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9 Betting Against Your Self: Paul Bourget's ''A Gambler" IN 1889, THE THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Paul Bourget, very much influenced by Barbey d'Aurevilly's esthetics of mystery, published what remains his best-known work, The Disciple. That indictment of positivism made him one of the leading voices in the reaction against the reigning literary orthodoxy of Naturalism. A champion of what he called "the psychological;' Bourget rejected writers like Zola for what he saw as their truncated vision of human motivation, a truculent materialism that reduced the individual to permutations of heredity and class. For Bourget, the contour of the mind, the conflicting eddies of what and how one thought, defined the human person far more than any genetic or economic legacy. During that same year Bourget wrote what stands as one of the most concise yet penetrating reflections on the ambiguous place ofgambling during that apogee of high bourgeois culture known as la belle epoque. A short prose portrait, '~ Gambler" first appeared as a newspaper piece. Two years later, in 1891, Bourget included it in a collection of ten similar delineations of social types which he titled Nouveaux Pastels. The first question sure to have troubled Bourget's reader was why he would choose '~ Gambler" as the title for his portrait of a character who had gambled only twice in his life, and that on two successive evenings some seventeen years before the late night carriage ride that provides the setting for the story. Why present as a gambler the successful society artist Miraut, whose repugnance at even the sight ofplaying cards is so strong that he must immediately leave any room where they appear? Unlike Balzac and Barbey, Bourget has little interest in looking at gambling as a metaphor for the individual's relation to the larger forces of history. This story of a young painter's experience with baccarat during two evenings at a private club provokes no subsequent expansion of Betting Against Your Self 169 the meaning of that encounter in the way that did Raphael de Valentin's visit to the antiquary's shop as a repository of universal history. Similarly , the details of Miraut's life referred to in the narrative-his humble origins in an unnamed provincial town, his days as a penniless art student in Paris, and his later success as France's most sought-after painter of women and flowers-make it difficult to read his story as the class allegory we saw in Barbey. Bourget may situate the two sessions of baccarat in 1872, but what he says of them reveals no trace of the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian war or the Paris Commune of only two years before . This story from a past of almost twenty years earlier says much more about 1889 than it does about 1872. Bourget's interest is less in what gambling might reveal about an individual's relation to history than it is in how gambling redefines, threatens, and unravels one's self-image, one's standing as a member of society in firm control of one's moral relations with others. It is this displacement of the historical by the psychological that offers the beginnings of an answer to the question of why this story of a double suicide should be titled ''A Gambler." The gambling described in this story may involve money, even sums of money which, for the characters involved, are otherwise far beyond their reach. The emphasis, however, is never on money as a token of social class. What gambling represents within this work is a loss of balance, a sweeping away ofthe structures and support provided by the rules of reciprocity that have previously presided over the central character's life. What makes Bourget's short text so significant is the ambiguity at its core. Is this story of someone who never gambled again, yet is labeled "a gambler:' a portrait of the highest moral rectitude or of pathetic allegiance to a lie? * * * In terms of its narrative form, Bourget's story is similar to Barbey's tale of whist. Here, too, an unnamed narrator, identified with the author, writes down for us, his readers, a verbatim rendition ofthe story told to him the previous evening by the well-known painter Miraut. Aside from a brief initial setting of the scene, the entire story consists of the dia10gue between Miraut and the narrator as the painter tells him the story of his two-day brush...

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