OUR FRIEND THE DOG

I

I have lost, within these last few days, a little bull-dog.  He had just completed the sixth month of his brief existence.  He had no history.  His intelligent eyes opened to look out upon the world, to love mankind, then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.

The friend who presented me with him had given him, perhaps by antiphrasis, the startling name of Pelleas.  Why rechristen him?  For how can a poor dog, loving, devoted, faithful, disgrace the name of a man or an imaginary hero?

Pelleas had a great bulging, powerful forehead, like that of Socrates or Verlaine; and, under a little black nose, blunt as a churlish assent, a pair of large hanging and symmetrical chops, which made his head a sort of massive, obstinate, pensive and three-cornered menace.  He was beautiful after the manner of a beautiful, natural monster that has complied strictly with the laws of its species.  And what a smile of attentive obligingness, of incorruptible innocence, of affectionate submission, of boundless gratitude and total self-abandonment lit up, at the least caress, that adorable mask of ugliness!  Whence exactly did that smile emanate?  From the ingenuous and melting eyes?  From the ears pricked up to catch the words of man?  From the forehead that unwrinkled to appreciate and love, or from the stump of a tail that wriggled at the other end to testify to the intimate and impassioned joy that filled his small being, happy once more to encounter the hand or the glance of the god to whom he surrendered himself?

[Illustration]

Pelleas was born in Paris, and I had taken him to the country.  His bonny fat paws, shapeless and not yet stiffened, carried slackly through the unexplored pathways of his new existence his huge and serious head, flat-nosed and, as it were, rendered heavy with thought.

For this thankless and rather sad head, like that of an overworked child, was beginning the overwhelming work that oppresses every brain at the start of life.  He had, in less than five or six weeks, to get into his mind, taking shape within it, an image and a satisfactory conception of the universe.  Man, aided by all the knowledge of his own elders and his brothers, takes thirty or forty years to outline that conception, but the humble dog has to unravel it for himself in a few days:  and yet, in the eyes of a god, who should know all things, would it not have the same weight and the same value as our own?