Du sang des troupeaux alteres,
Halte la!--Je fais sentinello!

[My proud lions with golden manes
Who thirst for the blood of my flocks,
Stand back!--I am on guard!]

The audience--small tradesmen of the quarter with their wives and
daughters-seemed highly enthusiastic: especially the women.
He represented so perfectly the ideal of the shopkeeper imagination,
that magnificent shepherd of the desert, who addressed lions with such an
air of authority and tended his flocks in full evening dress. And so,
despite their bourgeois bearing, their modest costumes and their
expressionless shop-girl smiles, all those women, made up their little
mouths to be caught by the hook of sentiment, and cast languishing
glances upon the singer. It was truly comical to see that glance at the
platform suddenly change and become contemptuous and fierce as it fell
upon the husband, the poor husband tranquilly drinking a glass of beer
opposite his wife: "You would never be capable of doing sentry duty in
the very teeth of lions, and in a black coat too, and with yellow
gloves!"

And the husband's eye seemed to reply:

"Ah! 'dame', yes, he's quite a dashing buck, that fellow."

Being decidedly indifferent to heroism of that stamp, Risler and
Sigismond were drinking their beer without paying much attention to the
music, when, at the end of the song, amid the applause and cries and
uproar that followed it, Pere Planus uttered an exclamation: