We had spent our first three days, not unprofitably, in prospecting the place. We reached Monte Carlo in the afternoon, and at once drove up to the hotel. Almost the first thing we saw was a large board over a little house on the hillside, close by the Crédit Lyonnais, with “_Avances sur bijoux_” on it.
Brentin chuckled. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “we sha’n’t play the game quite so low down as that, eh? It will be either neck or nothing with us.”
It was five o’clock before we started to go down to the Casino. We set out in solemn silence, down the steep and glaring white road, past the “Victoria” and the chemist’s. At the head of the gaudy, painted gardens, that look like the supreme effort of a _modiste_, we came in full view of the rooms. There we paused, choked, the most sensitive of us, by our emotions.
In front there was a long strip of gay flower-beds and white pebble paths, flanked by rows of California palms. To my excited fancy they were the planted feather brooms of _valets-de-place_—moral _valets-de-place_ who had set out to sweep the place clean but had never had the courage to go further. To the right of us were the hotels—the “St. James’s” and the “De Paris”; to the left, the Casino gardens again, and the shallow pools where the frogs croak so dolorously at nightfall. They are, I believe (for I am a Pythagorean), the souls of ruined gamblers, still croaking out their _quatre premier_, their _dix-quinze_, their _douze dernier_.
“Peace, batrachians!” I cried to them one evening, in the exalted mood that now became common to me. “Be still, hoarse souls! push no more shadowy stakes upon a board of shadows with your webbed fingers. We are here to avenge ye!”
Then we went on down to the front of the rooms. There, unable to find a seat, we leaned against a lamp-post and gloated on the fantastic building that held our future possessions. On our left was the Café de Paris, overflowing with _consommateurs_ at little tables under the awning; from the swirling whirlpool of noise made by the Hungarian band issued a maimed but recognizable English comic air. The sun was just setting in a matchless sky of Eton blue; the breeze had dropped, and the dingy Monaco flag over the Casino hung inert.