A lioness in the French countryside.

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If you ask me where is Laval, I will tell you that it is somewhere in North-Western France, that I have never been there, do not know how to go there, and never heard of anybody going there. The only people that might be interested by a visit are probably ethnologists studying witchcraft, because there are still some witches in this area, less famous than the witches of Berry, but powerful if I remember what I heard on a cultural radio channel. Looking on Wikipedia for famous people born in Laval, I find two, Henri Rousseau, nicknamed «Le Douanier» (the custom officer), a naive painter ridiculed during all his life and recognized as a self-taught genius after his death, and Alfred Jarry, one of the best French humorists of the beginning of the 20th C, although I am not sure that I should count Jarry among famous people from Laval, because his parents moved when he was young and he never studied there... It seems difficult to believe, but there is something else famous in this area since a few days. Described first by a truck driver like «a lion without a mane», the animal has been reported by 4 other people to the police, in an area of 30 km around Laval. The préfet, who is a fresh new préfet named «Veau», Calf (I don’t know what this calf, who was at the head of the anti-terrorist police not long ago, did wrong to be sent to Mayotte and then to Laval, but these places are not enviable for a préfet), sent 15 gendarmes and police officers to find this bald lion, but they found nothing. He then sent his cabinet director to tell to the media that the news had to be taken carefully, as nobody took a picture or a video, and they did not found any carcass of sheep or other calf in the nature. In a zoo a lion eats 2/3 kg of meat/day, and a lion alone would more probably attack a hen or a rabbit than a cow, except if it wanted to annoy the préfet. Some journalists are already speaking of a mass hallucination, but a lion is not a unicorn, a dragon, or another mythic animal that might have survived in a remote countryside like this one, and there has been a precedent about 20 years ago, when a puma was seen by several people inside a 6000 acres state forest in Chizé, at about 100 km South of Laval. At this time, the préfet sent 100 gendarmes, they found nothing, but as people were still seeing the beast, pedestrian walks in these woods have been forbidden during several years. Maybe Laval will become soon a famous destination for a photographic safari. Photo is mine.