My Private Menagerie Part 2

In Myrza, nature imitates the artificial so perfectly that the little creature looks as if she had stepped out of a toy-shop. When her coat is nicely curled, and she has got on her blue ribbon bow and her silver bell, she is the image of a toy dog, and when she barks it is impossible not to wonder whether there is a bellows under her paws.

She spends three-fourths of her time in sleep, and her life would not be much changed were she stuffed, nor does she seem particularly clever in the ordinary intercourse of life. Yet she one day exhibited an amount of intelligence absolutely unparalleled in my experience. Bonnegrace, the painter of the portraits of Tchoumakoff and E. H., which attracted so much attention at the exhibitions, had brought to me, in order to get my opinion upon it, one of his portraits painted in the manner of Pagnest, remarkable for truthfulness of colour and vigour of modelling. Although I have lived on terms of closest intimacy with animals and could tell a hundred traits of the ingenuity, reasoning, and philosophical powers of cats, dogs, and birds, I am bound to confess that animals wholly lack any feeling for art. Never have I seen a single one notice a picture, and the story of the birds that picked at the grapes in the painting by Zeuxis, strikes me as a piece of invention. It is precisely the feeling for ornament and art that distinguishes man from brutes. Dogs never look at pictures and never put on earrings. Well, Myrza, at the sight of the portrait placed against the wall by Bonnegrace, sprang from the stool on which she was lying curled up, dashed at the canvas and barked furiously at it, trying to bite the stranger who had made his way into the room.

Great was her surprise when she found herself compelled to recognise that she had a plane surface before her, that her teeth could not lay hold of it, and that it was no more than a vain presentment. She smelled the picture, tried to wedge in behind the frame, looked at us both with a glance of questioning and wonder, and returned to her place, where she disdainfully went to sleep again, refusing to have anything more to do with the painted individual. Myrza's features will not be lost to posterity, for there is a fine portrait of her by the Hungarian artist, Victor Madarasz.

Let me close with the story of Dash. One day a dealer in broken bottles and gla.s.s stopped at my door in quest of such wares. He had in his cart a puppy, three or four months old, which he had been commissioned to drown, whereat the worthy fellow grieved much, for the dog kept looking at him with a tender and beseeching look as if he knew well what was going to happen. The reason of the severe sentence pa.s.sed on the puppy was that he had broken his fore paw. My heart was filled with pity for him, and I took charge of the condemned creature; called in a vet, and had Dash's paw set in splints and bandaged. It was impossible, however, to stop him gnawing at the dressings; the paw could not be cured, and the bones not having knitted, it hung limp like the sleeve of a man who has lost an arm. His infirmity, however, did not prevent his being jolly, lively, and full of fun, and he managed to race along quite fast on his three legs.

He was an out and out street dog, a rascally little cur that Buffon himself would have been puzzled to cla.s.sify. He was ugly, but his features were uncommonly mobile and sparkled with cleverness. He seemed to understand what was told him, and his expression would change according as the words addressed to him, in the same tone of voice, were flattering or injurious. He rolled his eyes, turned up his lips, indulged in the wildest of nervous twitchings, or else grinned and showed his white teeth, obtaining in this way most comical effects of which he was perfectly conscious. He would often try to talk; laying his paw on my knee, he would fix on me that earnest gaze of his and begin a series of murmurs, sighs, and grunts, so varied in intonation that it was hard not to recognise them as language. Sometimes in the course of a conversation of this sort, Dash would break out into a bark or a yelp, and then I would look sternly at him and say: "That is barking, not speaking. Is it possible that you are an animal?" Dash, feeling humiliated at the suggestion, would go on with his vocalisation, giving it the most pathetic expression. We used to say then that Dash was telling his tale of woe.

He was pa.s.sionately fond of sugar, and at dessert, when coffee was brought in, he would invariably beg each guest for a piece with such insistence that he was always successful. He had ended by transforming this merely benevolent gift into a regular tax which he collected with unfailing regularity. He was but a little mongrel, yet with the frame of a Thersites he had the soul of an Achilles. Infirm though he was, he would attack, with madly heroic courage, dogs ten times his size and was regularly and terribly thrashed by them. Like Don Quixote, the brave Knight of La Mancha, he set out triumphantly and returned in most evil plight. Alas! he was destined to fall a victim to his own courage. Some months ago he was brought home with a broken back, the work of a Newfoundland, an amiable brute, which the next day played the same trick to a small greyhound.

Dash's death was the first of a series of catastrophes: the mistress of the house where he met with the death-stroke was, a few days later, burned alive in her bed, and the same fate overtook her husband who was trying to save her. This was merely a fatal coincidence and by no means an expiation, for these people were of the kindest and as fond of animals as is a Brahmin, besides being wholly innocent of our poor Dash's tragic fate.

