At the funeral, Herman looks at the Countess in her coffin, where, “it seemed to him that the rigid face returned his glance mockingly, closing one eye.” Again when he loses at faro, “as he stared at the card it seemed to him that the queen winked one eye at him mockingly.” But before this happens, the dealer tells him, “Your Queen is killed.” Here “Killed” is ironic, since Herman killed his Queen with shock. The Queen represents the Countess, obviously. The first night of gambling, Herman says, “The tray wins.” The importance of this phrase is false foreshadowing Pushkin uses subliminal wording to allude to the outcome of the third round of faro, as if egging us on to believe Herman will win three times. What’s more interesting than the numbers here is the wording that Pushkin cushions around the numbers. The number 3 signified that the Countess would trick Herman on his third round of faro, while the number 1 and the Ace foreshadowed the wrong card, and represented the one, lowly man, the “some one,” beat by the Queen. The other numbers are used as a broth to mix the important numbers into, to distract and add a tasty element. (I counted “some one” as a number, because I think the numbers represent characters.

Numbers appear everywhere in this story and of the most common numbers, (1, 3, 7, and 12), 1 appears about 24 times and 3 appears about 16 times.