THE WINNER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND.

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1615, 24 April 1879, Page 3

THE WINNER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND.

[From “ The World.”] Paris, February 15. The last of the eighty thousand prizes of the biggest lottery in the world has been drawn. The eighty thousand winners, bar one, have had their growl because they missed the grand prize. The odd millions scattered over Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, who won nothing, have proved to a demonstration that it was all the fault of the man who tempered the spring for the wheels. The lottery will soon be forgotten ; but before it is forgotten, there is obviously one thing to do—to say a few words about that ‘ barred one’ who has never grumbled at all, the journeyman leather dresser who has won the prizi worth five thousand pounds. His name is Aubriot ; he lives in the Hue Cardinal Lemoine, beyond the Pantheon, No.—well, there is no harm in saying it—No. 76, since lived is now the fitting word : he has fled. Fait. Congratulatory friends of the harpy tribe made the place too hot for him. He has had a stroke of ideal good luck. What are lotteries for, if not to raise poverty to affluence ? They are but sensation plays, with a weak ending when their prizes merely increase the rich man’s store. Aubriot is just the man tha f should have won, according to the dramatic fitness of things—poor, apparently virtuous with his poverty ; a member of a class that would ever have suspected foul play if the prize had gone to a millionaire. I could not resist the temptation to go and see him, though I felt I should be but one more importunate of a train of hundreds at his humble door. I divined rightly that he would have already caught enough of the trick of greatness to demand introductions, so I obtained one. The very concierge seemed almost to require a supplementary introduction to herself before taking up my name. She was quite right; her humble lodger has risen to the height of notoriety at a bound, and, in common self-defence, he must adopt notoriety’s safeguards for the privacy of domestic life. A month ago I might have mounted to his garret-floor in the big dirty house without a word of challenge ; to-day there was a preliminary journey up and journey down of the faithful janitress before I obtained leave to pass into the presence. It was the end door of the passage to the left, on the fifth floor, she told me ; and it was no less than the truth, for ‘ Aubriot’ was written on the panel. I knocked, and in another moment I was seated in a little tiled bedchamber-sitting-room, perfectly neat, and opening into a kitchen and common room beyond. The family was around me in quorum. Near the window an aged mild-eyed woman, who had once been handsome, the winner’s mother ; on the other side a younger woman, like the elder, trim, housewifely, the winner’s wife; between them an open-faced broadshouldered fellow of about forty, the winner. He received me with the grave politeness of the French workman. Yes, he had won the gros lot, and he was to receive the money in a day or two. The papers were right there, and wrong in all else. It was not true that he had played the fool when he heard the news, or that he had been spending money right and left ever since. How could he when he had not yet touched a sou of it ? Those things were calumnies. Ask his wife how he had borne his good luck. ‘ He just turned white,’ monsieur,’ said the smiling wife, ‘ and then ho turned red ; and that was all ’ ‘ Wicked calumnies,’ said the old mother, shaking her head. ‘Ho was a steady sober man before, and he has been nothing loss since.’ Then Aubriot wont on. Why should he forget himself because he had had a stroke of good fortune ? He would live a bit more comfortably, of course ; have a better roof over his head, and nicer things to eat, but there would be no other change. As I had been so good as to come and see him he would just give mo the short history of his purchase of the lottery ticket. He was in a workshop, and he had six mates, and they each bought a ticket or two. They used to talk about their chances ; and one day they came to a sort of agreement that, if any of them won the big prize, he should give all the others fifty francs apiece—and fifty francs the others should have ns soon as Aubriot was paid. It was said in a halfjoking way of course, for none of them had much hope of it; how could they ? Aubriot bought ticket after ticket at odd times, till at lust he had eight. Then his wife stopped him. ‘ Quite true,’ said the wife. ‘ I gave him a scolding, and told him we could not afford to waste so much money on a mere chance. Eight francs gone already—something like a week’s reffl ! ’ ‘ It was lucky she did not stop mo before,’ said Aubriot, ‘ for that last ticket bought was the ticket that won the prize.’ ‘But how was she to know that?’interposed (he grandmother. Weil, Aubriot stopped wasting his money, and, ‘in a manner of speaking,’ he forgot all about the lottery. I might guess ho did not think much about it, for on the very Sunday morning of the first drawing he was hard at work up to one o’clock, according to his wont. lie generally made half a day on Sunday, and ho made it that day as usual. In the afternoon lie took his wife out to see some friends, and they heard the hawkers calling the evening papers with (ho winning numbers for the day. He bought a paper, ‘La France;’ but still ho thought bo little about it that he never opened it till he got home, bet ween ten and eleven at night. Then he looked at the list, and read, ‘ Fourth Series, No. 978,599, winner of the gros lot, a silver service, or 125,000 francs.’ Ho know

