Then, there was that veiled suggestion from the Emperor that he knew something about Fifi’s family which might change her whole destiny; and on the whole, Cartouche had good reason to go about looking like a sick bull, which was his way of showing a passionate solicitude for the being dearest to him on earth. And meanwhile, Julie Campionet went hot foot after the manager, and Fifi wondered why Cartouche was so gentle with her and so indulgent with Toto.
The lottery drawing was to be held on the tenth of January, in a large public hall of the arrondissement, the mayor presiding. The drawing was to begin at noon, and last until all the tickets were drawn. As the day drew near, Cartouche’s fever of excitement increased, and when the morning of the tenth dawned he was as nervous as a cat. He knocked at Fifi’s door early, and told her to be ready to go with him at twelve o’clock to the lottery drawing. Fifi responded sleepily, but when the hour came she was ready to accompany him.
It was a lovely, bright morning, and Fifi’s looks were in harmony with the morning. The red cloak was very becoming to her, and the black feathers, for which her first thirty francs had gone, nodded over the most sparkling, piquant face in Paris. Toto, of course, was along, led by a long blue ribbon in his mistress’ hand; and so they set off.
Fifi had not the slightest thought of drawing a prize.
“As if 1313 would draw anything!” she sniffed. “If you had given me that franc, Cartouche, which the ticket cost, I could have bought a pair of gloves, or a fan, or a bushel of onions—” Fifi went on to enumerate what she could have bought with Cartouche’s franc, until its purchasing power grew to be something like her whole weekly salary. But in any event, she liked the expedition she was on and Toto liked it; so, on the whole, Fifi concluded she could at least get fifty centimes’ worth of pleasure out of the lottery ticket.
She looked so pretty as she tripped along that Cartouche mentally resolved, if she drew a five-hundred-franc prize, she might aspire to a notary, such as her father had been; and engrossed with the thought of Fifi’s possible rise in the world, he was so grumpy, Fifi declared she almost hated him.
They were among the first to arrive, and secured good seats near the tribune. There sat the officers of the lottery, the mayor with his tricolored sash, and several representatives of the government, together with a little fairy of a child, all in white, who was to draw the numbers from the wheel, which was already in place.
The crowd assembled in the hall was an orderly and well-dressed one, but Fifi and Cartouche, who were used to crowds, felt in a subtile way that it was quite different from the ordinary crowd. Most of the people were, like Cartouche, in a state of acute tension. They were strangely still and silent, but also, strangely ready to laugh, to cry, to shout—to do anything which would take the edge off the crisis.
When the drawing began, and one or two small prizes of twenty and fifty francs were drawn, the winners were vociferously cheered. There was a feeling that the grand prize of a hundred thousand francs would not be drawn until late in the afternoon, and the people were letting off their excitement over the little prizes, waiting for the thunder-bolt to fall. But scarcely half an hour after the drawing began, there was a sudden, deep pause—time itself seemed to stop for a moment—and then the auctioneer, who was calling out the prizes, roared out:
“Number 1313 draws the grand prize of one hundred thousand francs!”