A GAMBLING TRAGEDY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1303, 14 February 1885, Page 3

A GAMBLING TRAGEDY.

■, A correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette, who happened to be there in the winter 1873-4, sends the following experience of Monte Carlo and its tragedies : —“I had strolled,” he says, “into the Casino in the afternoon, and was standing behind the table watching the players. My attention was arrested by the luck of an old lady, whom I saw win the same stake of IOOOf 11 times running. At the same time I was distinctly eware of a young man who rose from the table a few paces off on my right, and went to & sofa close by. A minute alter there came a sharp report from that direction and on turning round to see the cause I discovered that the young man had rolled from his sofa, and a pistol was lying on the ground beside him. The croupiers sat at the tables unmoved, but the players started and shuffled, and in a few moments most of them had risen hurriedly to their feet. Several women went out of the room crying; the greater part of the men gathered gaping in a semicircle round the wounded man, who lay on the floor bleeding from the stomach, but no one offered to help him until an English officer stepped forward and raised his head, when 1 took his feet, and between us we lifted him on to the sofa, and staunched his wound as well as we could with handkerchiefs. After several minutes, two or three officials of the establishment appeared carrying an armchair, on which they placed the victim and carried him out, with looks of grave disapproval and affront. Afterwards I found that whatever sympathy might be extended to those whose losses ‘ induced them to make away with themselves respectably at a distance, in their lodgings at Nice, or even in the neighboring solitudes of the mountains, suicide, or the attempt at suicide, within the precincts of the establishment itself, was held at Monte Carlo an inexcusable breach of etiquette. By degrees people returned to the tables, and in about 20 minutes from the moment of the shot, play was resumed. The word was in the meantime passed round that the pistol used had been a toy, unloaded, and the pretended act of suicide a mere chantage or trick to extort money. I had reason to know better, and when I went out among the palm and cactus and geranium walks above the sea, those alleys of paradise had for me somehow changed their aspect, and I was glad next day to travel farther. Some time afterwards I ascertained the sequel through that excellent man, M. Adam, the senator, and friend of Qambetta, to whose exertions about this time the origin of the agitation against the gaming-tables was in great part due. It turned out that the victim in the present instance, a Pole, had, after three months’ painful illness, recovered sufficiently to leave the Principality, having been first tried, as similar offenders when they, recovered always were tried, for his misdemeanour.