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deeply.
    I explained my predicament: the inconvenience of walking around all evening with a suitcase. The management obligingly took my suitcase and gave me two yellow and white chips with 500,000 written on them in large gold numbers, and two smaller green and white chips with 100,000 written on them in smaller gold numbers.
    ‘That’s better.’ I smiled, admiring the snug way they fitted into the four pockets of my jacket.
    A man with the understanding eyes of a confessor said apologetically that he hoped I could produce documentation for such a large sum of cash. I was unknown to the establishment and sometimes criminal elements tried to use the casino to launder their money. I explained that I was faced with the prospect of premature death and saw no reason not to liquidate my assets and gamble. He seemed entirely satisfied, not to say excited, by my situation. I spared him my literary ambitions; I didn’t have all night to chat about the meaning of life.
    Privately, I was obsessed with the logic of my decision. If I could cast off the heavy cloak of luxury, I would be able to write with that passionate concentration I need in order to say something true before I die. I would be embedded in the trickling sand of the hourglass. I would become as intimate with my own experience as a neck with a noose. I would strip my life down to a whitewashed room, a chair, a desk, a page, a pen. And the birth canal to this proud simplicity was the Salle d’Europe; cliffs of gold, azure shields, garlanded nymphs, and roulette tables, themselves arranged like the spokes of a wheel under the circular golden grid of the ceiling. I became so caught up in this paradox that I had to walk round the room again and again, trying to tune my mood to the great act of intensification I was about to perform.
    As I circled the tables I started to notice that not only the belle époque decoration but the physiognomies of the staff and gamblers were devices for arresting time. There was a haughty tail-coated footman with white hair and a Roman nose. And a heavy-lidded corrupt waiter who gave available-for-flogging glances. There was a gambler with long curly hair and a musketeer’s zip of black beard in the cleft of his chin. He had a diamond earring, a yellow silk tie and a half-oriental girlfriend with white make-up and purple half-moons of exhaustion under each glittering black eye. There was a crowd of powder-caked, chain-smoking old women weighed down with jewellery. I saw an oriental man with a scar down the left side of his face and a bored tart in tow, smoking, chipless, on the stool next to him. He was also wearing a thick gold bracelet studded with diamonds. I saw jewellery everywhere, and realized that what looked like financial confidence was in fact the sign of how little these gamblers trusted themselves with money. When they had nothing left in their pockets, at least they still had thousands of pounds squeezed around their fingers, wrists and necks.
    I couldn’t help noticing that most people were playing with twenty- and fifty-franc chips. There were some pink five hundreds and blue thousands, but I knew that my 100,000-franc block was bound to be noticed and so, shy as a virgin, when a virgin is shy, I walked over to an empty table where an idle croupier sat alone. I placed the green and white counter on the red diamond and looked at him pleadingly, hoping he would take it away before it attracted any curiosity. A couple of tourists drifting by immediately glued themselves to the table and watched the ivory ball bounce its way into a slot. My prayers were answered. It was black. I met their commiserating expressions with a smile of subtle satisfaction. One hundred thousand francs in under two minutes. What lightness. What clarity of purpose.
    I resumed my pacing, hoping to ditch the spectators, and the moment they were on the other side of the room I returned to the empty table and quickly dropped a second counter on ‘Manque’.