文档介绍：英文名著 3000 本
MEMOIRS OF JACQUES
CASANOVA de SEINGALT 1725-
1798 TO PARIS AND PRISON,
Volume 2d--The False Nun
THE RARE UNABRIDGED LONDON EDITION OF
1894 TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR MACHEN TO
WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED THE CHAPTERS
DISCOVERED BY ARTHUR SYMONS.
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英文名著 3000 本
THE FALSE NUN
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英文名著 3000 本
CHAPTER XXI
Supper at My Casino With M. M. and M. de Bernis, the
French Ambassador--A Proposal from M. M.; I Accept It-
-Consequences-C. C. is Unfaithful to Me, and I Cannot
Complain
I felt highly pleased with the supper-party I had arranged
with M---M----, and I ought to have been happy. Yet I
was not so; but whence came the anxiety which was a
torment to me? Whence? From my fatal habit of
gambling. That passion was rooted in me; to live and to
play were to me two identical things, and as I could not
hold the bank I would go and punt at the ridotto, where I
lost my money morning and night. That state of things
made me misrable. Perhaps someone will say to me:
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英文名著 3000 本
"Why did you play, when there was no need of it, when
you were in want of nothing, when you had all the money
you could wish to satisfy your fancies?"
That would be a troublesome question if I had not made it
a law to tell the truth. Well, then, dear inquisitive reader,
if I played with almost the certainty of losing, although no
one, perhaps, was more sensible than I was to the losses
made in gambling, it is because I had in me the evil spirit
of avarice; it is because I loved prodigality, and because
my heart bled when I found pelled to spend
any money that I had not won at the gaming-table. It is
an ugly vice, dear reader, I do not deny it. However, all I
can say is that, during the four days previous to the supper,
I lost all the gold won for me by M---- M----
On the anxiously-expected day I went to my casino, where
at the appointed hour M---- M---- came