It is true that I have still another dog, called Nero, but he is too recent an inmate of our home to have a story of his own.

(NOTE.--Alas! Nero has been poisoned quite recently, just as if he had been supping with the Borgias, and his epitaph comes in the very first chapter of his life.)

V

MY HORSES

Now let not the reader, on seeing this t.i.tle, hastily accuse me of being a swell. Horses! That is a pretentious word to be written down by a man of letters! _Musa pedestris_, says Horace; that is, the Muse goes on foot, and Parna.s.sus itself has but one horse in its stable, Pegasus.

Besides, he is a winged steed and by no means quiet in harness, if we may credit what Schiller tells us in his ballad. I am not a sportsman, alas! and deeply do I regret it, for I am as fond of horses as if I had five hundred thousand a year, and I am entirely of the opinion of the Arabs concerning pedestrians. The horse is man's natural pedestal, and the one complete being is the centaur, whom mythology so ingeniously invented.

Nevertheless, although I am merely a man of letters, I have owned horses. In the year 1843 or 1844, I found in the pay-dirt of journalism, washed out in the wooden pan of the _feuilleton_, a sufficient quant.i.ty of gold dust to justify the hope that I might feed, besides my cats, dogs, and magpies, a couple of animals of larger size. I first had a couple of Shetland ponies, the size of big dogs, hairy as bears, all mane and tail, and who looked at me in such friendly fas.h.i.+on through their long black hair that I felt more like showing them into the drawing-room than sending them to the stable. They would take sugar out of my pockets like trained horses. But they proved to be decidedly too small; they would have answered as saddle horses for English children eight years of age, or as coach horses for Tom Thumb, but I was already in the enjoyment of that athletic and portly frame for which I am famed, and which has enabled me to bear up, without bending too much under the burden, under forty consecutive years of supplying of copy. The difference between the owner and the animals was unquestionably too striking, even though the little black ponies drew at a very lively gait the light phaeton to which they were harnessed with the daintiest tan harness, that looked as if it had been bought in a toy shop.

Comic ill.u.s.trated papers were not as numerous then as now, but there were quite enough of them to publish caricatures of me and of my horses. It goes without saying that, profiting by the lat.i.tude allowed to caricature, I was represented as of elephantine bulk and appearance, like the G.o.d Ganesa, the Hindoo G.o.d of wisdom, and that my ponies were shown as no larger than poodles, rats, or mice. It is also true that I could readily enough have carried my pair one under each arm, and taken the carriage on my back. I did for a moment think of having a pony four-in-hand, but such a Liliputian equipage would have merely attracted greater attention. So to my great regret, for I had already become fond of them, I replaced my Shetlands with two dapple-gray cobs of larger size, with powerful necks, broad chests, stout and well set up, which were not Mecklenburghers, no doubt, but plainly more capable of dragging me along. They were both mares, the one called Jane, the other Betsy. So far as outward looks went, they were as alike as two peas, and never was there a better matched pair apparently. But Betsy was as lazy as Jane was willing. While the one drew steadily, the other was satisfied with trotting along, saving herself and taking good care to do nothing. These two animals, of the same breed, of the same age, and destined to live in the same stable, had the liveliest antipathy for each other. They could not bear one another, fought in the stable, and bit each other as they reared in harness. It was impossible to reconcile them, which was a pity, for with their hog manes, like those of the horses on the Parthenon frieze, their quivering nostrils, and their eyes dilated with anger, they looked uncommonly handsome as they were driven up or down the Avenue des Champs-elysees. A subst.i.tute had to be found for Betsy, and a small mare, somewhat lighter coloured, for it had been impossible to match her exactly, was brought round. Jane immediately welcomed the new-comer and did the honours of the stable to her most graciously, and ere long they became fast friends. Jane would rest her head on Blanche's neck--she had been so called because her gray coat was rather whitish--and when they were let loose in the yard after being rubbed down, they would play together like a pair of dogs of children. If one was taken out driving, the one left in the stable was plainly wearying for her, and as soon as she heard in the distance the ring of her companion's hoofs on the paving-stones, she set up a joyous neigh, like a trumpet-blast, to which the other did not fail to reply as she approached.

They would come up to be harnessed with astonis.h.i.+ng docility, and took of themselves their proper place by the pole. Like all animals that are loved and well treated, Jane and Blanche soon became most familiar and trusting. They would follow me without bridle or halter like the best-trained dog, and when I stopped they would stick their noses on my shoulder in order to be caressed. Jane was fond of bread, and Blanche of sugar, and both were crazy about melon skin. I could make them do anything in return for these dainties.