, lie liad something in the fourth series, and he remembered there were a good many nines in the number. Ho went quietly into the next, room and looked at the ticke f , came quietly back to his wife—then he supposed he must hare been rather pale—and said, ‘We’ve won the grand pn'ze ! ’ 1 Nonsense ! ’ (c'te hetise I) said the wife. ‘ Read that, then j’ and he held the ticket before her. To say that he did not sleep all night would be a calumny, but he certainly did not close an eye till two in the morning. Everybody said ‘ c'te hetise!' at first. He went to the workshop next morning, and told them ; ‘ c'te hetise ! ’ Ho had one way with all of them : ‘ Do you know how to read ? Well, look at that; and he showed them ticket and paper. Hy that night the news was known in his neighbourhood, by the next day to all Paris. ‘Since then,’ said Aubriot, pausing, and drawing a deep breath, ‘you can’t think what a time I’ve had of it! Letters by the dozen every post, and just ns many callers, asking me to do all sorts of tilings—to lend some of the money, to give it away, to put twenty thousand francs here in a speculation, thirty thousand there. It made me quite ill to have to answer them.’ ‘ But you surely never thought of doing that ? ’ * How could ho help it, sir ? ’ said the wife promptly. ‘ Some of the writers sent stamps for a reply, and it would not have been honest to keep them.’ ‘ That was their artfulness,’ said the old mother, ‘At last I had to leave off answering each one, and put a general answer in the papers to tell them one and all not to bother me. The worst of it was, one answer would not do for some of them ; they would write again. My wife will show you what a lot we had.’ And the wife produces a smallish box crammed full. ‘ The callers were worse; I could not get my meals for them —all sorts of crnck-brainod schemes. You never heard the like.* ‘ Yes, monsieur,, you are quite right; I won’t let anybody touch a sou of it, no matter how nicely he may talk. I shall put it all away in a bank for a time, and then take the whole family down to my old mother’s home in the country and live quiet for a time. Here you see the whole family, except my wife’s little niece, who lives with us We have not any children of our own. Her fortune is made, I hope, as well as ours. Call her in, and let her speak to the gentleman. There ! and I can assure you she is as good as she looks. O, I don’t think I shall be dull in the country for want of something to do. I can garden a bit. Besides, I hare not been dull hero, though, of course, I have left off regular work since I won the prize. T have pottered about in the house ; I like it. I shall certainly not try to be a fine gentleman with my money. Wdrat sort of figure should I cut in company—a working man ? I daresay I shall go into some business when I come back to Paris ; but all that is uncertain. I am glad I won it, of course ; who would not be ? But it is a great comfort to me to think that before I won it I was not altogether dependent on good luck. There was not a penny owing in this house, and we had a little put by. You know what the prize is —a great silver service for the table, or its value. Well, the service was of no use tome; but I thought as M. Menier, the chocolatemaker, had been very kind to my family—my wife worked for him, and so did my mother before her—it would only be right to give him the first chance of buying it on his own terms. But he did want it—of course, if you come to think of it, he has plenty of his own ; and so I am going to take the 125,000 francs.