Lydie Dattas relates her encounter with lion tamer Alexandre Bouglione one night after a show at the Cirque d'hiver. “Handing me my ticket back, the bohemian with her jungle eyes predicted, 'You will marry my son!'” The two lovers are like struck by a fireball, and not only on that first day. “When Alexandre seized the ebony neck of his lute, notes shuddered with fear. (...) I would read to him and he would listen until, murder gleaming in his eyes like a heat stroke, he would break up with me in the middle of a sentence. At night he would come back to me like a lazy lion comes back to a carcass. (...) Leaning on his caravan, with its mud-caked wheels, a Sinto mockingly reminded him of the law of his tribe: 'I play the lute, too: I uproot a tree, I use a man's guts as strings—and I play!'”
Dominique Féret, April 2014
Distribution
Read by Anna Mouglalis
Extracts choosen by Dominique Féret
Realisation Blandine Masson
Production
France Culture