Let us add at once that it is wise to distrust these fluctuating habits and these gropings after laws. For instance, red has been known to beat black by seventy per cent. in the course of a day’s play. Black, on the other hand, as people still remember at Monte Carlo, one day came up twenty-nine times in succession and the second dozen twenty-eight times without a break. Chance has not our nerves; it is not, like us, impatient to make good its losses or to carry off its gains. It takes its time, awaits its hour and does not trouble to keep step with our ways of life. 5 Players as a rule attribute these habits or caprices to a trick of the croupier’s hand. This is hardly tenable. After all, we know how the thing is done. The ball drops into its compartment and the croupier announces, for instance: “13, black, _impair_ and manque.” The losses are raked in, the winnings are paid out, the players renew their stakes, there is sometimes a brief dispute, somebody asks for change and so on. These operations vary a good deal in length; and all this time the wheel carrying the ball is making hundreds of revolutions. The croupier stops it at last, takes the ball, reverses the wheel and sends the ball spinning in the opposite direction. It is impossible under these conditions for his particular trick of the hand to exercise any influence whatever. Besides, we can easily see from the chart of the _permanences_ that the change of croupier does not perceptibly affect the rhythm of the even chances. It is not the man who controls the rhythm but the rhythm that controls the man. 6 These gropings after laws in what would seem a negation of all or any law; these strivings on the part of Chance to quit its own domain and to organize its chaos; this god who denies himself and seeks to destroy himself by his own hand; these incomprehensible stammerings, these awkward efforts to achieve utterance and assume consciousness are rather curious, we must admit. For the rest, it is these efforts, these hankerings after equilibrium, this embryonic rhythm that constitute the gamblers’ good and bad luck. If Chance were simply Chance as we conceive it on first principles, one would stake any sum anyhow and at any moment. I am well aware that, according to the most learned theorists on roulette, each _coup_ is independent of all the others and begins as if nothing had happened before, as if nothing were to happen afterwards, as if the table were fresh from the shop, the wheel from the factory and the croupier from the hands of God. In theory this is quite accurate; but we have just seen that in practice it does not seem to be so. For that matter, it seems impossible to explain the reason. Players are satisfied to observe the fact, while yielding to a dangerous but very human tendency to exaggerate the scope and the certainty of their observations.