After one particularly big win, Bacon went home with a handsome stranger, the owner, he said, of a yacht moored in the marina. After his departure, the Monaco police descended on Bacon’s apartment in search of the man, who was wanted all along the Riviera. “Francis enjoyed that,” says Peppiatt. “Monaco was a place apart, and it attracted louche people who he found intriguing: con men, doctors who’d perform not quite legal operations, the old women who queued to get into the casino every morning.”  But Bacon can’t have spent four years solely on gambling. “He was very disciplined,” says Peppiatt. “He needed the regularity of getting up early and painting every morning before lunch. And that came easiest to him in London. He always said he found it difficult to paint in strong light, which is why he did very little painting in Tangier, which he also visited very frequently.” Peppiatt, indeed, is sceptical that Bacon did much significant painting in Monaco, or that he spent years there at a time. The fact that Bacon maintained a London residence throughout this period, but lived at five different Monaco addresses, might seem to corroborate that view. The expense of such a lifestyle would have been considerable even without losses at the gambling tables, though Bacon was bankrolled, to a degree at least, by his lover Hall. An art collector and a director of the Peter Jones department store, Hall remains a shadowy figure, though like many of Bacon’s early patron-lovers – “sugar daddies,” Harrison calls them – he was married with children.  For Bacon, gambling was a means of self-exploration to be pursued no less obsessively than painting. In his mind the two activities were so closely entwined that losses at the roulette table were seen as collateral damage to success at the easel. Writing to a London dealer in 1947, having sustained heavy losses at the Monte Carlo Casino, he requested the then hefty price of £750 for a triptych on the grounds that this was “not one quarter of what (the paintings) have cost me with gambling etc”.
One evening in the late Eighties, I was walking down Brompton Road in South Kensington, when I saw a figure turning in the doorway of a late-night chemist.