The next day the mayor called an assembly so that they could report back. There was nowhere indoors big enough to hold them all, not even the mairie, and the women refused to go into the church, because Christ on the cross stared down at them; wherever they stood, he was always looking at them, as if he could turn his head. So they gathered under the plane trees in the square. Everyone was eager to speak, but no one wanted to incriminate Le Simple. But if he had nothing to do with the thefts then who had? Fernand and Couderc let them all have their say, knowing that everyone already assumed who was to blame.

‘If it was the German stealing the ewes, Le Simple would have seen him,’ said the mayor. The grave look on the schoolmaster’s face signalled his agreement.

‘Le Simple has seen him!’ retorted Léone, from La Brasse farm. ‘But he doesn’t dare say anything because he’s frightened. It’s understandable that he’s frightened of a man with lions …’

‘I’m sure it’s his lions eating them. I hear them at night.’

‘But what about the dogs?’ asked the mayor.

‘Dogs against a lion tamer! They probably don’t even dare bark; they’re probably as gentle as kittens with him!’

‘Maybe it’s the lions themselves that go; they escape from their cages at night and make for the flock …’

Someone else piped up that they were sure that one night, between nightmares, they had heard barking and even the squealing of a sheep being eaten alive.

‘From down here? I’d be surprised …’

‘If the wind’s blowing this way you can hear …’

‘I’m telling you, he lets his wild cats out at night. You can see shadows up there; you can see him driving them to the flock with his big whip, like he does in the cage. It’s obvious; he puts his lions before our sheep; he couldn’t care less about our sheep.’

‘We have to give him up to the gendarmes; we have to turn the Hun in, before he eats us all.’

‘Yes, turn him in!’

‘Wait!’

Joséphine did not normally speak up, and certainly never gave her opinion. But, this time, she got up on the stone bench beneath the trees, because her voice was quiet. Without preamble she admitted that she had already been up there and seen the famous cages; she was the only one who had seen them up close, and it was quite obvious the wild cats never got out of them, except to go from their individual enclosures to the big display cage, a cage that was wide and tall, wider than a circus tent, where the lion tamer made them go in the afternoon to practise their circus tricks. The lions were never free to wander around and go out at night as people were saying.