Dice, Cards, Wheels by Kavanagh Thomas M.;

Author:Kavanagh, Thomas M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

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Gambling on the Anvil of History: Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin

France’s experience of the revolution and its aftermath, a culmination of the values emerging in Saurin’s play, but also a lesson in the unpredictability of an ideal’s consequences, set the stage for a new vision of the gambler both as real figure and as metaphor. The nineteenth century’s understanding of the gambler began with his projection onto a metaphysical plane far removed from the culture wars of a past pitting bourgeois restraint against aristocratic profligacy. In light of all that had happened across the face of Europe, the conflict between Béverlei’s somber agony and Valère’s delightful whirl could only be seen as tired and trite. For the new century born in conviction and idealism, but also in war and blood, the gambler’s embrace of chance could not help but acquire a more foreboding resonance.

In 1831 Honoré de Balzac, beginning The Human Comedy which would establish him as the most popular French novelist of the nineteenth century, published his first successful novel. That work, The Wild Ass’s Skin, opens in a strange fashion. Not only is the focal character unnamed, but his thoughts of suicide threaten to end the story before it has begun. This conflicted scene is set in the center of Paris, in what was the largest and most infamous gambling center of post-Revolutionary Europe: the Palais Royal.

Just north of the Louvre, across the Rue de Rivoli, the four-story Palais Royal occupies a six-acre, oblong block. Once the private residence of the Orléans family, the cadet branch of the royal family, the building was, in the years before the Revolution, transformed into a commercial venture by the cash-short duc d’Orléans, Louis Philippe Joseph. The due converted the upper floors into rented apartments and the three-sided street-level gallery into one hundred eighty exclusive shops. By 1791 the turmoil of the Revolution’s early phases had compromised the due’s control of the premises. An intricate sub-leasing of shops combined with well-placed bribes to police officials soon led to the operation within the Palais Royal of no fewer than a hundred separate gambling operations offering all the most popular dice and card games.1 For the first time in the history of Paris, modest citizens and the moneyed bourgeoisie could gamble in a legitimate setting without fear of arrest, a privilege previously enjoyed only by the nobility.2 In November 1793, the unfortunate duc d’Orléans, who had voted in favor of the execution of his cousin Louis XVI and briefly hoped to succeed him as Philippe-Égalité, was condemned to the guillotine. The tumbrel carrying him to his execution passed before what had once been his palace so he could savor the final insult of seeing on it a sign declaring it “National Property.” That change in ownership and politics brought, however, no downturn in the popularity of the gambling that continued there. As the historian Louis Madelin described it, “A passion for play seized everybody: there were a hundred gambling hells in the Palais Royal, and every table was heaped with gold.

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