"If I had not lost your love," I replied, "I should not consider it a loss to leave this palace, this luxury and this society, all of which are hateful to me. However poor we may be, we can always live as we lived in our chalet--there, or somewhere else, if you are tired of Switzerland. If you still loved me, you would not be ruined; for you would think neither of gambling nor of intemperance, nor of any of the passions which you commemorated in an infernal toast; if you loved me, you would pay what you owe with what you have left, and we would go and bury ourselves and love each other in some secluded spot where I would quickly forget what I have learned, where I would never remind you of it, where I could not suffer because of it--if you loved me!" "Oh! I do love you, I do love you!" he cried; "let us go! let us fly, save me! Be my benefactress, my angel, as you have always been! Come, and forgive me!" He threw himself at my feet and all that the most fervent passion can dictate, he said to me with so much warmth that I believed it--and I shall always believe it. Leoni deceived me, degraded me, and loved me at the same time. One day, to evade the keen reproaches that I heaped upon him, he tried to rehabilitate the passion of gambling. "Gambling," he said, with the specious eloquence which had only too much power over me, "is a passion much more energetic than love. More fruitful in terrible dramas, it is more intoxicating, more heroic in the acts which combine to attain its end. I must say it, alas! that while that end is vile in appearance, the ardor is irresistible, the audacity is sublime, the sacrifices are blind and unlimited. You must know, Juliette, that women never inspire such passions. Gold has a power superior to theirs. In strength, in courage, in devotion, in perseverance, love, compared with the gambler's stake, is only a feeble child whose efforts are deserving of pity. How many men have you seen sacrifice to a mistress that inestimable treasure, that priceless necessity, that condition of existence without which we feel that existence is unendurable--_honor_? I have known very few whose devotion goes beyond the sacrifice of life. Every day the gambler sacrifices his honor and lives on. The gambler is keen, he is stoical, he takes his triumph coolly, he takes his downfall coolly; he passes in a few hours from the lowest ranks of society to the highest; in a few hours more he goes down again to his starting-point, and all without change of attitude or expression. In a few hours, without leaving the spot to which his demon chains him, he incurs all the vicissitudes of life, he passes through all the phases of fortune which represent the different social conditions. By turns king and beggar, he climbs the long ladder at a single stride, always calm, always self-controlled, always sustained by his sturdy ambition, always spurred on by the intense thirst that consumes him. What will he be an hour hence? prince or