French couple find coins worth €100,000 in basement

Friday's European lottery EuroMillions promises a first prize of €185 million to anyone lucky enough to have the winning numbers.

Portrait of Louis XIII by Philippe de Champaigne (1602-74) - from Wikipedia

But one young couple from the city of Millau in the southern département of Aveyron have already hit their own personal jackpot - albeit much smaller.

Around two weeks ago, according to the local commercial station, radio Totem, the couple were clearing out part of the basement of their house in the centre of the city when they came across a jar.

It looked innocent enough, buried 50 centimetres beneath the surface of the basement floor and covered with a tile.

But inside the jar were quite literally, as the regional newspaper Midi Libre describes, "34 pieces of gold"

The couple didn't know it at the time but their find was worth an estimated €100,000 and included coins dating from 1595 until the French Revolution.

They took them along to Marc Aigouy, a local numismatist (the fancy word for a coin collector) who gave his expert opinion and estimated their worth to be €1,000 for the least valuable to €6,500 for a coin dating to 1640 during the reign of Louis XIII.

He excitedly told Agence France Presse how amazing the discovery had been.

"Most of the pieces were already pretty rare at the time they must have been buried," he said.

"I offered to buy the coins myself or to help the couple offer them up for auction, because we can easily expect them to fetch perhaps more than €100,000 especially if American or Japanese collectors are interested in them," he added.

"I'm waiting for the couple to get back to me to tell me what they want to do."

According to Aigouy the couple, who wish to remain anonymous, will pocket the whole auction price as the coins were found on their property.

If they had been found on public land then they would have had to share the value 50:50 with the state.

Time to start digging around in the cellar - or failing that perhaps choosing a few numbers for Friday's EuroMillions draw.

Jackpot win for a 50-centimes bet should bring a smile to the face - shouldn't it?

It's the kind of story you read from time to time in the press, see on the telly or hear on the radio: a dead cert to make you feel good and perhaps start wondering what you would do if you won a pile of money.

Image from Wikipedia - author: Jeff Kubina from the milky way galaxy

"A woman places 50 centimes and wins €238,830 at a casino in Toulouse," runs the headline on the site of the regional French daily La Dépêche du Midi.

Surely the stuff that dreams are made of.

But take a scroll down the page and you'll see that not everybody is of the same opinion.

Because among the "congratulations" are some comments that are - to put it politely - simply mean-spirited.

There are those that accuse the paper of "running an infomercial-type story" or others expressing disgust at the amount of money the casino must have "raked in" before someone hit the jackpot.

Wouldn't you expect readers to be happy for the Maryse, the fiftysomething named in the piece who's also seen smiling in an accompanying photo receiving a "symbolic cheque" for the amount?

After all, as the hospital worker tells the paper, she only plays the slot machines once a month and never risks a great deal of money as proven by her having only bought €10-worth of 50-centimes tokens.

And her win should bring an even bigger smile to the face of those reading as she was obviously more than overjoyed when she thought she had won the smaller amount of €25,000.

That was the figure the machine had registered when Maryse hit the jackpot.

"I was already happy but when the director of the slot machines told me exactly how much I had won, I cried like a child," she told the paper.

"I thought such large sums of money were only reserved for 'serious' players."

But no, some of La Dépêche readers aren't at all happy for her, the paper or the casino it seems.

This is the age of the Net of course, in which the habit of making perhaps snide and resentful comments has become easy and almost commonplace - especially when they can be left anonymously.

Maybe they have a point when they write that the casino is getting some free publicity in a story that tells us, "The win is the biggest since it opened its doors four years ago."

And maybe they're right that by publishing the first name, a photo and giving the job of the winner, the paper has, "Provided enough information to allow other 'less fortunate souls' to come begging at her door or begin bombarding her with telephone calls."

But heck. Where does all this cynicism and apparent churlishness come from? And why do they feel the need to express their thoughts?

Why can't they just be happy for her?

Oh well you can't win them all.

But at least Maryse did.

French lottery winner shares 10 million euros jackpot with friends

The New Year got off to a rather special start for two couples in their 60s from just outside the southern French city of Arles as they picked up €10 million between them in the lottery.

image - screenshot from TF1 report

Except the win wasn't quite as straightforward as is it might initially appear.

Because in fact only one man held the winning ticket, but he decided to share the jackpot with his wife and the other couple because he was - well to put in quite simply - a man of principle.

As the regional daily, La Provence explained when it first reported the story, the two couples, who had known each other for more than two decades, had been regularly playing the lottery for the past three years.

They tried their luck at Christmas, says the paper, choosing the numbers together and handing over the €10 at the local tobacconists.

The draw was made and they won - absolutely nothing.

