Le Roux takes the reader behind the canvas of the French fairground: how the travelling showmen organise, the fair itself, the sideshows and theatre booths, animal trainers and lion-tamers, acrobats, clowns and strongmen. Anecdotes include the tamer Bidel, mauled by a lion at the Neuilly fair in 1886.
A vivid social portrait of the nineteenth-century saltimbanques, a world that painters from Seurat to Picasso loved. Download the free EPUB.