If man were not odiously brutal and ferocious, as he too frequently shows himself towards animals, they would cling to him most gladly.

Their dim brain is filled with the thought of that being who thinks, speaks, and does things the meaning of which escapes them; he is a mystery and a wonder to them. They will often look at you with eyes full of questions you cannot answer, for the key to their speech has not yet been found. Yet they have a speech which enables them to exchange, by means of intonations not yet noted by man, ideas that are rudimentary, no doubt, but which are such as may be conceived by creatures within their sphere of action and feeling. Less stupid than we are, animals succeed in understanding a few words of our idiom, but not enough to enable them to converse with us. Besides, as the words they do learn refer solely to what we exact of them, the conversation would be brief.

But that animals speak cannot be doubted by any one who has lived in any degree of intimacy with dogs, cats, horses, or other creatures of that sort.

For instance, Jane was naturally intrepid; she never refused, and nothing frightened her, but after a few months of cohabitation with Blanche her character changed and she manifested at times sudden and inexplicable fear. Her companion, much less brave, must have told her ghost stories at night. Often, when going through the Bois de Boulogne at dusk or after dark, Blanche would stop short or shy, as if a phantom, invisible to me, had risen up before her. She trembled in every limb, breathed hard, and broke out into sweat. If I attempted to urge her ahead with the whip, she backed, and all Jane could do, strong as she was, was insufficient to induce her to go on. One of us would have to get down, cover her eyes with the hand and lead her until the vision had vanished. Little by little Jane became subject to the same terror, the reason of which, no doubt, Blanche told her once they were back in their stable. I may as well confess that for my part, when I would be driving down a dark road on which the moonlight produced alternations of light and shadow, and Blanche suddenly became rooted to the spot as though a spectre had sprung at her head, and refused to move,--she who was usually so docile that Queen Mab's whip, made of a cricket's bone with a spider's thread for a thong, was enough to start her into a gallop,--I could not repress a slight shudder or refrain from peering into the darkness rather anxiously, while at times the harmless trunks of ash or birch trees would appear to me as spectral-looking as one of Goya's "Caprices."

I took great delight in driving these dear animals myself, and we soon became very intimate. It was merely as a matter of form that I held the reins, for the least click of the tongue was enough to direct them, to turn them to the right or the left, to make them go faster, or to stop them. They quickly learned all my habits and started of themselves for the office, the printer's, the publishers', the Bois de Boulogne, and the houses where I went to dinner on certain days of the week, and this so accurately that they would have ended by compromising me, for they would have revealed the places to which I paid the most mysterious visits. If I happened to forget the time in the course of an interesting or tender conversation they would remind me it was getting late by neighing or pawing in front of the balcony.

Although I greatly enjoyed traversing the city in the phaeton drawn by my two friends, I could not help at times thinking the north wind sharp and the rain cold when the months came along which the Republican calendar named so appropriately the months of mist, of frost, of rain, of wind, of snow (brumaire, frimaire, pluviose, ventose, nivose), so I purchased a small blue coupe, lined with white reps, which was likened to the equipage of the famous dwarf of the day, a piece of impertinence I did not mind. A brown coupe, lined with garnet, followed the blue one, and was itself replaced by a dark-green coupe lined with dark blue, for I actually did sport a coach--I, poor newspaper writer holding no Government stock--for five or six years. And my ponies were none the less fat and in good condition though they were fed on literature, had substantives for oats, adjectives for hay, and adverbs for straw. But alas! there came, no one knows very well why, the Revolution in February; a great many paving-stones were picked up for patriotic purposes, and Paris became rather unfit for carriage travel. I could of course have escaladed the barricades with my agile steeds and my light equipage, but it was only at the cook-shop that I could get credit, and I could not possibly feed my horses on roast chicken. The horizon was dark with heavy clouds, through which flashed red gleams. Money had taken fright and gone into hiding; the _Presse_, on the staff of which I was, had suspended publication, and I was glad enough to find a person willing to buy my horses, harness, and carriages for a fourth of their value. It was a bitter grief to me, and I would not venture to say that no tears ran down my cheeks on to the manes of Jane and Blanche when they were led away. Sometimes their new owner would drive past the house; I always knew their quick, sharp trot at a distance, and always the sudden way they would stop under my windows proved that they had not forgotten the place where they had been so tenderly loved and so well cared for, and a sigh would break responsive from me as I said to myself: "Poor Jane, poor Blanche! I wonder if they are happy."

And the loss of them is the one and only thing I felt sore over when I lost my slender fortune.