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The Gaming Table by Andrew Steinmetz

 CHAPTER XI. page 4

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_.

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