But Marie Antoinette’s love of high play was almost a vice, and her gaming-table often witnessed scenes far from creditable to her sex or rank. Le Comte de Mercy informs us that the Emperor Joseph II.--not too severe a moralist--once sent a message to the Queen to the effect that “the play at the Queen’s table at Fontainebleau was like that in a common gambling-house; people of all kinds were there, and mingled without decorum; the Comte d’Artois and the Duc de Chartres displayed there every day some fresh trait of folly, and great scandal was caused by the fact that several ladies cheated.... Those who held the bank arrived on the 30th of October; they acted as tellers all night and during the morning of the 31st in the apartments of the Princess de Lamballe. The Queen remained till five o’clock in the morning. In the evening the Queen directed the play to begin again, and continued playing until late in the morning of the 1st of November--All Saints’ Day.” It is not surprising that frivolity and dissipation of this kind were much commented upon, and gave to slanderers much scope for their attacks on her conduct. In order, also, to manage the high play at the Queen’s faro tables, it was necessary to have a banker provided with large sums of money. Charles X. was an habitual whist-player, and on the eve of his deposition enjoyed his “rubber”; and when as an exile the ex-king was the guest of Cardinal Weld at Lulworth Castle, near Wareham, his principal occupation was whist. Later on, during his sojourn at Prague, at eight, after dinner, the whist-table was prepared, “where the tranquillity of the evening was not disturbed unless Charles found himself with an indifferent partner. He could lose a crown by his own fault with great reluctance, but to lose a trick by the stupidity of his partner was beyond his patience.” But his equanimity was only temporarily ruffled, and then he was full of redundant apology. Strange and pathetic is a well-known anecdote told of the great Napoleon. As “the prisoner of Europe” he arrived at his last dwelling-place on the 15th of October, and exactly one year before he had been playing at cards with his mother in his little saloon in the island of Elba; and as the illustrious lady was about to rise after losing the game, her imperial son said to her laughingly, “Pay your debts, madam, pay your debts!” Since that time, as Dr. Doran writes, “Napoleon had played a most serious game against a host of adversaries, and had been defeated. The winners called upon him to pay the penalty.”