M. Bergeret was not unhappy, for he rejoiced in that true independence which comes from within, and his soul was unfettered. Since the departure of his wife he was also enjoying the sweets of solitude, while awaiting the arrival of his daughter Pauline, who was shortly expected from Arcachon with his sister, Mademoiselle Bergeret.

He looked forward to a happy life with his daughter, who resembled him in certain turns of mind and speech, so that it flattered his vanity when people praised her.

He was pleased at the idea of seeing his sister Zoe, an old maid, who, having never had any pretensions to good looks, had not lost her natural frankness of disposition, to which was added a secret delight in making herself unpleasant, but who lacked neither wit nor kindliness.

For the time being, however, M. Bergeret was busy settling down in his new quarters. He hung his views of Naples and Vesuvius, legacies both, on the walls of his study. Now of all the delights permitted to a respectable man, there is perhaps none which procures him such tranquil enjoyment as that of knocking nails into a wall. The keenest pleasure of that experienced voluptuary, Comte de Caylus, was unpacking cases of Etruscan pottery. Thus M. Bergeret proceeded to hang up on his wall an old water-colour representing Vesuvius, adorned with an aigrette of flame and smoke, standing out against the dark blue sky of midnight. This picture reminded him of the days of his wondering and enchanted childhood.

He was not sad, neither was he glad. He had money worries, he knew the unloveliness of poverty. “Money makes the man,” as Pindar says (Isth. II).

He did not get on with his colleagues or his pupils. He did not get on with the townspeople; incapable as he was of comprehending either their thoughts or their feelings, he had been obliged to withdraw from human fellowship, and his peculiar way of thinking had deprived him of the enjoyment of that genial feeling of comradeship which even high walls and closed doors cannot exclude.

The mere fact that he was a thinker made him a strange and disturbing element suspected by all. He was even a source of worry to Paillot, the bookseller, and his asylum and refuge, the corner where the old books were kept, was no longer to be counted on. In spite of all this he was not unhappy. He set about arranging his books on the deal shelves put up by the carpenter, and took pleasure in handling these little memorials of his humble contemplative life. He worked with zeal at his task of getting things straight, and when he tired of hanging pictures or arranging furniture, he buried himself deep in some book, with a lurking feeling, however, that he ought not to enjoy it because it was a human product, yet enjoying it notwithstanding. He read a few pages on “the progress realized by modern society,” and his reflections ran as follows:

“Let us be humble and believe ourselves in no way excellent, for we are not excellent. As we examine ourselves, let us uncover our true countenance, which is rough and violent like that of our forefathers, and, as we have the advantage over them of a longer tradition, let us at least recognize the sequence and continuity of our ignorance.”

Thus pondered M. Bergeret, as he settled himself in his new abode. He was not sad, neither was he glad, as he reflected that he would always yearn in vain for Madame de Gromance, not realizing the fact that she was only precious to him by virtue of the craving which she inspired. But the very derangement of his feelings prevented him from clearly grasping this philosophical truth. He was not handsome, he was not young, he was not rich; he was not sad, because his wisdom approached the happy state of ataraxy, without, however, finally attaining it, and he was not glad, because he was somewhat of a sensualist, and his soul was not free from illusions and desires.

The servant Marie, who had fulfilled her task of bringing terror and misery into the house, had been dismissed, and in her place he had engaged a decent woman from the town, whom he called AngÉlique, but who was spoken of as Madame Borniche by the shopkeepers and the country-people in the market-place.

Her husband, Nicolas Borniche, a good coachman, but a bad man, had deserted her when she was still young and ugly. She had been in service with various families. Her status as a married woman still filled her with a certain pride not always concealed, and with a great fondness for managing. Finally, she was by way of being a herbalist and a healer, something of a sorceress, and filled the house with a pleasant odour of herbs. Full of genuine zeal, she was obsessed by an eternal longing for affection and approval. From the very first she had taken to M. Bergeret, on account of the distinction of his mind and the gentleness of his manner, but she awaited the arrival of Mademoiselle Bergeret with foreboding, for a secret presentiment told her that she would not get on well with the sister from Arcachon. On the other hand, she pleased M. Bergeret, who was at last enjoying peace in his house and deliverance from all his troubles.

His books, which heretofore had been despised and thrown about, were now displayed upon long shelves in the big sunny room. There he could work in quiet at his Virgilius nauticus, and indulge freely in silent orgies of meditation. Before the window a young plane tree gently waved its pointed leaves, and, farther away, a dark buttress of Saint-ExupÈre reared its jagged pinnacle, in which grew a cherry tree, doubtless planted there by a bird.

