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6 Staging the Gambler: Sex, Sentiment, and Family Values PLAYS, MORE THAN ANY OTHER literary or historical genre, reveal a society's changing attitudes toward an activity like gambling. For a comedy or tragedy to work, it must express both the playwright's individual vision and the audience's more widespread assumptions and prejudices. When the specificity of an author's vision is missing, the play lacks novelty and originality. When the culture shared with the audience is ignored, a play devolves toward the idiosyncratic and the irrelevant. Novels, poetry, and philosophical essays come alive within an individual act of reading that need extend no further than writer and reader. The theater, on the other hand, is a collective art form. Beginning as a collaboration of author and actors, the play presented on stage will be consumed , applauded, or rejected not by a single reader but by the fluid community of an audience. A play's success is an event whose implications are sociological at least as much as they are artistic. As such, plays reveal more about how a society perceives gambling than we can learn from the more private arts of the novel and the essay. The staged gambler, as we saw with Bodel, is a figure embedded in the shifting values that define a given cultural moment. The changes in the way the gambler was represented on the French stage between 1687 and 1768, between Jean-Fran<;ois Dancourt's La Desolation des joueuses and the enormous success of Bernard-Joseph Saurin's Beverlei in 1768, clearly reveal the shape of this interplay between a type and the society with which it interacts. Moving from the giddy apogee of Louis XIV's frank embrace of gambling to the fervid moralism and proto-democratic sentimentality of the high Enlightenment, these plays show how the staged figure of the gambler reveals and consolidates a broad restructuring of attitudes toward sexuality, sentiment, and wealth as components of social identity. Staging the Gambler III These plays-whether Jean-Fran<;ois Dancourt's light-hearted satires, Jean-Fran<;ois Regnard's pre-Marivaudian entanglements of sentiment and money, or Bernard-Joseph Saurin's tear-jerking melodramas-are marked by a paradox. While gambling provides their subject matter and a gambler is their central character, none of them contains a single scene of actual gambling. None invites the spectator to identify with characters who bet, win, and lose as did the three thieves in Le leu de saint Nicolas. One explanation for that absence might be that watching other people gamble can be intensely boring. No matter how strong the emotions provoked by gambling, they lack the fascination of conflicts generated by two flesh and blood characters interacting with each other. Unlike theatrical representations of seduction and sexual desire, staged gambling can easily fail at triggering vicarious emotions on the part of its spectators. Seduction in a theatrical setting, elusively metaphoric or blatantly pornographic, communicates to onlookers an intensity of feeling that draws them, comfortably or uncomfortably, into the scene they behold. Gambling, on the contrary, promises no similar absorption ofthe spectator within the games on stage. In the theater, gambling becomes significant and interesting only when its consequences extend beyond gambling itself. Rather than turning a card or rolling a die, the staged gambler must project the audience into the psychological, sentimental , and social assumptions shared by playwright and audience. * * * The paradox of gambling's absent presence on the stage is wittily captured by Dancourt in his one-act summer entertainment of 1687, La Desolation des joueuses. The "desolation" referred to in the title has nothing to do with any nefarious consequences of gambling or with any degradation of the female characters who so avidly give themselves over to that practice. Dancourt sets out instead to stage for his audience the bitter disappointment of Parisian gamblers who found themselves abruptly deprived of any opportunity to satisfy their passion, to continue their play. First presented on August 23, 1687, Dancourt's play is a comic treatment of the effects at all levels of Parisian society of the royal edict of July 18 banning the game of lansquenet and imposing fines even up to the confiscation of one's home on all who continued to host such games. It is the banishment of gambling that will reveal how comically addictive its perils and pleasures had become. 112 Chapter 6 The play's setting, the shared space in which all the characters will interact, is Lady Dorimene's drawing room. What might, in a more canonical representation of late seventeenth-century French society, have been the intellectual and artistic meeting place of a salon modeled on Madame de Rambouillet's chambre bleue or on Madeleine de Scudery's home in the Marais, becomes here, as Dorimene's non-gambling daughter , Angelique, so bitterly laments, an academie. Defined by the Littre as "a place open to the public where gambling took place" and qualified as a "dive" [un coupe-gor;ge], the kind of academy Angelique rejects has nothing to do with the august bodies formed by Richelieu and Colbert. Rather than the refinement of the French language or the practice of the arts, Dorimene's gatherings are devoted exclusively to gambling at lansquenet. A beguilingly simple card game, lansquenet was played with one or more standard fifty-two-card decks. The banker, in this case Dorimene, began play by announcing the amount she offered to wager. Each of the other players would then in turn cover either all or a part of that bank. Once all bets had been met, Dorimene turned over two cards. The first, placed to her left, would be her card. The second, placed to her right, would be for the players. Should these first two cards have the same value-two sevens or two kings-she as banker won immediately and collected all bets. If the cards were of different values, she then proceeded to turn the remaining cards over one at a time. If a card matching the first card to her left came up first, she again won the bets. If a card matching the players' card to her right came up first, the players won and she paid all bets. While variations on these basic rules allowed players to choose individual cards which played against the banker's, her mathematical advantage, with any pair on the first two cards winning all bets for her, remained considerable. Dancourt's staging of his game of lansquenet in an elegant Parisian hotel immediately reveals his satiric intent. Derived from the German Landsknechte, a term designating the mercenary soldiers so often employed in military conflicts ofthe period, lansquenet was a barracks game, a game more closely