“Now this friend has since confessed to me that whilst the lion remained immovable he was conscious of one idea . . . . how can I express it? . . . . In short, it was like a ferocious wish that something unexpected should happen, like a monstrous impatience. . . . . “And, in excuse for my friend, I try to convince myself that he was not alone in feeling an abominable and vague desire; to me it seemed to have imprinted a fugitive expression upon all the blanched faces that rise before me even now: for instance, that of a small, freckled, red-haired woman [p154] clinging to her husband’s arm, who gnawed her lower lip and mercilessly climbed upon my feet—mercilessly, at all events, for my feet. [Illustration] “At last the lion raised himself upon his four paws, and without advancing, gazed at his inert master with extreme distrust of the mass armed with a whip, ‘who was saying nothing worth hearing.’ One second passed in this way, or one century, I could not be sure which. Then Sultan made, towards what he began to consider a possible prey, two small furtive steps . . . . two cat-like steps, prudent and stealthy . . . . and again, two little steps. Then he laid one of his heavy paws upon his tamer’s shoulder, still not maliciously, rather as a caution, as we should place one hand upon a sheet of paper in danger of blowing away. “In thus interpreting the ideas passing ‘through the darkness a lion has for soul,’ to quote a line from Victor Hugo, I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that my impressions harmonize with the picture that Edouard Detaille seized with the eye of a great painter. “But oh, my dear Hugues Le Roux, no pencil of the illustrious artist can depict, all the resources of the pen are powerless to describe, the frightful tumult which, in the hitherto silent theatre, greeted this first act after the gloomy prologue—an infernal din, the noise of falling chairs, of shouts, of screams! . . . . “If I ventured to write an essay on the physiology of modern wild beasts [p155] in the course of the reflections which I should be forced to devote to the accidents of the show, I should not fail to mention these axioms:— [Illustration] “1. A female spectator never faints until there is nothing more to see . . . . “2. The audience in the second places is only waiting for an opportunity to rush into the first seats . . . . “And, in fact, without a moment’s interval, all the barriers were scaled. Round the cage women were eagerly pushing men aside in their efforts to get a better view. And shrieks!—but the shrieks!