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As a cardplayer, Kijek was a scratch, a legend at gin but even more partial to “pitch,” the working man’s rhapsody of high, low, jack and game.

The day of their first meeting, rendered as a cardplayer might do it —11/1/11— was exceptionally auspicious.

He was a fisherman and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theater-lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman.

“Really?” she said, not paying her full attention because the cardplayer was sending her his look, which was one not of supplication but of command.

The similarities between this Cézanne watercolor and the canvas in the Musée d’Orsay are striking: the pale greenish-yellow in the cardplayer’s coat; his black-and-gray trousers; the red and yellow on the tabletop; the reddish and gray tints in his crumpled hat.