associated with rowdy soldiers than refined aristocrats . Humorously described by Charles Dufresny in his Le Joueur of 1709 as "a kind of badly run republic where everyone is equal:' lansquenet always carried with it a strong whiff of the vulgar, the plebian, and the declasse. Dancourt's play is as simple as the game on whose prohibition it is Staging the Gambler 113 based. Its intrigue turns on the fact that Dorimene, feeling only contempt for the non-gambling Dorante with whom her daughter has fallen in love, is set on having Angelique marry instead the much older chevalier de Bellemonte, an incompetent card cheat in no way worthy of the title he has appropriated. This tension surrounding Angelique's fate, however, quickly recedes into the background. Over a rapid succession of fourteen burlesque scenes, Dorimene is visited by a parade of characters all of whom must deal with the disastrous news that their shared passion has now been forbidden. The play becomes a comic exaggeration of costume and gesture, parodying the succession of nobles, bourgeois , money lenders, clerks, and seducers who arrive one after the other. In the final scene, the would-be fiance, the decrepit and outrageously decked out chevalier, is unmasked as a cheat whose billowing pantaloon hides the reserve of cards he hopes to sneak into the game. The suspense as to whom Angelique will marry is little more than a device, the source of a minor tension that serves to open and close the action. The play's real center is the parade of characters each revealing another comically exaggerated aspect of the Parisian gambling scene. Topaze, the money lender who has been called in to bailout Dorimene after a disastrous run of cards, is hesitant to lend her anything now that the source of her income has been outlawed. It is only when she puts up her jewelry as collateral that he finally agrees to lend her 15,000 livres. When the comtesse, a representative of the preening nobility, arrives, she is amazed to discover that there is no game in progress. Informed of the royal edict, she can only sputter that the whole idea of such a prohibition is as absurd as "forbidding people to sleep."l Certain that such a law could apply only "to the people, to lackeys, to the scum;' she insists that, had it been intended for a person of her station, the king would surely have dispatched a special messenger to inform her of that news. But the only news she has heard since the last game had to do with the crass misconduct of the bourgeois husband of one of the game's big losers, who pushed conjugal boorishness to the point of recognizing as paste the necklace with which his wife replaced the one she pawned in order to continue playing. The next arrivals, the wife of an intendant charged with stewarding the finances of an aristocratic family and a caissier charged with handling the cash for a wealthy merchant, are also traumatized by the demise of their game. The intendante faints when she learns that she now has no chance to win back all the money she has "borrowed" from her husband. 114 Chapter 6 It is only when Dorimene's servant shuffles a deck of cards under her nose that she can be revived. The caissier is in trouble not because he gambles, but because there is now no way for him to reap the profits guaranteed by the extortionate rate of interest at which he has been lending 20,000 livres ofhis employer's money to unlucky gamblers. The last to arrive is the handsome and wealthy Eraste. His lament has nothing to do with losses he can no longer recoup, but with how the end of lansquenet will deprive his many mistresses of the handy explanations they could offer their suspicious husbands as to how they came to possess the fine jewelry with which he adroitly seduces them. Dancourt's play comes to an end when, in the final scene, the chevalier de Bellemonte is unmasked by Dorimene's valet, Merlin, as a crony from the time when the two of them ran a crooked game on the coach between Paris and Dijon. With Bellemonte out of the picture, Dorimene reluctantly consents to her daughter's marrying Dorante-but only on the condition that he first learn to play lansquenet. The curtain comes down as the assembled characters debate the truly crucial question : would they be better off setting out for an England imagined by Dorimene as a gamblers' paradise untroubled by legal prohibitions or should they, as the marquis suggests, shift their game to a rooftop, an abandoned building, or a boat on the Seine so as to avoid the risk of confiscation that comes with playing in one's own home. Dancourt's play makes clear to his audience that no one should be troubled by the thought that this summer's royal edict will change things any more than had the earlier decrees which were as ineffective as they were numerous. Above all, Dancourt's comic sketch highlights the way gambling had become a strand that ran through every fiber of the Parisian social fabric at the end of the seventeenth century. * * * Almost ten years after Dancourt's light summer entertainment, JeanFran <;ois Regnard produced a more ambitious portrait of the ancien regime gambler in his Le]oueur. First presented at the Theatre Italien on December 19, 1696, this five-act verse comedy is inflected by the same absence of actual gambling that we saw in Dancourt. Critical discussion of this play has for the most part centered around the question of whether Le]oueur should be classified as a "comedy of character" in the tradition of Moliere, a comedy focusing on a central character afflicted Staging the Gambler 115 with a vice that determines all aspects of his theatrical personality; or as a "comedy ofmanners;' a form offering instead a broad panorama of the society surrounding the central character.2 Regnard's central character, Valere, can never resist a game of trictrac , close to what we today call backgammon. As a gambling game, tric-trac is different in both its individual and group dynamics from the lansquenet so sorely missed by the visitors to Dorimene's salon. Lansquenet , like the pharaon it closely resembles, is a game that pits each of the individual players against the banker, leaving no room for an uninvolved spectator who might simply watch the game. All who come to Dorimene's are there to place their bets and test their luck. Tric-trac, on the contrary, is a board game played by two opponents who can be expected to draw around them an audience proportionate in size to the stakes the players have placed on the game's outcome. While lansquenet is a game of pure chance whose outcome is determined entirely by the run of cards, tric-trac is a "mixed" game whose outcome depends not only on the chance element of the points thrown on two dice but also on the skill with which the competing players move their