To relieve his guilt, he reminded himself of all the cruelty that nature itself caused. Nature was capable of burying all the goats in the Himalayas in a single night, of asphyxiating thousands of sheep with flurries of snow, of burning all of life in the raging savannah fires, decimating fish in sudden floods, burying horses, deer and calves in molten lava … Nature was murderous and the animals he killed with his hands to feed his lions and tigers were part of the food chain.

Although they lacked the solemnity of Inca sacrifices or the nobility of sacred offerings, his murders were no less ritualistic. Once the circus was no more, the German took care not to overfeed his animals, but old Théo weighed more than two hundredweight, and the others were all adult now so that meant at least fifty kilos of fresh flesh to find every day. He could not provide this with fish from the river or game, and certainly not from his handful of sheep and goats. He had to get his hands on much more fleshy beasts. But if the worst came to the worst and there was nothing in his traps, he would fall back on one of the sheep or goats. He simply took the goat or sheep round to the other side of the house so that it could not be seen from the cages. Of course the lions could smell their dinner, and they could hear the bleating of the poor little animal, which increased their excitement. For ten seconds the peace of the causse was electrified by the death screams of the little animal, then calm was restored. To a lion, the dying of a ewe was pitiful, nothing like the bellows of a buffalo or baby elephant as it fell under its claws, and far removed from the feverish struggle of prey defending itself from death, or the dancing surrender of the antelope, or the earthy running of the warthog before submitting to the lion’s teeth.

Each time the lion tamer killed for his lions and tigers he thought back to the spectators he used to have, the parents telling their children that wild cats were lovely, as if they were cuddly toys, when actually you could read in the animals’ eyes how ardently they would love to devour everyone. To wipe the smiles off the faces of the rosy-cheeked children, Wolfgang would tell them how, in the wild, male lions ate baby lion cubs, killing them so that they could impregnate the new lioness with their own semen. That was why back then old Théo had been kept separate from the others. Otherwise he would have broken the necks of the young lions that had not been born to him and that were now big enough to defend themselves.