after the microcosm of the hotel lay fast asleep the cards were dealt and play ran high in the little building called the casino, ostensibly devoted to the milder delights of billiards and cigars. ”

“ As to the latter, a stranger might be pardoned if he were to mistake it for a casino, which it strikingly resembles, with its flat-domed entrance, line of caryatids like pedestal busts, and the row of stone urns on the balustraded top of the façade. ”

“ In the public casino—which, as thou well knowest, is a place of resort where fortunes are lost and won in an hour—ay, sometimes in a minute—I have met a man whose attire is good, and whose purse is well filled, but whose countenance I like as little as I should that of the captain of the sbirri, or his lieutenant, if I had committed a crime. ”

“ As he walked past the band-stand the Casino windows made panels of orange against the biscuit-coloured stone. No, he would not play again that night. One must not abuse one’s luck. He had already made three hundred francs. He had now a thousand of the bank’s money to gamble with. To-morrow he would buy ten chips of a hundred francs each and play with them instead of with louis. He was full of confidence. To-morrow the battle again; to-night the joy of victory. He rounded the corner where the grounds of the Casino overhang the station, and entered the quieter garden beyond. ”

“ It is thousand-times-breathed gamblers' breath that you are breathing, suffused with the heavy odour of the expensive perfumes on the women. What a change when you step outside into the fresh air once more. You realize what it feels like when the Casino closes, and the maniacs with their hot heads are actually forced to leave the tables and come out.
To think that at ten in the morning there are queues waiting to get in and get seats at the tables, and that men and women are ready to remain at the tables all day, and can live on it and die at it! ”

“ Though all persons are at liberty to enter without payment, it is nevertheless frequented by the best society, who dance there as heartily as in the most aristocratic salons. All distinctions vanish in the casino: public functionaries, shopkeepers, officers' wives, work-girls, foreigners, persons, in short, of all ranks and conditions mingle together, forming an amusing pell-mell, that reminds one, by its unceremonious gaiety, of the bals champêtres of the environs of Paris. ”

“ The casino, standing among the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which its balustrated terrace looked into. ”

“ I wandered back to the Aztec. My bartending friend told me that Toni Raselle was out in the casino in back, escorted by a general. He said she was wearing a white blouse and dark-red skirt, and had an evening scarf that matched her skirt.
I tipped him and went out into the casino. I bought chips through the wicket just inside the door. The large room was crowded. It was brightly, whitely lighted, like an operating amphitheater. The light made the faces of the people look sick. The cards, the chips, the dice, the wheels were all in pitiless illumination. ”

“ At the Casino most of those people are subconsciously wondering how they are going to pay their hotel bills and get out of Monte Carlo, calm as they manage to look; but here—well, here you see the quintessence of the world’s frivolity. ”

“ NICE Not having as yet been in the Cirque privé at Monte Carlo, I was perhaps unduly impressed by the splendor of the rooms devoted to gambling in this amazingly large casino. There were eight hundred or a thousand people all in evening clothes, who had paid a heavy price for the mere privilege of entering, and were now gathered about handsome green-covered mahogany tables under glittering and ornate electroliers, playing a variety of carefully devised gambling games with a fervor that at times makes martyrs in other causes. ”

“ You can't see your surroundings, and the next day you wake into a new world. From my bedroom window eight hours later I looked out upon the sunny courtyard of the hotel and an ancient in a blue apron cutting grass with a scythe.
The Casino—where we stayed two weeks—is perhaps a little symbol of the whole matter. There is one wing of the establishment which is the hotel proper, devoted mostly to the one-night ravishment of Americans. But then you pass through a little door into the casino itself, and are in France. A terrace with blue tables fronts the harbor and the pebble beach ”

“ It is said to occupy the spot where the people watched the great flotilla of William the Conqueror drift to St. Valery, there to take the Norman army to England.
A French watering-place is quite different from an American seaside resort. You have your board and sleeping-room in one of the hotels, but your parlors, piazzas, and places of recreation are in an elegant pleasure house, called the Casino. For the privileges of the Casino you pay a small sum; at Étretat it amounts to about ten dollars a month. The billiard-rooms, ball-room, and the rooms for general conversation are in the Casino. ”

“ Revard, picnics, hikes and fishing parties, yet many of the boys seem to find it pleasantest to do nothing,—just to sit around in lazy comfort all day long, watching the others playing billiards, listening to the orchestra in the afternoon Beneath the gold mosaic casino dome, sitting luxuriously in a box at the vaudeville in the evening, gaining a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of exertion. ”

“ In 1836, some speculators induced him to lend the aid of his name and talent to establish a casino, of which music was the pretext, but gambling the real object. This establishment, which was situated in the most fashionable locality of Paris, was opened49 with considerable splendour at the end of November, 1837, under the name of Casino Paganini; but the Government refused to authorize its opening as a gambling house, and the speculators were reduced to give concerts, the proceeds of which were far exceeded by the expenses of the undertaking. ”

“ Casino is an amusement frequently affected by broken down gamblers, whose depleted resources do not permit them to “sit in” a game of poker, and who seek to rehabilitate their fallen fortunes by playing casino for a stake of five cents on a game of twenty-one points.
266EUCHRE. Perhaps no game is more universally played in the United States than Euchre. It is pre-eminently a social amusement. While it does not possess the absorbing fascination of whist, it permits free and unrestrained conversation among the players, which circumstance has unquestionably contributed largely to its popularity. ”

“ There is always a crowd waiting at the Casino doors when they are opened, always a wild scramble for the chairs around the tables; and, once comfortably seated, these early comers are usually good for the day, or at least until dinner-time. They are the most economical and persistent, though not the most profitable, of the Casino's patrons. ”

“ It is true that I took a revolver with me to the Casino that night. I remember putting it in my silk bag and pretending at dinner that I had a lot of gold pieces by me, for luck. I had. I was going to the Casino to gamble. I would find a place opposite Bianca and sit her out. You remember the scene. People talked of it enough Heaven knows. One would have supposed women never had played high before. A crowd gathered round us—half Paris was there. I remember the Tobacco King, a very fat man with a red face. ”

“ It was what the newspapers call the "favorite resort" of the ex-Empress of the French, who might have been seen at her imperial avocations with a good glass at any time from the Casino. The Casino, I hasten to add, has quite the air of an establishment frequented by gentlemen who look on ladies' windows with telescopes. ”

“ There are other wrinkled and haggard old women in [Pg 194] the Casino crowd,—women less contemptible, more pitiable, but unpleasant sights for all that. They come to the gambling rooms to play, not to steal; but the gambling fever has burned out all that was pure womanly in them and nothing is left to them in life save the vice they hug to their hearts. Some of them have been playing there ever since the first years of the Casino, missing never a day from the opening to the closing of the season, and usually staying all day long in the hot, ill-ventilated rooms. ”

“ The great gambling monopoly is no respecter of persons, and in the Casino, as on the Turf, complete equality prevails.
In the same year, 1892, a curious incident occurred at a trente-et-quarante table. An individual having staked a maximum on the black, red won. ”