With small
success. Gaming soon ceased to attract him, for at the roulette table
in Monaco he loathed the companionship of old professional gamblers
with their gallows-bird faces, and of bedizened Paris courtesans, and
at his club in Berlin or Baden, where he played only with respectable
people, the stakes were never high enough to permit even the largest
possible gain or loss to excite him. The pleasures of the epicure
afforded him more satisfaction, and his table was famous among his
peers. He soon wearied of wine; the discomfort caused by intoxication
seemed to him too large a price to pay for the enjoyment of drinking.
This caused his guests to banter him about his moderation, and allude
to the historic drinking-horn of gigantic size, which, as the
chronicles of the House attested, his ancestors used to drain at their
banquets, though in those days the Burgundy was far from its present
perfection, and Canary had not yet been invented. His companions'
enthusiasm for drinking at last disgusted him with entertaining, and he
gradually lost his taste for choice dinners also.
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