pieces around the board, advancing their own position while blocking their opponent. It is this added element of the player's skill, of knowing how best to use the points one throws, that transforms tric-trac into a social event, a game capable of interesting not only the two players who have money riding on its outcome but a wider circle of spectators who admire, test themselves against, and learn from the moves made by the players. At no point does Regnard show us anyone playing tric-trac. Yet the entire play is the resolution of a bet made in the opening scenes between two servants. Nerine, Angelique's practical-minded maid, bets that her mistress will overcome her attraction to Valere and marry the older and more sober Dorante. Hector, Valere's overworked valet, puts his money on his master as "the green fruit" young women always end up preferring . Structuring the play around the servants' wager allows Regnard to infuse the gamble of a protracted proposition bet with all the allure and excitement of an attempted seduction. Moreover, Valere's chances of making his servant a winner are a direct function of what happens to him during the three sessions of tric-trac we never see, but which hang heavy over the wager's outcome. On three different occasions Valere, returning to his rented hotel garni, laments his loss or rejoices in his winning. The play's most famous passage comes in Act Three, Scene Six when, counting the money from a big win in front of Hector, Valere 116 Chapter 6 launches into a paean to the joys of the gambler's life. What Valere describes, however, has less to do with anything experienced while outrolling and out-playing his opponent than it does with the life away from the game that his status as a winning gambler makes possible: II n'est point dans Ie monde un etat plus aimable Que celui d'un joueur: sa vie est agreable; Ses jours sont enchaines par des plaisirs nouveaux; Comedie, opera, bonne chere, cadeaux: II traine en tous les lieux la joie et l'abondance; On voit regner sur lui l'air de magnificence; Tabatieres, bijoux: sa poche est un tresor; Sous ses heureuses mains Ie cuivre devient or ........ Chaque jour milles belles Lui font la cour par lettre, et l'invitent chez elles. 3 [In all the world there is no calling more delightful/Than that of the gambler: his life is a lark; / His days are strung together by pleasures ever new: / Comedy , opera, feasts, gifts. / He brings wherever he goes joy and abundance. / An air ofmagnificence reigns over his life: / Snuff boxes, jewels: his pocket is a treasury . / In his happy hands copper becomes gold ... / Each day a thousand beautiful women / Court him by letter and invite him to visit.] If, as Valere describes it, the gambler's life is an uninterrupted succession of pleasures, it is because, in a Paris where it is ever more obvious that money makes the world go round, the lucky gambler represents the irresistibly attractive force of easy and prodigious cash. Abstracted from the plodding accumulations of work and effort, the gambler's wealth is associated with the proliferation ofgifts sure to be found in his pockets. The gambler's pleasures, as we see them in Regnard's play, have less to do with the confrontations, tensions, and exaltations of play than they do with how the aura ofthe successful gambler's easy money transforms the way he is perceived and treated by all sectors of the society around him. The other note Valere strikes in his description of the gambler's joys, the only one specific to gambling itself, has less to do with what the individual gambler might experience than with how gambling establishes an exotic and liberating conviviality that stands in stark opposition to the prevailing social order. Le jeu rassemble tout; il unit ala fois Le turbulent marquis, Ie paisible bourgeois. Staging the Gambler La femme du banquier, doree et triomphante, Coupe orgueilleusement la duchesse indigente. La, sans distinction, on voit aller de pair Le laquais d'un commis avec un due et pair; Et quoi qu'un sort jaloux nous ait fait d'injustices, De sa naissance ainsi l'on venge les caprices. (260) 117 [Gambling brings all together. It unites in one forum / The turbulent marquis and the placid bourgeois, / The banker's wife, adorned and triumphant, / Proudly trumps the indigent duchess. / There, without rank, can be found playing together /A shop owner's lackey with a duke of the realm. And while a jealous fate may have treated us unjustly, / In this we avenge the caprice of our births.] The fluid hierarchies of the gaming table bring with them a series of parodic transformations redefining the values on which traditional society is based. Monsieur Toutabas presents himself to Valere's father, Geronte, as a well born gentleman from Auvergne-"Doctor ofall games, and master of tric-trac. / My name is Toutabas, Viscount of the Point" (214-) - who boasts that he can provide his son with an education far more worthwhile than that dispensed by the conventional centers of academic instruction: . . . Je vous soutiens que dans tous les etats On ne peut de mon art assez faire de cas; Qu'un enfant de famille, et qu'on veut bien instruire, Devrait savoir jouer avant que savoir lire. (215) [. . . I would argue that in all stations of life / The importance of my art can never be exaggerated; / That a well born child, to be correctly educated, / Should know how to gamble before learning to read.] With a curriculum that includes the fine art of cheating at all the most popular games, his tutelage, like gambling'S correction to the accidents of birth, will adroitly rectify what would otherwise be a product of pure chance: Et c'est de la que vient la beaute de mon art. En suivant mes le~ons, on court peu ce hasard. Je sais, quand ille faut, par un peu d'artifice, D'un sort injurieux corriger la malice. (216) [And that is the true beauty of my art: / In following my teachings, one runs no real risk. / I can, when the need arises, with a bit of artifice, / Of unhappy fate correct the malice.] 