My Private Menagerie

This public humiliation did not check Zamore’s vocation. He returned home with drooping tail and thoughtful mien, and during the whole of the remainder of that day was more reserved, more taciturn, and more morose than ever. But in the dead of night my sisters were awakened by slight sounds, the cause of which they could not conjecture, which proceeded from an uninhabited room next theirs, where Zamore was usually put to bed on an old arm-chair. It sounded like a rhythmic tread, made more sonorous by the silence of night. They at first supposed that the mice were romping round, but the sound of steps and leaps on the flooring was too loud for that. The bravest of my sisters rose, partly opened the door, and by the light of a moonbeam streaming in through a pane, she beheld Zamore on his hind legs, pawing the air with his fore paws, and busy studying the dancing steps he had admired in the street that morning. The gentleman was practising!

Nor did this prove, as might be supposed, a passing fancy, a momentary attraction; Zamore persisted in his choregraphic aspirations and turned out a fine dancer. Every time he heard the fife and drum he would run out on the square, slip between the spectators’ legs and watch, with the closest attention, the trained dogs performing their exercises. Mindful, however, of the whip-cut, he no longer attempted to take part in the dancing; he took note of the poses, the steps, and the attitudes, and then, at night, in the silence of his room, he would work away at them, remaining the while, during the day, as austere in his bearing as ever. Ere long he was not satisfied with copying; he took to composing, to inventing, and I am bound to say few dogs surpassed him in the elevated style. I often used to watch him through the half-open door; he practised with such enthusiasm that every night he would drain dry the bowl of water placed in one corner of the room.

When he had become quite sure of himself and the equal of the most accomplished of four-footed dancers, he felt he could no longer hide his light under a bushel and that he must reveal the mystery of his accomplishments. The court-yard of the house was closed, on one side, by an iron fence with spaces sufficiently wide to allow moderately stout dogs to enter in easily. So one fine morning some fifteen or twenty dog friends of his, connoisseurs no doubt, to whom Zamore had sent letters of invitation to his début in the choregraphic art, met around a square of smooth ground nicely levelled off, which the artist had previously swept with his tail, and the performance began. The dogs appeared to be delighted and manifested their enthusiasm by ouahs! ouahs! closely resembling the bravi of dilettanti at the Opera. With the sole exception of an old and pretty muddy poodle, very wretched looking, and a critic, no doubt, who barked out something about forgetting sound tradition, all the spectators proclaimed Zamore the Vestris of dogs and the god of dancing. Our artist had performed a minuet, a jig, and a deux temps waltz. A large number of two-footed spectators had joined the four-footed ones, and Zamore enjoyed the honour of being applauded by human hands.

Dancing became so much a habit of his that when he was paying court to some fair, he would stand up on his hind legs, making bows and turning his toes out like a marquis of the ancien régime. All he lacked was the plumed hat under his arm.

Apart from this he was as hypochondriacal as a comic actor and took no part in the life of the household. He stirred only when he saw his master pick up his hat and stick. Zamore died of brain fever, brought on, no doubt, by overwork in trying to learn the schottische, then in the full swing of its popularity. Zamore may say within his tomb, as says the Greek dancer in her epitaph: “Earth, rest lightly on me, for I rested lightly on thee.”

How came it that being so talented, Zamore was not enrolled in Corvi’s company? For I was even then sufficiently influential as a critic to manage this for him. Zamore, however, would not leave his master, and sacrificed his self-love to his affection, a proof of devotion which one would look for in vain among men.

A singer, named Kobold, a thorough-bred King Charles from the famous kennels of Lord Lauder, took the place of the dancer. It was a queer little beast, with an enormous projecting forehead, big goggle eyes, nose broken short off at the root, and long ears trailing on the ground. When Kobold was brought to France, knowing no language but English, he was quite bewildered. He could not understand the orders given him; trained to answer to “Go on,” or “Come here,” he remained motionless when he was told in French, “Viens,” or “Va-t’en.” It took him a year to learn the tongue of the new country in which he found himself and to take part in the conversation. Kobold was very fond of music, and himself sang little songs with a very strong English accent. The A would be struck on the piano, and he caught the note exactly and modulated with a flute-like sound phrases that were really musical and that had no connection whatever with barking or yelping. When we wanted to make him go on, all we had to do was to say, “Sing a little more,” and he would repeat the cadence. Although he was fed with the utmost care, as was proper in the case of a tenor singer and so distinguished a gentleman, Kobold had one eccentric taste: he would eat earth just like a South American savage. We never succeeded in curing him of the habit, which proved the cause of his death. He was very fond of the stablemen, the horses, and the stable, and my ponies had no more constant companion than he. He spent his time between their loose-boxes and the piano.

After Kobold, the King Charles, came Myrza, a tiny Havana poodle that had the honour of being for a time the property of Giulia Grisi, who gave her to me. She is snow-white, especially when she is fresh from her bath and has not had time to roll over in the dust, a fancy some dogs share with dust-loving birds. She is extremely gentle and affectionate, and as sweet-tempered as a dove. Her little fluffy face, her two little eyes that might be mistaken for upholstery nails, and her little nose like a Piedmont truffle, are most comical. Tufts of hair, curly as Astrakhan fur, fall over her face in the most picturesque and unexpected way, hiding first one eye and then the other, so that she has the most peculiar appearance imaginable and squints like a chameleon.

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. Bonnegrâce, 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 Bonnegrâce, 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 glass 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 passed 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 classify. 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 passionately 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.)