In the summer and autumn of 1872, while George Eliot was finishing the writing of Middlemarch, she was also making notes in the small portable book now known as Pforzheimer MS 711. This is the first of several books which include notes related to the novel she was to begin in 1874 and complete in 1876, Daniel Deronda. She finished the Finale to Middlemarch on October 2; a fortnight earlier, she and Lewes crossed the Channel to take the waters at Homburg, where on 26 September they saw amongst the roulette players ‘Miss Leigh (Byron's granddaughter) having lost 500 £, looking feverishly excited. Painful sight’ (GHL 1872 Diary). George Eliot also mentioned this scene, in a letter to John Blackwood, as ‘the saddest thing to be witnessed’. Despite her comment to Blackwood that ‘there is very little dramatic “Stoff” to be picked up by watching or listening’ in the Kursaal, the source of the dramatic opening paragraphs of Daniel Deronda was the painful sight of Miss Leigh's play ‘in the grasp of this mean, money-raking demon’ (GEL V 314). But the written record of this ‘Stoff’ is to be found only in Lewes's Diary and George Eliot's letter to Blackwood. Her notebook recorded no observations from life, but was reserved for notes from her reading. For instance, her notes on gambling superstitions (Pf 711 40, 41) date from April 1874, when she looked up an article on the topic in the June 1872 Cornhill Magazine. By that time, having made ‘sketches towards Daniel Deronda, [in] Jan. & Feb. 1874’, she must have formed an intention to make gambling a dramatic scene and thematic motif in her novel.