The sun lazily climbed past its highest point, looking down on the beasts running back and forth beneath the hills on the south side of Sasha Zoo, casually scattering great handfuls of radiance.
"Oh, God!" Madame Nacelli looked at the brown bear behind the double fence, staring at her and licking its mouth, and her face went deathly pale as she backed away again and again. "No, no, we have to leave! It's too dangerous!"
Just now, the zoo staff had told the Nacelli family that the lions, brown bears, and the like here were not kept in cages at all.
They needed to sit in a tour car and pass right through the middle of these wildly roaming predators' habitat.
Madame Nacelli had already begun suspecting that the zoo was using this method to save on feed.
The youngest son of the Nacelli family, however, was excitedly making faces at the big bear.
A moment later, Nacelli returned from the entrance to the Predator Zone, put an arm around his wife's shoulders, and comforted her. "My dear, I went and looked. That tour car is extremely sturdy, and it doesn't leave the slightest gap for those beasts.
"I swear, it's absolutely safe to sit inside."
Seeing that his wife was still shaking her head nonstop, he had no choice but to bring out his trump card and whisper in her ear, "We spent 4 francs and 5 sous on the tickets. If you don't go in to see it, that's the same as wasting 1 franc and 5 sous."
The woman's legs immediately stopped trembling.
1 franc and 5 sous was enough for the whole family to eat two meals of beef, or to buy Anna a new dress.
No, absolutely no wasting that much money!
She immediately lifted