Meanwhile the lions in the fourth cage roared, and the sad bear, made happy with his morning ration of mush and milk, buried his nose in the pail, muzzle and all, and forgave his mistress for changing her _métier_.
Next to the panthers’ cage the week’s wash hung drying in the sun. Some of it was coquettish.
Ah! my friend, if you complain of the responsibility of having a family on your hands, remember it is not a patch to having a menagerie on your hands, even without the cumbersome elephant.
“To show” inside the fortifications costs dearly—six hundred francs rental for a place in any of the _fêtes foraines_. The law prohibits single exhibitions which are not a part of the regular _fêtes foraines_, and these take place only at stated intervals in the different quarters of the city. They are the Foire aux Pain-d’Epices, the Fête de Neuilly, the Fête des Invalides, the one surrounding the bronze lion of Belfort, and other smaller ones along the Boulevards Vaugirard, Pasteur, Garibaldi, Grenelle, and Rochechouart, and the Fête of La Chapelle. The still smaller fêtes outside of Paris do not pay well. Meanwhile the animals have to be fed, pay or no pay.
“There are those who have said hard things of me even in the old days,” said La Goulue, “but they lied. I am a good girl with a good heart (_je suis une bonne fille_),” she cried, looking me straight in the eye. “It was the life that was bad, not I, monsieur.”
There is great risk to life and limb in training and showing these animals; the lion Bob a while ago closed his jaws upon “M. La Goulue,” crunching half through the shoulder. Yet it is the injury to others that the Goulues fear the most.
One of the panthers tore the arm from a child during a performance in Rouen. It was an expensive accident for La Goulue.
At the time I saw this small menagerie wintering in a corner of the earth, La Goulue was waiting for an engagement in a coming _fête foraine_. As yet the letter had not arrived, and I believe the bear knew it.
“M. La Goulue” did not smile, and spoke but rarely. You felt his absolute domination and fearlessness. He took the hyena by the throat, then stroked its ears kindly. When he rolled Alice, the lioness, over on her back, he did so with gentleness and firmness; when she rebelled and struck at him viciously, he cuffed her ears and stood talking to her as to a disobedient child.