Each battle, each new day of combat, obliterated couples; every day there were more black dresses, thousands of them. From every point of view, love was being lost. Joséphine was aware of the perils of being a woman living on her own. If only because, in the space of a few months, she saw what she had become in the eyes of others: an old maid … ‘Old maid’; the term seemed to define her, fitting her like a made-to-measure garment. For the rest of her days, that was all she would be, an old maid, unless she broke with convention and denied love the right to desert her.

As well as being an old maid she was also a war widow, a term dreaded throughout the countryside, with its attendant dignity and grief. Joséphine knew she was condemned to loneliness and despair, but she still could not face going back to live with her parents in Bergerac.

In the atmosphere of perpetual tragedy, in a world where everyone was frightened, some nights were worse than others. Even the optimistic lost hope and every time there was news from the front it was more catastrophic than the time before. The lions’ roars were like an echo of the bad news. For a month they had been howling with no let-up; it was becoming a background noise, like the war itself, the mood music to the great drama. No one knew why the lions now roared from morning until night; maybe the lion tamer was no longer feeding them. The dogs no longer dared bark in reply, crushed by the sheer volume of the noise. The mayor wanted to know why they were behaving this way, so he went up to see the Hun to find out the real reason. He knew it was something to do with the summer pasture.

Ever since the lions and tigers had seen the procession of sheep, since they had discovered that the sheep were grazing on the plateaux and not on the lower pasture where they had been the previous summer, they sniffed the scent of new flesh all day long. The wind wafted the odour of sheep and cows towards them and stirred up their instincts. Down in the village, people were starting to fear that the noise would attract the gendarmes, or that one day one of the lions would escape, make for the village and eat them all.

Couderc reminded them of the law of nature that decreed that males howled to mark their territory and scare their prey. ‘Every male is driven by that instinct, to be master of his area and push rivals away. In the savannah these howls can be heard miles away, whereas, here, rest assured that the roars are muffled by the hills and the woods.’