Seated at his table one morning in front of the window, against which the leaves of the plane tree quivered, M. Bergeret, who was trying to discover how the ships of Æneas had been changed into nymphs, heard a tap at the door, and forthwith his servant entered, carrying in front of her, opossum-like, a tiny creature whose black head peeped out from the folds of her apron, which she had turned up to form a pocket. With a look of anxiety and hope upon her face, she remained motionless for a moment, then she placed the little thing upon the carpet at her master’s feet.

“What’s that?” asked M. Bergeret. It was a little dog of doubtful breed, having something of the terrier in him, and a well-set head, a short, smooth coat of a dark tan colour, and a tiny little stump of a tail. His body retained its puppy-like softness and he went sniffing at the carpet.

“AngÉlique,” said M. Bergeret, “take this animal back to its owner.”

“It has no owner, Monsieur.”

M. Bergeret looked silently at the little creature who had come to examine his slippers, and was giving little sniffs of approval. M. Bergeret was a philologist, which perhaps explains why at this juncture he asked a vain question.

“What is he called?”

“Monsieur,” replied AngÉlique, “he has no name.”

M. Bergeret seemed put out at this answer: he looked at the dog sadly, with a disheartened air.

Then the little animal placed its two front paws on M. Bergeret’s slipper, and, holding it thus, began innocently to nibble at it. With a sudden access of compassion M. Bergeret took the tiny nameless creature upon his knees. The dog looked at him intently, and M. Bergeret was pleased at his confiding expression.

“What beautiful eyes!” he cried.

The dog’s eyes were indeed beautiful, the pupils of a golden-flecked chestnut set in warm white. And his gaze spoke of simple, mysterious thoughts, common alike to the thoughtful beasts and simple men of the earth.

Tired, perhaps, with the intellectual effort he had made for the purpose of entering into communication with a human being, he closed his beautiful eyes, and, yawning widely, revealed his pink mouth, his curled-up tongue, and his array of dazzling teeth.

M. Bergeret put his hand into the dog’s mouth, and allowed him to lick it, at which old AngÉlique gave a smile of relief.

“A more affectionate little creature doesn’t breathe,” she said.

“The dog,” said M. Bergeret, “is a religious animal. In his savage state he worships the moon and the lights that float upon the waters. These are his gods, to whom he appeals at night with long-drawn howls. In the domesticated state he seeks by his caresses to conciliate those powerful genii who dispense the good things of this world—to wit, men. He worships and honours men by the accomplishment of the rites passed down to him by his ancestors; he licks their hand, jumps against their legs, and when they show signs of anger towards him he approaches them crawling on his belly as a sign of humility, to appease their wrath.”

“All dogs are not the friends of man,” remarked AngÉlique. “Some of them bite the hand that feeds them.”

“Those are the ungodly, blasphemous dogs,” returned M. Bergeret, “insensate creatures like Ajax, the son of Telamon, who wounded the hand of the golden Aphrodite. These sacrilegious creatures die a dreadful death or lead wandering and miserable lives. They are not to be confounded with those dogs who, espousing the quarrel of their own particular god, wage war upon his enemy, the neighbouring god. They are heroes. Such, for example, is the dog of Lafolie, the butcher, who fixed his sharp teeth into the leg of the tramp Pied-d’Alouette. For it is a fact that dogs fight among themselves like men, and Turk, with his snub nose, serves his god Lafolie against the robber gods, in the same way that Israel helped Jehovah to destroy Chamos and Moloch.”

The puppy, however, having decided that M. Bergeret’s remarks were the reverse of interesting, curled up his feet and stretched out his head, ready to go to sleep upon the knees that harboured him.

“Where did you find him?” asked M. Bergeret.

“Well, Monsieur, it was M. Dellion’s chef gave him to me.”

“With the result,” continued M. Bergeret, “that we now have this soul to care for.”

“What soul?” asked AngÉlique. “This canine soul. An animal is, properly speaking, a soul; I do not say an immortal soul. And yet, when I come to consider the positions this poor little beast and I myself occupy in the scheme of things, I recognize in both exactly the same right to immortality.”

After considerable hesitation, old AngÉlique, with a painful effort that made her upper lip curl up and reveal her two remaining teeth, said:

“If Monsieur does not want a dog, I will return him to M. Dellion’s chef; but you may safely keep him, I assure you. You won’t see or hear him.”

She had hardly finished her sentence when the puppy, hearing a heavy van rolling down the street, sat bolt upright on M. Bergeret’s knees, and began to bark both loud and long, so that the window-panes resounded with the noise.

M. Bergeret smiled.

“He is a watch-dog,” said AngÉlique, by way of excuse. “They are by far the most faithful.”

“Have you given him anything to eat?” asked M. Bergeret.

“Of course,” returned AngÉlique.

“What does he eat?”

“Monsieur must be aware that dogs eat bread and meat.”