A week later though Jean-Pierre who, as the French media has reported, prefers to stay out of the limelight, entered the lottery again, only this time without telling either his wife or his friends.

He chose exactly the same numbers as the previous week, paid the €10 and...yes you've guessed it...the numbers came up.

And he was €10 million the richer.

Now this is the point where most of us would probably in theory wish to be magnanimous.

But as the recent example of Jeanette French in the United States proved that isn't always the case.

She was the 72-year-old woman from Florida who had been a member of a syndicate playing the State Lottery for the past eight years.

When the syndicate scooped the $16m jackpot the other seven members refused to split the winnings with French, because as ABC News Radio reported, she hadn't put her dollar in the collective pot.

The case soon became one for the lawyers.

Not so with Jean-Pierre though.

He immediately told his wife Eve - all right it would have been difficult to have kept it from her probably - and the other couple, Jean-Paul and Sophie.

Not only that, he has also split the winnings four ways and never considered keeping the money for himself.

"It's normal that we should share the money as we've known each other for 22 years," he told France Info radio.

"I went to see them and asked them to give me the usual €5 they contributed every week, and when they did, I told them we had all won €10 million."

Kebab-selling couple scoop casino jackpot

For one French couple 13 wasn't such an unlucky number as they celebrated their wedding anniversary by scooping a €5.5 million jackpot at a casino.

But rather than let the win change their lives the pair fully intend to keep their jobs selling kebabs and chips.

On Monday afternoon Elhadi and Mahjouba decided that they would try their luck at a casino in the spa town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre in southwestern France.

The couple, both 38 years old, run a bar selling kebabs and chips and were in the town taking a break from the children and celebrating their Lily of the Valley (here in France) anniversary - marking 13 years of marriage.

As the wife said, when interviewed on the nationwide radio network RTL, they had gone along to the casino to have a drink and had "splashed out" €20 on playing a slot machine.

Luck clearly seemed to be on their side from the beginning as they had soon totted up €120 in winnings - all of it in small coins.

"We exchanged the coins for notes," she said.

"Except for the initial €20 which we traded in for 50-centime coins so that we could play another machine."

And that was when Lady Luck really struck because, even though at first they apparently thought the machine had jammed and wasn't working properly, it turned out that they had hit the jackpot and were €5.5 million richer.

Far from frittering away the money though, the couple fully intend not to let it change their lives in any way. So much so that they insist they'll keep their kebab and chip shop running.

"For us, we see the win as simply an improvement in our everyday lives, and it was just chance," said Mahjouba.

"We're not at all gamblers and it was pure luck," agreed her husband.

"We'll put some money aside for our children in case they want to study later," he added.

"Otherwise we're not really sure what we'll do, but we're certainly not going to squander it."

The winner wants it all

Just imagine for a moment that you're in a casino playing on one of those slot machines.

Next to you is a friend, also happily gambling away, and although you've been pumping money into that little devil for quite a while now, you've not actually won anything of any consequence.

So you turn round and ask your friend to hit the lever to set the thing in motion and then press the appropriate button to stop its rotation.

All the time of course it's your money that has been playing and it's in effect "your" machine.

Your friend obliges and.....KERCHING - you hit the jackpot to the tune of €2.175 million!

That's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago to Marie-Hélène when she won at a casino in Palavas-les-Flots not far from the city of Montpellier in the south of France.

And her friend, Francis was with her the next day when the bubbly was flowing and the casino handed over a cheque for the full amount.

The local press was even there to record the event, with the smiling winner proclaiming, "He's my lucky charm, my four-leafed clover."

End of story perhaps. Except of course it isn't.

It has now been picked up by the national media because Francis would like something more than simply to be remembered as Marie-Hélène's "porte-bonheur".

He also wants a slice of the winnings - half of it reportedly - and of course he has found himself a lawyer.

"My client was playing on the machine next to the one which hit the jackpot," Luc Abratkiewicz told the national daily, Le Parisien.

"She asked him to 'play' for her and he set the machine in motion and pressed the button," he added.

"To win, a player needed to perform three separate actions* and my client carried out two of those."

As far as the casino is concerned there's only one winner.

"It's clear Marie-Hélène is the winner," said Jean-Marc Masquelier, the director of the casino.

"On the day that the jackpot was won, nobody said anything other than that - including her friend who even participated at the celebrations to hand over the cheque."

So far Marie-Hélène has refused to comment, and she certainly hasn't handed over any of the prize money.

Instead the case has been turned over to investigators from the brigade des jeux who are looking at video footage of what actually happened before, during and after the slot machine went KERCHING.

And the moral of this tale?




*the other one of course being to have provided to the money in the first place.