The poet Voiture was the delight of his contemporaries, conspicuous as he was for the most exquisite polish and inexhaustible wit; but he was also one of the most desperate gamesters of his time. Like Rotrou, he mistrusted his folly, and sometimes refrained. 'I have discovered,' he once wrote to a friend, 'as well as Aristotle, that there is no beatitude in play; and in fact I have given over gambling; it is now seven months since I played—which is very important news, and which I forgot to tell you.' He would have died rich had he always refrained. His relapses were terrible; one night he lost fifteen hundred pistoles (about L750).
The list of foreign poets ruined by gambling might be extended; whilst, on the other hand, it is impossible, I believe, to quote a single instance of the kind among the poets of England,—perhaps because very few of them had anything to lose. The reader will probably remember Dr Johnson's exclamation on hearing of the large debt left unpaid by poor Goldsmith at his death—'Was ever poet so trusted before!'...
The great philosophers Montaigne and Descartes, seduced at an early age by the allurements of gambling, managed at length to overcome the evil, presenting examples of reformation—which proves that this mania is not absolutely incurable. Descartes became a gamester in his seventeenth year; but it is said that the combinations of cards, or the doctrine of probabilities, interested him more than his winnings.(107)
(107) Hist. des Philos. Modernes: Descartes.
The celebrated Cardan, one of the most universal and most eccentric geniuses of his age, declares in his autobiography, that the rage for gambling long entailed upon him the loss of reputation and fortune, and that it retarded his progress in the sciences. 'Nothing,' says he, 'could justify me, unless it was that my love of gaming was less than my horror of privation.' A very bad excuse, indeed; but Cardan reformed and ceased to be a gambler.
Three of the greatest geniuses of England—Lords Halifax, Anglesey, and Shaftesbury—were gamblers; and Locke tells a very funny story about one of their gambling bouts. This philosopher, who neglected nothing, however eccentric, that had any relation to the working of the human understanding, happened to be present while my Lords Halifax, Anglesey, and Shaftesbury were playing, and had the patience to write down, word for word, all their discordant utterances during the phases of the game; the result being a dialogue of speakers who only used exclamations—all talking in chorus, but more to themselves than to each other. Lord Anglesey observing Locke's occupation, asked him what he was writing. 'My Lord,' replied Locke, 'I am anxious not to lose anything you utter.' This irony made them all blush, and put an end to the game.
M. Sallo, Counsellor to the Parliament of Paris, died, says Vigneul de Marville, of a disease to which the children of the Muses are rarely subject, and for which we find no remedy in Hippocrates and Galen;—he died of a lingering disease after having lost 100,000 crowns at the gaming table—all he possessed.
By way of diversion to his cankering grief, he started the well-known Journal des Savans, but lived to write only 13 sheets of it, for he was wounded to the death.(108)
(108) Melanges, d'Hist. et de Litt. i.
The physician Paschasius Justus was a deplorable instance of an incorrigible gambler. This otherwise most excellent and learned man having passed three-fourths of his life in a continual struggle with vice, at length resolved to cure himself of the disease by occupying his mind with a work which might be useful to his contemporaries and posterity.(109) He began his book, but still he gamed; he finished it, but the evil was still in him. 'I have lost everything but God!' he exclaimed. He prayed for delivery from his soul's disease;(110) but his prayer was not heard; he died like any gambler—more wretched than reformed.