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Volume I Volume II

The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz

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GAMBLING IN FRANCE IN ALL TIMES

CHAPTER V. page 22

And again, `The game of _Hoca_ is prohibited at Paris _UNDER THE
PENALTY OF DEATH_, and yet it is played at court. Five thousand
pistoles before dinner is nothing. That game is a regular cut-
throat.'

Hoca was prodigiously unfavourable to the players; the latter had
only twenty-eight chances against thirty. In the seventeenth
century this game caused such disorder at Rome that the Pope
prohibited it and expelled the bankers.

The Italians whom Mazarin brought into France obtained from the
king permission to set up _Hoca_ tables in Paris. The parliament
launched two edicts against them, and threatened to punish them
severely. The king's edicts were equally severe. Every of
offender was to be fined 1000 livres, and the person in whose
house Faro, Basset, or any such game was suffered, incurred the
penalty of 6000 livres for each offence. The persons who played
were to be imprisoned. Gaming was forbidden the French cavalry
under the penalty of death, and every commanding officer who
should presume to set up a Hazard table was to be cashiered, and
all concerned to be rigorously imprisoned. These penalties might
show great horror of gaming, but they were too severe to be
steadily inflicted, and therefore failed to repress the crime
against which they were directed. The severer the law the less
the likelihood of its application, and consequently its power of
repression.

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