As far as I was concerned, the following days at Les Bolois rolled by in indolence. Everyone resumed their petty lives. Monsieur Pastel went back to hunting, Madame Pastel occupied herself with household matters. By the third day, my brother-in-law Louis had gone back to work. Mélanie replaced the cook, who was on the point of giving birth. And I played continually with an apathetic Floriane who, for the moment, in the sullenness of a rainy September, relieved the tedium of her retreat with an increasing affection for her little Zizi.
I brought her diversion, movement and tenderness. She had to worry about my nourishment, and my cleanliness in every regard. For her, I was like a baby. Her attentive case made my egret once again that we had not had children. A child is a pledge of feminine fidelity...
The first night, she confided me to Mélanie. The second night, she let me sleep next to her bed, on a cushion. Further progress on the third night: she allowed me after much insistence on my part and endless scratchings, under the covers at her feet. Thus I resumed my place in the conjugal bed.
For dogs, as for humans, there is nothing like the intimacy of sleeping together to consolidate affection, from the moment that it becomes possible. I observed a tightening of our bond, I might say on a daily basis.
Dogs are naturally brought to love their masters. They are the only creatures in the world that look you in the eyes and say to you: I love you for yourself. You can deprive me of nourishment, beat me unjustly, play a thousand dirty tricks on me, and I will love you even so. You can isolate me, leave me behind a door, and I will sit on my behind and wait. You can die, and I will find your grave, and pine away thereon.
As a man, I adored Floriane, and I had consented to make many sacrifices for her, but without ever attaining the total slavery to which I felt disposed as a dog. I had killed myself for her under the effect of a mental depression that a little philosophy might perhaps have converted into resignation, whereas my new state did not admit reflection. If St. Peter had not taken me as the subject of an experiment unique in his eternal career, I could easily have believed that metempsychosis is a divine law, that the Creator brings creatures, in a new life, close to those they loved most in their preceding life, the supreme favor being, for the most virtuous, returning as members of the canine species.
Floriane, as I said, submitted progressively to my adoration. She eventually confessed to me the same devotion that I had for her. In the morning, when we woke up, I passed from her feet to her arms. With no recall of the carnal impulses that had once united us, I floated in integral purity. She told me things; I replied with tender little growls, licking her with my pink tongue. I had become her confidant. She thought aloud for me.
“Papa,” she said to me, “doesn’t seem to be in a good mood. I don’t know what’s happening in the house…doubtless it’s still to do with my story. Can you imagine, Zizi, that he’s received the Maire, who came to ask him for a subscription for the public drinking-fountain, like a dog in a game of skittles.”
She retracted that immediately: “Like a dog who isn’t Zizi. You, I’d admit to my game of skittles.”
Another time:
“I wonder why Louis left so quickly. Don’t you think, Zizi, that it was to go back to his girl friend? Oh, when love gets hold of us...”
Her beautiful eyes strayed into the past. I thought she was about to arrive at our drama, and yield the exact repercussion of her heart to me. Nothing of the sort; she retreated into silence. I was always reduced to judging her in accordance with the past.
With regard to her relationship with Georges, the mystery similarly continued. Twice in a week, during breakfast, a letter with a Toulon postmark reached her. As she knew that she was being observed by her parents, she opened the letters and read them with a feigned indifference; then she slipped them into her boson.
“What is it?” Monsieur Pastel asked.
“Condolences, Papa.”
“From whom?”
“From one of his friends.”
“Let me have a look.”
“What’s the point?” She did not comply.
Her father grimaced, but did not insist. For my part, as is imaginable, I looked out for the missive, keeping close on Floriane’s heels when she went up to her room to resume her reading. The same disappointment as with regard to the famous telegram, alas. She pushed me away in spite of my efforts to climb on to her knees, until she had finished the prose in question—evidently singular, since it led her to smile several times—after which she tore the letters into a thousand pieces and threw them in the toilet bucket. I gazed stupidly at the pieces, already bleached by the water, while she replied hastily on mauve paper, which she had selected in spite of the fact that white with a black border was required of her. Those few details—the case she took to destroy the correspondence, the colored paper—redeemed my memory, confirming once again her culpability.
