What vertigo has seized upon those unhappy wretches, who crowd about the table and devour with their eyes the heaps of silver and gold, and the bank notes spread out before the croupiers? They do not see that all that money is there only to allure them, to lead them on; they say to themselves: “This one wins, that one goes away with his pockets full; why should not we be as fortunate as they?”--Ah! even if they should, would the money won in a gambling hell ever serve to enrich a family, to support a wife; to endow a daughter, to help the unfortunate? No, the gambler’s heart is hard and unfeeling, his mind is sordid and debased by the passion which dominates it. If they win to-day, they will play again to-morrow, until they can no longer procure aught to satisfy the insatiable greed which draws them to the fatal table. If they return home with their pockets filled with gold, do not imagine that they will be more generous with their families. Their wives are ill-clad, their children lack everything, creditors besiege their door; but they will give nothing, they will pay nobody, they will laugh at the threats of those whose wages they hold back, and will be indifferent to the voice of nature. Soon they will lose the money that a lucky chance caused them to win, and then woe to the poor creatures that surround them! it is upon them that they vent their rage, which they do not dare to display before strangers. It is in their own homes that they abandon themselves to anger, to brutality, even to the last excesses. They must have money; they seize upon everything that can still produce it; their children’s last garments are sold, the result of a day’s work disappears in a second upon a color or a number. Then they glare darkly about them, despair is depicted upon all their features; they gaze in frenzy at that gold which they cannot possess, and at the croupiers, who observe their despair with the coldest indifference. Then the guiltiest desires and the basest villainy torment their frantic imagination; they covet their neighbors’ money; they put out their hand toward it, and often, impelled by the cruel passion which destroys their wits, they commit the most shameful crimes. Such examples are only too common; gambling has three results, but they are inevitable: it leads either to suicide, to the poor-house or to the stool of repentance.