This comedy, annually repeated, was annually played on the same lines.  Only each year the period intervening between the surrender of the tickets and the announcement of the lottery brought an increasing agony.  Each time as the Comte saw the precious slips finally depart in the hands of the maid-of-all-work, he was convinced that at last the laws of probability must fructify.  Each year he found a new meaning in the cabalistic mysteries of numbers.  The eighteenth attempt, multiplied by three, gave fifty-four, his age.  Success was inevitable:  nineteen, a number indivisible and chaste above all others, seemed specially designated.  In a word, the Comte suffered during these periods as only a gambler of the fourth generation is able to suffer.

At present the number twenty appeared to him to have properties no other number had possessed, especially in the reappearance of the zero, a figure which peculiarly attracted him by its symmetry.  His despair was consequently unlimited.

Ordinarily the news of the lottery arrived by an inspector of roads, who passed through Keragouil a week or so after the announcement in the press; for the Comte, having surrendered his ticket, was only troubled lest he had won.

This time, to the upsetting of all history, an Englishman on a bicycle trip brought him a newspaper, an article almost unknown to Keragouil, where the shriek of the locomotive had yet to penetrate.

The Comte de Bonzag, opening the paper with the accustomed sinking of the heart, was startled by the staring headlines: 

RESULTS OF THE LOTTERY

A glance at the winners of the first and second prizes reassured him.  He drew a breath of satisfaction, saying gratefully; “Ah, what luck!  God be praised!  I’ll never do that again!”

Then, remembering with only an idle curiosity the one hundred and forty-three mediocre prizes on the list, he returned to the perusal.  Suddenly the print swam before his eyes, and the great esplanade seemed to rise.  Number 77,707 had won the fourth prize of one hundred thousand francs; number 200,013, a prize of ten thousand francs.

III

The emotion which overwhelmed Napoleon at Waterloo as he beheld his triumphant squadrons go down into the sunken road was not a whit more complete than the despair of the Comte de Bonzag when he realized that the one hundred and ten thousand francs which the laws of probability had finally produced was now the property of Francine, the cook.

One hundred and ten thousand francs!  It was colossal!  Five generations of Bonzags had never touched as much as that.  One hundred and ten thousand francs meant the rehabilitation of the ancient name, the restoration of the Chateau de Keragouil, half the year at Paris, in the Cercle Royale, in the regions of art, and among the great minds that were still young in the Quartier—­and all that was in the possession of a plump Gascony peasant, whose ideas of comfort and pleasure were satisfied by one hundred and twenty francs a year.