118 Chapter 6 Later in the play, Hector explains to Valere's fiancee, Angelique, that he has been sent to retrieve two hundred louis to cover a very bad turn of the dice for Valere. He describes his errand with a series of inflated metaphors that parody the equating ofgambling with the nobility's battlefield prowess for which we saw Casanova congratulating himself after his victory at piquet. II frappe adroite, agauche, et d'estoc et de taille; II se defend, madame, encor comme un lion. Je l'ai vu, dans l'effort de la convulsion, Maudissant les hasards d'un combat trop funeste: De sa bourse expirante il ramassait Ie reste; Et paraissant encor plus grand dans son malheur, II vendait cher son sang et sa vie au vainqueur ... Comme un aide-de-camp, je viens en diligence Appeler du secours: il faut faire approcher Notre corps de reserve, et je m'en vais chercher Deux cents louis qu'il a laisses dans sa cassette. (278) [He strikes to the right, to the left, with pommel and point; / He holds his ground, madame, ever like a lion. / I have seen him, in the throes of a final convulsion, / Damn the hasards of an ill-fated combat: / From his dying purse he gathered what was left, / And appearing even greater in the midst of misfortune, / He sold dearly his blood and his life to the winner. / . . . Like an aide-de-camp, I come posthaste / To muster reinforcements: I must bring to the fore / Our troops in reserve and am off to enlist / Two hundred louis he left in his box.] In the world of Regnard's gambler, it is the deployment of game pieces that confers an identity that was once the prerogative of birth and military valor. If, even though his real name is Richard, Valere's servant is called Hector throughout the play, it is because, as he explains to Geronte, Valere insisted on rebaptizing him in honor of the figure traditionally associated with the jack of diamonds: Hector of Troy. Geronte's reaction to this explanation is to wonder why his son has not, as he reworked his world, transformed Angelique into Pallas, the name given to the queen of spades. These transformations of identity provoked by gambling-the comic renaming of characters in honor of court cards and the leveling of hierarchy effected by gambling'S reducing of all to the money they bet-point to the play's central issue: how the movement of money both reveals and modifies the implications of gender, how the sentiment and desire assumed to define the relations Staging the Gambler 119 between men and women will themselves be redefined by the rapid movement of money across the gaming table. In Dancourt's La Desolation des joueuses the status of the couple and Dorimene's opposition to her daughter's marriage were peripheral issues. Both the daughter and Dorante, her beloved, refuse to gamble and remain untouched by its effects. Their engagement is little more than a device providing the initial tension and, once the parade of characters have expressed their laments, the closure of a marriage is accepted. With Regnard, the status of the couple, the tension generated by the very different desires drawing them together, is fully integrated into the dynamics of the gambler's life. It is gambling that, for both Valere and Angelique, generates the tension that will define their conflicting desires . Angelique is drawn irresistibly to the carefree exuberance that makes Valere so different from the older, calmer, and more reasonable Dorante, the rival suitor who is both Valere's uncle and the choice clearly preferred by Angelique's servant, Nerine. At the same time, as even Angelique must recognize, it is Valere's carefree vitality that establishes him as the worst possible marriage prospect. For Valere, on the other hand, Angelique's attraction is her substantial dowry and the financial resources a marriage would represent. Given the different shapes of these desires, it is the financial ups and downs of Valere's career at tric-trac that will determine how he acts at any given moment. When he is winning, he loses all interest in Angelique and the additional funds she represents. When he is losing, his duplicitous attempts to extort funds from her are so obvious that not even Angelique's sentimental infatuation can blind her to what is really happening. Regnard, as he stages the always out-of-sync dance of these two conflicted characters , not only anticipates the central theme of Marivaux's theater of sentiment but makes brutally explicit the financial underpinnings ofsentiment that will be so systematically suppressed in Marivaux's portrayal of his self-questioning couples. The conflict structuring Regnard's play is that between feminine and masculine desire. Angelique desires only to be desired, while Valere desires her only as a source of funds allowing his gambling to continue. From these two versions of desire as an affective lack and as a financial need, there flows an ideology of gender that postulates women as inevitably frustrated by what men might offer. To be a woman within Regnard's play is to be torn between a force of sentiment drawing Angelique toward the challenge of capturing the youthful allure and exciting 120 Chapter 6 precarity of Valere's carefree instability and a contrary force of reason drawing her toward the stability of the marriage proposed by the older, more caring, and more grateful Dorante. Angelique's dilemma is her inability to choose without regret between the seductive bon ton of a Valere who incarnates all the most fashionable pleasures of Parisian high society and the placid bon sens of a Dorante who stands between Moliere's honnete homme and the Enlightenment's philosophe. A woman's desire, as Hector baldly puts it to Nerine when he explains why he is sure Angelique will never choose Dorante, "needs a little something of the disorderly" [se plait un peu dans le derCglement] (196). Regnard underlines the conflict at the core ofAngelique's desire by surrounding her with two other female characters, her sister, the comtesse , and her servant, Nerine, each of whom represents one of the two options making up this dilemma. The comtesse brings to her every encounter a comic power of self-deception, a compulsion to project onto every male character she meets-Valere, Dorante, and the fake marquis -a desire as ardent as it is deluded in its ability to run roughshod over reality and reason. Just after she has explained to Angelique why it would be folly even to consider marrying a gambler, the comtesse blithely adds: J'ai beau m'armer de fier, je vois de toutes parts Mille coeurs amoureux suivre mes etandards: Un conseiller de robe, un seigneur de finance, Dorante, Ie Marquis, briguent mon alliance; Mais si d'un nouveau noeud je veux bien me lier, Je pretends aValere offrir un coeur entier. (224) [In vain I stand aloof. I see on all sides / A thousand hearts pursuing my banner: / A court counselor, a lord of finance, / Dorante, the marquis, all long for my hand. / But ifto a new bond I should wish to submit, / I would to Valere offer the whole of my heart.] Nerine, on the contrary, is never for a moment duped by sentiment . From her first appearance on stage she makes it clear that she will oppose her mistress's infatuation with Valere by reminding her at every turn that his promises are worthless and that a single verb captures everything that can be expected from him: "that he has gambled, that he gambles, and that he will always gamble" [quJil ajou~ quJil joue) et quJil jouera toujours] (200). Tirelessly insisting to her mistress that marrying a gambler will cost her everything-"her