I sincerely pity those persons who are not amused by this comical bear. I, who thoroughly appreciate the delicacy of its performance, can assert that I have never passed a menagerie without entering the office. This is why I am now on such good terms with all the lion-tamers—Bidel, Pezon, Nouma-Hava, and Co. It is already two or three years since I made the acquaintance of Pezon. It was at the wedding of one of his daughters with a young man whose name I cannot recollect, but who had already received his [p139] baptism of blood in the cages. The marriage-dinner was held at Saint Mandé, in the Salon des Familles. All the tamers in the kingdom, male and female, had been invited to this festival. They had not felt it a duty—and I secretly regretted the fact—to wear either their trunk-hose or their riding-boots, but were all in evening dress and lavender kid gloves. We sat down, thirty to dinner, including myself. On my right was a very dark man with a moustache like that of Victor Emmanuel; he has since been eaten in a fair in the south of France. I can affirm that this lion-tamer, as well as his comrades, had an excellent appetite, and I should not have cared to find myself between his teeth. [p140] Neither leg of bear nor _chaud-froid_ of lion was served at the wedding feast, but the wine flowed abundantly, and, at dessert, all tongues were liberated. I had, therefore, an excellent opportunity of proving that these powerful men are in domestic life the most amiable of mankind. I never received so many fraternal embraces in my life as at this wedding, where the guests followed the example of Homer’s heroes and heroines, whose last representatives they certainly are. Judge for yourself: Besides a bag of gold crowns that glittered brilliantly in the sunshine, the youthful bride entered the new menagerie—I beg pardon, the new home—with a dowry of four lions. A friend of the family had offered her a small panther from Java as a wedding present. Her godfather had given her two rattlesnakes, and the bridegroom’s brother had added to these gifts an adult rabbit without any hair, a curiosity never met with before. . . . You, who seek for some means of securing eternal youth in your limbs, should devote a little time to lion-taming, the foam of their rage must be the real fountain of eternal youth. Look at Jean-Baptiste Pezon: he is more than sixty-three years old, and yet one would say that roots, knotty oak roots, started from his boots and fastened him to the ground, enabling him to stand so firmly on his sturdy hips. And not one single grey hair is to be found in the curious black tresses which fall to his shoulders, worn in the same fashion as that of his contemporary Cladel, whom Jean-Baptiste somewhat resembles. Yet the mask of the lion-tamer is cast in quite [p141] a different mould from that of the literary man. At most Cladel has the appearance of a shepherd; whilst Pezon looks like a wolf-driver. [Illustration]