Well, whatever people might think, my reaction to these various items of evidence was progressively attenuated. Quite sharp at the beginning, when we arrived at Les Bolois, it was eventually converted into a kind of fatalism. Yes, I could believe, to recall the terminology of the great Saint and a great comedian of similar inflection, Molière, that I was a cuckold, but I found compensation in the marks of another kind of affection that I obtained from Floriane—a anesthesia of which I can give a further proof.
Those mauve letters, in reply to those from Toulon, do you know who gave them to the postman?
It was me. Yes, me. In order not to have to get up from her chair when the mail arrived, Floriane slipped them into my teeth, saying: “Go on, Zizi, make yourself useful.”
And I made myself useful by running briskly to the postman and offering him, while wagging my tail, the evidence for the prosecution.
That was where I had got to, in a week!
Let husbands and unfortunate lovers take inspiration from my example, if only to spare newspaper readers the banality of multiple conjugal murders and the hideousness of the portraits that accompany them.
The rest of the time, we were no longer apart. She took me on frequent walks around the estate. As September was freshening the lush vegetation of the park, she dressed me in a woolen coat knitted by her own hands, on which she had even embroidered a little suggestive amour. She liberated me from the gilded collar that Georges had sent to her on the same day that he promised it. Free, I gamboled madly. I yapped—that’s the right word—at all the animals of nature, the horses, the cows, the goats and the pretty belated autumn butterflies, images of independence, and other dogs, my brothers, chained up in farmyards. Not because I resented being brought down to their level by St. Peter, but because my barking was the most expressive fashion of signaling to the universe my joy at being Floriane’s sole companion.
It frequently happened that we stopped at the bench where, years before, we had stammered our first vows. I recognized the stone where, under the empire of emotion, not daring to raise my eyes, I had stupidly drawn my finger along a crack traced in a tree-trunk. I sniffed that crack, as if to recover therefrom the perfume of defunct amour.
“What are you doing, Zizi, always digging your little snout in there? Has some other dog been there?”
That was all she accorded to that splendid memory! One day, however, she remembered. A deep sigh certified that for me. And we didn’t come back again, after that, to rest in the same place.
I retained for some time the painful impression of the motive she had attributed to my sniffing. I have to come back to it, because, although St. Peter had disguised me as a dog, he had fortunately not given me the deplorable habits that distinguish my brothers and sisters, with regard to their fashion of exchanging greetings—the cynical manner, that adjective being applicable, of going about, without the motive of perpetuating the race, incessantly sniffing the behinds of those of their fellows thy encounter.
Like Maria, Monsieur Pastel remarked on it, one day when shooting six grouse had rendered him joyful.
“Has that animal ever been ill?” he said, sardonically.
“Not that I know of, Papa,” Floriane replied.
“I was wondering, because he mustn’t have a sense of smell.”
Someone who didn’t lack a sense of smell, of course, was my comrade Castor. I’m not talking about his flair for detecting game, which was merely the millennial heredity of the time when his hungry ancestors tracked it for themselves. I’m talking about the special sense of smell of canine propriety. He made abundant use of his nostrils in that fashion. His greeting, when I sent for in Les Bolois, was of that fashion. It is probable, however, that I emanated nothing at all—thank you, St. Peter!—because he did not repeat the exercise.
Apart from that natural aspiration, Castor was a delightful companion. We liked one another, as I said, from the start. Our sympathy quickly mutated into a real amity. We understood one another in all things. People are too oblivious of the fact that animals have intellectual relationships and that they express them in a language of their own, incomprehensible to humans. From that viewpoint, the canine race is particularly well-endowed. A different pitch in barking, a raised paw, a trivial caudal agitation, a glance in one direction or another, and one is understood. At least those exchanges are clear, precise and definite. At least they spare you the floods of rhetoric that sow so many weeds elsewhere, propagating false ideas, the stuffing of skulls, and partisan spirit, such as politics entertains among the bipeds of the superior class.