lands repossessed, her bed up for Staging the Gambler 121 auction" (27s)-Nerine carefully but futilely rehearses her mistress in how to refuse Valere's request for her diamond-studded portrait. Proclaiming that "I like a love built on a solid safe [sur un bon coffre-ftrt]" (207), Nerine's exclusive concern with the monetary establishes her not only as one pole ofAngelique's dilemma, but, paradoxically, as an honest version of Valere, as someone who never masks material concerns with the sweetness of sentiment. Angelique, however, has no power to resist a victimization by sentiment of which she is all too aware: Ne combats plus, Nerine, une ardeur qui m'enchante: Tu prendrois pour l'eteindre une peine impuissante.... La raison, les conseils, ne peuvent m'en distraire: Je vois Ie bon parti; mais je prends Ie contraire. (274) [Dispute no longer, Nerine, an ardor which enchants me: / Your efforts to quell it will be of no avail ... / Reason, good counsel, will never dissuade me: / I see the right choice, but opt for the contrary.] For his satire of the other pole of masculine desire, Regnard uses the seesawing fortunes of the gambler to show that declarations of sentiment are a ruse to be adopted or discarded in inverse proportion to the state of his finances. When Valere's first big reversal at tric-trac makes it imperative that he have access to Angelique's money if he is to have any chance at recouping his losses, Hector observes that "when he hasn't a penny ... his love has no limits" [quand it nJa pas un sou . .. it est amoureux comme un flu] (199). Valere's purse, Hector continues, is the perfect thermometer. It always indicates, for those who know how to read it, the intensity of his master's devotion. When the level of gold louis descends, his ardor is sure to rise. When the louis mount up, his love grows cold. Regnard emphasizes masculine duplicity by staging Valere as simultaneously pursuing two different women: the naive Angelique and the disabused Madame La Ressource. La Ressource is a money lender who, as her name indicates, represents more directly the true object of Valere's affections. She will, however, supply the cash he needs only as a high-interest loan secured by the collateral ofthe diamond-studded portrait that Angelique has been duped into giving to Valere. That moment oftruth for Angelique and the play's resolution come as a result of the circulation of that portrait as both a likeness ofthe supposed beloved and as precious diamonds. As symbolic object, Angelique's 122 Chapter 6 portrait stands as a synthesis of all the values, feigned and real, which preside over the characters' actions. As image, it evokes the face of the beloved and all the sentiment it is assumed to trigger for the lover. Angelique has given the portrait to Valere in return for his promise that he will renounce gambling and hold her image forever next to his heart. As diamond-studded frame, it represents the collateral for the loan that allows Valere to break his promise and return to tric-trac. Synthesizing sentiment and money, it embodies all the conflicting forces that drive the play's development. Ambiguously situated at the intersection of the affective and the financial, this image of a face which is more than a face confirms Regnard 's theater as anticipating and revealing the real stakes of the ambiguities Marivaux will stage through his frequent use of the mask. In a play like Le feu de Pamour et du hasard Marivaux's well-born Silvia and Dorante each decide, as a way of discovering the true character of the person to whom they have been engaged by their parents, that they will change places with their servants, Lisette and Arlequin. For both of them, this donning of masks is a way of testing the other's true feelings. What Silvia and Dorante want from their disguise is a chance to observe the other outside the roles assigned them by their fathers. As it happens, however, even after she has learned Dorante's real identity and knows that the chemistry of sentiment has eminently suited them for each other, Silvia insists that Dorante be kept in the dark as to the fact that she is not the servant she pretends to be. For her, the ultimate proof of Dorante's love must take the form of a willingness to marry her in spite of an inferior social status. Only then, as she sees it, will sentiment prove itself to be a force stronger than money and station. In Marivaux, it is sentiment tinged with egotism that motivates this final test. Money and station are alluded to only indirectly through the broad comedy of the reactions experienced by the two servants during the brief time each of them believes that a real master or a real mistress has fallen madly in love with them. At the play's close, Silvia's insistence that Dorante be willing to marry her even as a dowerless servant is dismissed as nothing more than a mild excess of feminine pride. In Marivaux, the play ofmasks between masters and servants allows Silvia to present herself as a woman minus her financial value. In Regnard , the diamond-studded portrait symbolizes Angelique's status as a woman plus a financial value. Paradoxically, Angelique's gift of her portrait to Valere as a guage of their love transforms it into a mask ofwhich Staging the Gambler 123 she herself becomes the dupe. In the play's final act Angelique discovers that the portrait was immediately given to La Ressource as collateral for Valere's loan and that Dorante, Valere's rival, has bought it back for her. Announcing her decision to marry Dorante by declaring that "the original will go with the copy" (310), she removes, as it were, a mask that has blinded her far more than it has deceived anyone else. Rejected by Angelique and disinherited by his father, Valere concludes "So it goes, so it goes; but let's look at the bright side, Hector. / Someday gambling will reimburse my losses at love" (318). Regnard's frank acknowledgment of sentiment's symbiosis with financial self-interest will, in a play like Le]eu de Pamour et du hazard, disappear in favor ofsomething quite different. In Marivaux's play of masks a verbal pyrotechnics of doubt and psychological insecurity posit the characters' motivations as exclusively sentimental and exclusively aristocratic. In Marivaux, the world of the masters remains safely separate from that of the servants. Seen in this light, Marivaux's theater of sentiment represents a stepping back from the absence of any frontier between sentiment and money that Regnard's figure of the gambler made only too apparent. * * * Marivaux's relegation of financial concern to the level of a parody enacted by servants is part of a disappearance from the French stage of the figure of the gambler that runs from Regnard's Le]oueur of 1696 to the late 1760s.4 When, after an absence