Such episodes were by no means rare in Russia and in Poland. The fatal passion of gambling was carried to excess. It had become a frenzy, a positive madness. Russian and Polish society teemed with victims, the whole of whose fortunes had been lost at the gaming table in a dozen hours. I remember that after Potocki’s death at Tulczim, the children of his first marriage came into possession of his immense fortune. Two of these, educated at Leipzig, received during the life of their father only a few ducats per week for pocket-money. The moment they were the masters of their inheritance, they went headlong into all the excesses of gaming, and the elder of the two lost thirty millions of florins in three years by playing at faro with his own land-stewards. A short time after that his friend, M. de Fontenay, who had clung to him through good and evil fortune, had to borrow a hundred louis to have him buried at Aix-la-Chapelle, where he died. Sometimes the incidents of those terrible gaming parties presented the most wonderful reversals of luck. Here is an instance. Prince Galitzin, one of the richest of Russian nobles, was playing on one occasion with the most persistent bad luck. Estates, serfs, revenues, town-houses, furniture, jewels, everything had been swallowed up. He had nothing left but his carriage. That was waiting for him outside; he staked it, and lost that in a few throws of the dice. A few minutes afterwards the horses were also gone. ‘I did not stake the harness,’ he said; ‘it is all in silver, and has just come from St. Petersburg.’ His adversary nodded, and a game was begun for the harness. At that moment, though, the luck turned as completely in the Prince’s favour as a few moments previously it had been against him. In a few hours he not only won back the horses, the carriage, and the family jewels, but everything else he had lost so rapidly, and that, thanks to the harness, which literally seemed to be attached to the wheel of fortune. It is absolutely astounding to find that men are not positively shattered by those shocks of fortune. Galitzin was not ungrateful in his worship of the harness. In his palace at Moscow I have looked at it--in fact, it was pointed out to me, suspended in the most conspicuous spot of the building, and protected from the tiniest speck of dust by a framework of glass, like a precious relic, and as a tangible proof of the strange vicissitudes of gaming.