Castor could say, for example, in the blink of an eye: “That Pastel, my master, is a good fellow, incapable of hurting a flea, except for the fleas he extracts from my fur. Don’t bother him with noisy barking, especially in the morning, when he likes to sleep, and you’ll see that he always has a sugar-lump for you.”
Which was confirmed to the letter; the treat was always there, in his waistcoat pocket, ready to be offered to me when I expressed, by sitting up and begging, that I wanted it. I savored it slowly, unlike my fellows, who swallowed it in one go, the way that Spaniards eat. I should say, in passing, of that honest and chivalrous people, that their voracity always provokes my astonishment. On encountering a fat bourgeois there, alongside excessively thin people, I cannot help anticipating the cause of future social upheavals, unless the prudence of political leaders determines the equalization of bellies. I leave aside the esthetic viewpoint that makes me deplore the reign of fat in women even more. Pretty at sixteen, for the most part, they are already subject to adipose disgrace at twenty; at forty, it is immensity. All that is the result of a disordered appetite.
In her increasing tenderness, Floriane would willingly have put me on the superalimentary diet in honor beyond the Pyrenees. She had determined in collaboration with Mélanie the foodstuffs that were most agreeable to me, and went so far as to prepare them for me with her own delicate hands. In the beginning, I licked my chops, but on reflection, the concern of conserving my figure moderated me. I ended up leaving half my dishes.
My liaison with Castor delighted my father-in-law, to the point that he wanted to debaptize me in order to call me Pollux. That new denomination would have satisfied his sense of history.
“Let him do it,” the spaniel advised me. “Pollux is as good as Zizi.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
I would have been delighted to be rid of the patronym that had been attributed to me by Georges, but Floriane stuck to Zizi, and Monsieur Pastel did not insist.
I even arrived at finding my soubriquet quite sweet, when it emerged from Floriane’s mouth. She accompanied it, while nestling me against her, with ardent declarations that I had never heard in the times of my virile incarnation.
“I adore your gilded eyes, my Zizi…you surpass the splendors of nature…I’d rather have you than the radiance of a sun setting over the mountains!” Phrases that she had, I believe, fished out of my writings, and that I am embarrassed to report because, to tell the truth, they are a trifle lacking in lyricism.
On evening, before setting me at her feet, she served me up so many of them that I shed a human tear, and as I whimpered at the same time, she said: “What, you’re weeping? Do dogs weep, then? It’s not possible—he must have a pain somewhere. If I lost you, my Zizi, I’d go mad! Tomorrow, we’ll go see the vet.”
The next day, she packed her bags. Neither the insistence of her parents not the charm of the late season could retain her. She ran to the expert, for Zizi.
When we arrived at our apartment, the Aesculapius of canines was already there, waiting on the landing.
It was Georges Ferval.
Chapter VII
In civilian dress this time—a pale gray sports jacket—but supremely elegant even so, Georges Ferval manifested his joy at seeing Floriane again by repeating a hand-kiss that exceeded normal politeness. Floriane consented to it.
Then he ecstasied: “The country has done you good. You look superb.”
“I could say as much for you, Georges.”
“It’s not for lack of worrying about you, though.”
“Oh! You’ve been thinking about me?”
“A superfluous question. Ask the waves that I was considering while I was on watch. I heard your voice in the sound of the sea.”
“Even in the tempest?”
“Even then.”
“The tempest ought not to remind you of me, you know!”
“Yes, in the sense that it recalled my emotions while he was still alive.”
They could not have reanimated my anger and disgust more sharply, although I had believed myself delivered from them forever, by acceptance of my fate, and by the new tenderness that Floriane heaped upon me. I could not suppress a growl of ill augury.