of almost seventy years, the gambler did reappear, it was as the result of a complex cross-Channel exchange between the English and the French stage. That exchange began in February 1753 when Edward Moore's The Gamester was first presented in London with David Garrick, the leading actor of the period, in the title role. Hardly successful, Moore's play ran for only eleven performances and would have disappeared from the English repertory had it not been for its far more successful staging in Paris some fifteen years later, in 1768. Mter that success, Moore's play was revived in England and went on to become what Anthony Ambert has described as "the play performed more frequently on the London stage than any other Restoration or eighteenth-century tragedy."5 If Moore's play found a second life in 1771, it was because of the work's enormous success in an adaptation for the Paris stage, a success that began in 1768 and continued even until 1819. What happened to 124 Chapter 6 Moore's play in France and the way it reveals the century's most important cultural shift in the popular imagination of the gambler began in 1760 when Denis Diderot, already the major theorist of what would come to be known as the drame bour;geois, found himself so taken with Moore's Gamester that he did his own prose translation of the work and offered it to the Comedie Fran<;aise under the title of Le ]oueur. While the Comedie Fran<;aise quickly refused Diderot's structurally unstageable and bombastically overwrought work, his translation continued to circulate in manuscript and was probably one of the sources for Bernard-Joseph Saurin's 1768 verse translation ofMoore's work that was presented under the title Biverlei) tragedie bour;geoise.6 Its success in Paris, what Charles Colle described as a reussite prodigieuse,7 directly spurred its revival three years later in London. While Saurin's Biverlei follows the action of Moore's original more or less faithfully, it departs from the English original in ways that highlight the French Enlightenment's redefinition of the gambler. Saurin's "gambling play" is utterly unlike Regnard's Le ]oueur of 1696. In Saurin's work the gambler is portrayed not as part of a couple on the brink of marriage but as the head of an established household that already includes a child. Saurin's Madame Beverlei relates to her husband with an unwavering maternal solicitude that survives every degradation of the family's status brought about by her husband's weakness for gambling. Saurin's couple is defined by a lugubrious poverty that has stripped them of all the trappings of their earlier wealth. His play opens as Madame patiently awaits her husband's return from another of his nightly fiascos at the gaming table. Leaving the terrain of the unattached couple defined by ambiguous desires, Saurin moves us massively to the realm of family responsibility: Beverlei is not only a husband who has reduced his wife to poverty but a son who has squandered everything left him by his father, a brother who has lost the money confided to him by his sister, and a father who has destroyed his son's financial future. Gone entirely from Saurin's work is any hint of the easy money and giddy joie de vivre which drew Valere to the world of gambling. In their place we find a financially devastated family brought to the brink of destruction by the husband's losses at gambling. Following Moore's original, Biverlei is constructed as a series of clearly delineated actions that develop the relations between the characters : the initial conflict between Leuson, the devoted suitor of Beverlei's sister, Henriette, and the arch-vilain Stukeli who has coaxed the naive Staging the Gambler 125 Beverlei every step along the way to disaster; the carefully crafted ploys that allow Stukeli and his henchmen to appropriate Beverlei's every penny and even his wife's jewels; the carefully modulated suspense created by the impression that Leuson has been murdered by Stukeli's agents and that Beverlei will be framed for the crime. As concerns the representation of gambling, Beverlei is addicted neither to the rowdy free-for-all of lansquenet nor to the social duet of high-stakes tric-trac. His game is dice, more specifically the eighteenthcentury version ofhasard, a descendant of the game we saw in Leleu de saint Nicolas. Hasard, along with the simpler passe-dix in which the goal is to achieve a count of at least ten with three dice, were the two most prevalent dice games of the eighteenth century. In the popular imagination , hasard's reputation rested on the rapidity of its wins and losses as well as the addictive nature of its appeal. In The Compleat Gamester of 1734-, Richard Seymour observed ofhasard that "the game is most properly denominated, for it makes a man, or undoes him in the twinkling of an eye" and added that it is "the most bewitching game that is played on the dice; for when a man begins to play, he knows not when to leave off; and having once accustomed himself to it, he hardly ever after minds anything else:'8 As with Dancourt and Regnard, Saurin never shows us Beverlei or any of the other characters actually gambling. What does occupy center stage is the social and familial disorder provoked by gambling. Saurin's main concern is to depict gambling as a personal and social cancer. Jarvis, the Beverleis' aged and ever-loyal servant who was let go when there was no money to pay his wages, tearfully recalls how virtuous, upstanding , and morally generous Beverlei had been as a child. The terrible contrast between his master's past and present confirms gambling'S dark power to attack and infect even those who were once most healthy. Like a metastasizing cancer, gambling becomes an all-consuming evil that devours not only the player's finances but even his moral being. As emphatic as Saurin becomes in depicting the devastation wrought by gambling, he remains silent as to any explanation ofwhy or how so previously exemplary a character as Beverlei should fall victim to that vice. When, in an anguished moment, Beverlei asks himself why he has fallen so low, his only answer is to equate his gambling with a "vile love of gold" (viI amour de Por).9 A love of gold, of course, hardly leads only to gambling. As Beverlei elaborates on the reasons why he gambles, his explanation fades into a vague indictment of all departures from the 126 Chapter 6 virtue of the middle way: "The middle station, mother of the calm mind, / Is so much better than riches which, alas!, lead us only astray" (23). If Saurin's treatment of gambling's seduction is limited to such flat metaphors, it is because gambling is not the real cause of Beverlei's undoing. He is the victim not so much of gambling, but of the diabolic Stukeli who wants not only all that can be squeezed