“Oh, there’s the pooch. It’s Zizi, isn’t it, that we baptized him? Bonjour, Zizi. Are you still a bad boy?”
“Not at all; he behaves exquisitely toward everyone.”
“I rub him up the wrong way, then.”
“He’ll end up tolerating you, Georges.”
He was the one who opened the door. He went into my home as if it were his own. He went straight into the drawing room and liberated the windows. Then he brought into the antechamber the few items of baggage, including my niche, left on the landing.
Floriane put me down on the floor and went into her bedroom. I knew what she was going to do there. Indeed, she came back a few minutes later, powdered and lipsticked to perfection, while he, camped in front of the mirror next to the Devambez, had also prepared himself, smoothing his hair and rectifying the pleats of his cravat, for a conversation in which I foresaw my definitive enlightenment.
In order not to miss anything, as much as not to hinder the movements of the seducer, if he were disposed to make any, I ignored the signal that Floriane gave me to climb up on her knees and perched on a neighboring armchair.
Here, then, is their abominable dialogue. I have not altered a single word.
Georges spoke first: “What will become of you, my poor Floriane?”
“I don’t know.”
“Still so young!”
“I’m over thirty, Georges.”
“A thirty that one would take for twenty.”
“Flatterer!”
That was all that they found to enchant one another. Their lyricism, after its initial flight, fell flat. A conductor of sailors, it is true, can dispense with being a poet. I also grasped Georges’ strategy in refusing to age Floriane. Even if one is addressing a conscious and contented old frump, women are always grateful when one diminishes their age. A banal compliment, but which always hits the mark.
“Still so young, I insist,” the seducer repeated, “and so lovely…for you can’t deny it. It’s astonishing that your beauty lacks adornment, that you’re perpetuating your mourning. You ought not to renounce pleasure because Jacques did that stupid thing.”
“Obviously.”
“Coquetry is a woman’s right in all circumstances.”
“Not everyone is of that opinion.”
“One doesn’t have to take notice of what people say.”
“There is, all the same, a normal delay that it’s necessary to respect.”
“A few months…”
“Let’s see, Georges—since, for the moment, I have everything I need…thanks to you.”
“I agree. I but I want to see you rapidly returned to the pleasures of life, and especially out of back. It’s necessary to defy prejudices, in morality as in dress…deep down as well as on the surface.”
He hesitated over what he wanted to say; then his voice became positive again, and convincing, in order to reanimate a memory of such precision that I was to have no more doubt.
“By the way, I went past the house where we were going to meet two days after Jacques’ suicide. Do you remember?”
“Perfectly.”
“I saw the owner. She knows what’s what, and all the more amiable because she’ll touch the ten per cent. I told her that we’d go today at about five o’clock, if that suits you.”
“Yes, all right.”
“I also told her to put out her best sheets. She said she would and, in her contentment at our visit, promised me a cocktail.”
I couldn’t hear any more. This time, their dialogue, from beginning to end, confirmed their liaison and its imminent renewal. They had consented to hide it a little longer, since Floriane had, for the moment—thanks to Georges, she confessed—everything she needed, and I knew what that meant. But the light was glaring, in the confession of their access to an ignominious house, where the landlady was touching ten per cent, where the best sheets would welcome their intoxication, to which they would add spice with a cocktail swilled in my dishonor.
Oh, my bliss, my security as a little dog!
Oh, the reassuring conviction of St. Peter, my psychic guinea-pigism, my posthumous tranquility, my cosseted zizism, and the charm of Les Bolois, and the father-in-law’s puns, and the confraternity of my colleague Castor—how all of that fled in a trice!
I made an effort to leap at the bandit’s throat, but the blow he dealt me surpassed the resistance of my feeble carcass. A sudden paralysis blocked my entire mechanism. My eyes rolled back. I fainted, like the most cowardly of humans.
The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 28