out of his witless prey but even the corruption of the long-suffering and ever-faithful madame Beverlei whom Stukeli has coveted since well before her marriage. If Beverlei has lost everything, it is not so much because he gambles as because he has been cheated by the accomplices Stukeli has hired to create games where Beverlei never had the slightest chance of winning. If anyone in Beverlei is a gambler, it is Stukeli. He feels not a moment's qualm at running the pure bluff of claiming to Madame Beverlei that he never wrote the letter describing his impending arrest for debt that justified Beverlei's asking his wife for her remaining jewels. His bluff is to create for the faithful wife the illusion that Beverlei himselfforged the letter so he could give her jewels to the fictitious mistress Stukeli broadly hints her husband is keeping. Saurin's adaptation of Moore is at its most original when he redefines the distribution of gender roles that was so central to Regnard's Le ]oueur. Saurin's female characters, rather than being duped by faithless males, are portrayed as maternal presences fully conscious ofthe shortcomings of the men around them but nonetheless willing to continue as their long-suffering victims. Beverlei's sister may demand that her brother restore her gambled-away fortune, but she does so only so she can use that money to relieve the suffering of her impoverished sisterin -law, Beverlei's wife. Saurin's male characters, rather than imitating the deceptive Valere, become either dupes like Beverlei, boringly steadfast monuments to virtue like Leuson and Jarvis, or demiurgic incarnations of super-human evil like Stukeli. As it emerges from this redefinition of roles, gambling becomes little more than the marker of an innate stupidity , an almost childlike lack of self-control which makes of the Beverleis of this world the perfect prey of its Stukelis. * * * The status ofSaurin's playas the telling indication of a profound change in the public's attitude toward gambling is most evident not in the measured reactions to it of such serious theater critics as Freron, Grimm, Staging the Gambler 127 and Colle but in a series of short poems inspired by the play and published during the summer of 1768 in the Mercure de France.Io Those poems, hardly distinguished works, nonetheless tell us a great deal about what a new kind of Parisian audience expected from the theater and how those expectations reflect both a new attitude toward gambling and a new sense of the theater's social function. These anonymous poems, as they attempt to express what their authors found so moving and valuable about Saurin's play, often choose as their point of comparison the very different tenor ofthe last great gambling play presented on the French stage, Regnard's Le ]oueur. Addressing Saurin directly, one anonymous poet explains that Regnard, en badinant, esquissa son Joueur; Mais il fait rire, et sa gaite l'excuse; Chez ton rival Ie vice amuse; Chez toi, mieux peint, il inspire l'horreur. [Regnard portrayed his gambler all in jest; / But he would make us laugh, and his gaiety excuses him; / For your rival, vice amuses; / For you, far better drawn, it inspires horror.] Regnard's comedy may amuse, this poet argues, but only the catharsis of horror can reform. Continuing a debate on the theater's social function that began ten years earlier in Rousseau's Lettre it dJAlembert, these heart-felt reactions to Saurin's tragedie bourgeoise celebrate it as a work which, rather than provoking the cold smile of reason, appeals to the heart in a way that makes its spectators tremble in unison. Souvent Ie ridicule se glisse et s'evapore. Pour mieux nous corriger, fais-nous fremir encore: On ne parle aux esprits qu'en subjuguant les coeurs. 11 [Ridicule often slips away and evaporates. / To better correct us, make us shudder yet again: / One speaks to the mind only by subjugating the heart.] Saurin accommodates his play to the sensibilities of an essentially bourgeois audience by presenting it with characters in every way like themselves. While, for instance, Moore's original retained the aristocratic convention ofa second chance provided by an inheritance, Saurin substitutes for it the mercantile version of a foreign investment at Cadiz that produces a windfall of 300,000 livres. What most assured the popular 128 Chapter 6 success of Saurin's play, what provided the "instructive horror" that so moved his audience, was the devastation of the bourgeois family unit he so starkly portrays. The intensity of that portrait is a result of Saurin's almost lurid insistence on how Stukeli's machinations aim to destroy the hapless Beverlei both as husband and as father. Stukeli's motivation, we saw earlier, is not only a desire for Beverlei's money but his determination to seduce the faithful wife he had earlier lost to his rival. While Moore's ever virtuous Madame Beverley immediately rejects each of Stukely's insinuating attacks, Saurin transforms Madame Beverlei into a character vulnerable to and struggling against a real insecurity as to her husband's fidelity. During her initial conversation with Stukeli in Act One, she is obsessed with the fact that this is the first time her husband has spent an entire night away from her bed. Her tentative ''And I am afraid .. :' (16) provides Stuleli the perfect opening for a reassurance meant only to heighten her insecurity. Even as she insists she would never doubt her husband, her "I cannot resist the torment that drives me on" (18) reveals the struggle behind her denial. It is, however, in his treatment of Beverlei as father that Saurin makes his most significant departure from Moore's original. His intensification of the audience's sense of horror came as a result of his adding to the play a character only alluded to but never actually present on stage in the London version: Beverlei's young son, Tomi. In Act One the child's placid presence on his mother's lap and his simple statement of"Oh! mama ... I love my papa so much!" (16) adds a new dimension of pathos to the portrayal of Beverlei's ruined domesticity. His presence there also makes it clear that Stukeli's seduction seeks to pervert not only a faithful wife but a devoted mother. In Act Two, when Beverlei finally returns home, Tomi's telling his father how sad it made him to see his mother's tears only intensifies Beverlei's shame and guilt. It was, however, the child's final appearance in the play, peacefully sleeping in the prison cell of Act Five, that Saurin's Parisian audience found both intolerable and irresistible.12 As he prepares the poison that will provide his only escape from despair over the ruin of his family, Beverlei launches into a Hamlet-like soliloquy on the benefits and risks of suicide. As he speaks, his attention is drawn to the innocent boy sleeping in the chair beside him. His grief only grows greater at the thought of the fate he has prepared for his child. Convinced that the merciful course would be to save his child from the life of poverty and opprobrium that awaits him, Beverlei picks up the knife inadvertently Staging the Gambler 129 left in his cell and raises it over the sleeping figure. Awakening, the boy says "Papa . . . your eyes . . . they scare me . . . My dear papa, forgive me" (83). The bathos of the innocent child's begging forgiveness of the father who has destroyed everything moves even the now demented Beverlei to throw the knife aside, but not before his wife's unexpected arrival assures that she see the husband and father in his final degradation as cowardly infanticide. Bringing with her the good news that Stukeli has been unmasked and Beverlei's property restored, it is too late. The poison has been drunk and Beverlei dies in the arms of his wife with his son at his knee. Searching for some good that might come from all he has done so colossally wrong, Beverlei's final words to his wife and son establish him as a horrifying example of gambling'S evil, as a tragic lesson which might at least check any inherited proclivity in that direction threatening the innocent child. Si du jeu jamais VOllS sentez les fureurs, Souvenez-vous de votre pere . Donnez-moi votre main, rna femme Adieu ... je meurs. (89) [If ever you feel the furies of gambling, / Remember your father ... / Give me your hand, my wife ... Adieu ... I die.] * * * As Saurin's adaptation ofMoore's play makes clear, the new form oftheater that emerged in France during the second half of the eighteenth century presented money and family duty as the central values defining its characters. In so doing, this new theater addressing itself to a distinctly bourgeois audience broke radically with Marivaux's relegation of any concern with money to the comic register of the servants. Yet the money that returns to center stage in the drame bour;geois was quite unlike the big wins and diamond-studded picture frames of Regnard's Le ]oueur. In that play of almost three-quarters of a century earlier, money was only money. Its function was to allow Valere to return to the tric-trac table where wagers won and lost would reintegrate him within an inebriating circulation of wealth co-substantial with society itself The gambling and the money that preside over this new theater are totally different. Gambling may be the culprit in the closing lines of Saurin's Biverlei, but, in terms of its actual function within the play, it is little more than a metaphor for a far more serious vice. The ultimate Chapter 6 pathos of Beverlei's story lies in the fact that his suicide is pointless and unnecessary. Stukeli is dead. His henchmen are apprehended. And, most important of all, Beverlei's property has been returned. If, in spite of that happy ending, Beverlei must die, it is not because he is a gambler but because he has proven himself unworthy of the wealth that is once again his. Gambling may have made him a victim of cheats, but his real crime was a sacrilege committed against the bourgeois religion ofwealth. Money, be it as individual wealth or as an inheritance linking generation to generation, has become the single marker of personal value and social standing. If Moore and Saurin finally have little to say about gambling itself beyond its financial repercussions, it is because their real subject is how, over the course of the eighteenth century, money as a privilege of which one must prove oneself worthy had become the new bedrock of individual and social identity. During the seventeenth century, as we saw in Dancourt's La Desolation des joueuses, it was civil authority that sought to repress gambling. If those prohibitions were ineffectual, it was because-and this was the premise of Dancourt's play-how and why people gambled was a function of more fundamental traits of character. If the moralists of that period dismissed gambling as a failing of minor consequence, it was because the evils associated with it-avarice, deception, theft, anger, passion , blasphemy-were seen as far more serious vices in their own right. They might manifest themselves in gambling, but gambling was hardly their root cause. Over the course of the eighteenth century that tolerance disappeared . In surprising consensus, the defenders of traditional values as well as the philosophes proposing a new vision of enlightened society came together in a shared denunciation of gambling as a threat to social order. The new anathema leveled against the gambler was the product of a cultural transformation at the core of Enlightenment thought. Slowly but inexorably, an ideal of social virtue came to replace individual happiness as a goal to be achieved and as the measure of true moral worth.13 Social virtue could take many forms; but, as articulated over the course of the century, it was a secular, civic, and familial virtue that emerged as the reigning ideal. Espousing merit and work over birth and privilege, adherents to this new ideal believed that wealth and standing were the legitimate rewards of a life lived virtuously. Saurin's tragedie bouflJeoise is an expression of how gambling came to be redefined within this new ideology of social virtue confirmed by Staging the Gambler wealth. The middle-class audiences that flocked to this new theatrical form not only found themselves watching characters very much like themselves , but were wafted to new heights of emotional involvement by spectacles of domestic and civic virtues specific to their class. If, for those audiences, gambling could serve so well as an emblem of vice and corruption , it was for two reasons. On the one hand, gambling was an activity long associated with the profligate aristocracy against which they defined themselves. On the other, the gambler's spiral of selfdestruction engulfing all around him provided an exemplary tragedy of wealth abused and inheritance squandered. In this play reintroducing the figure of the gambler to the French stage after a seventy-year absence, the disorder that the gambler represents becomes tangible not as the insolent privilege of the aristocrat, but as a perverse quest for wealth unsanctioned by merit. In the same way that wealth virtuously acquired and passed on to one's heirs became the surest marker of social rectitude, so also gambling's hyper-intense circulation of money unrelated to merit became an appalling example of social pathology. If Saurin's audiences left the theater in tears, it was because the spectacle of Beverlei's ruin confirmed a reverence for a sanctity of wealth made tangible by the perversities of the gambler. ...

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