Somewhat piqued, M. Bergeret retorted that in her eagerness she might very likely have taken him away from his mother before he was old enough to leave her, upon which he was lifted up again and re-examined, only to make sure of the fact that he was at least six months old.

M. Bergeret put him down on the carpet, and regarded him with interest.

“Isn’t he pretty?” said the servant.

“No, he is not pretty,” replied M. Bergeret. “But he is engaging, and has beautiful eyes. That is what people used to say about me,” added the professor, “when I was three times as old, and not half as intelligent. Since then I have no doubt acquired an outlook upon the universe which he will never attain. But, in comparison with the Absolute, I may say that my knowledge equals his in the smallness of its extent. Like his, it is a geometrical point in the infinite.” Then, addressing the little creature who was sniffing the waste-paper basket, he went on: “Smell it out, sniff it well, take from the outside world all the knowledge that can reach your simple brain through the medium of that black truffle-like nose of yours. And what though I at the same time observe, and compare, and study? We shall never know, neither the one nor the other of us, why we have been put into this world, and what we are doing in it. What are we here for, eh?”

As he had spoken rather loudly, the puppy looked at him anxiously, and M. Bergeret, returning to the thought which had first filled his mind, said to the servant:

“We must give him a name.”

With her hands folded in front of her she replied laughingly that that would not be a difficult matter.

Upon which M. Bergeret made the private reflection that to the simple all things are simple, but that clear-sighted souls, who look upon things from many and divers aspects, invisible to the vulgar mind, experience the greatest difficulty in coming to a decision about even the most trivial matters. And he cudgelled his brains, trying to hit upon a name for the little living thing who was busily engaged in nibbling the fringe of the carpet.

“All the names of dogs,” thought he, “preserved in the ancient treatises of the huntsmen of old, such as Fouilloux, and in the verses of our sylvan poets such as La Fontaine—Finaud, Miraut, Briffaut, Ravaud, and such-like names, are given to sporting dogs, who are the aristocracy of the kennel, the chivalry of the canine race. The dog of Ulysses was called Argos, and he was a hunter too, so Homer tells us. ‘In his youth he hunted the little hares of Ithaca, but now he was old and hunted no more.’ What we require is something quite different. The names given by old maids to their lap-dogs would be more suitable were they not usually pretentious and absurd. Azor, for instance, is ridiculous!”

So M. Bergeret ruminated, calling to memory many a dog name, without being able to decide, however, on one that pleased him. He would have liked to invent a name, but lacked the imagination.

“What day is it?” he asked at last.

“The ninth,” replied AngÉlique, “Thursday, the ninth.”

“Well, then!” said M. Bergeret, “can’t we call the dog Thursday, like Robinson Crusoe who called his man Friday, for the same reason?”

“As Monsieur pleases,” said AngÉlique. “But it isn’t very pretty.”

“Very well,” said M. Bergeret, “find a name for the creature yourself, for, after all, you brought him here.”

“Oh, no,” said the servant. “I couldn’t find a name for him, I’m not clever enough. When I saw him lying on the straw in the kitchen, I called him Riquet, and he came up and played about under my skirts.”

“You called him Riquet, did you?” cried M. Bergeret. “Why didn’t you say so before? Riquet he is and Riquet he shall remain, that’s settled. Now be off with you, and take Riquet with you. I want to work.” “Monsieur,” returned AngÉlique, “I am going to leave the puppy with you; I will come for him when I get back from market.”

“You could quite well take him to market with you,” retorted M. Bergeret.

“Monsieur, I am going to church as well.”

It was quite true that she really was going to church at Saint-ExupÈre, to ask for a Mass to be said for the repose of her husband’s soul. She did that regularly once a year, not that she had ever been informed of the decease of Borniche, who had never communicated with her since his desertion, but it was a settled thing in the good woman’s mind that Borniche was dead. She had therefore no fear of his coming to rob her of the little she had, and did her best to fix things up to his advantage in the other world, so long as he left her in peace in this one.

“Eh!” ejaculated M. Bergeret. “Shut him up in the kitchen or some other convenient place, and do not wor——”

He did not finish his sentence, for AngÉlique had vanished, purposely pretending not to hear, that she might leave Riquet with his master. She wanted them to grow used to one another, and she also wanted to give poor, friendless M. Bergeret a companion. Having closed the door behind her, she went along the corridor and down the steps. M. Bergeret set to work again and plunged head foremost into his Virgilius nauticus. He loved the work; it rested his thoughts, and became a kind of game that suited him, for he played it all by himself. On the table beside him were several boxes filled with pegs, which he fixed into little squares of cardboard to represent the fleet of Æneas. Now while he was thus occupied he felt something like tiny fists tapping at his legs. Riquet, whom he had quite forgotten, was standing on his hind legs patting his master’s knees, and wagging his little stump of a tail. When he tired of this, he let his paws slide down the trouser leg, then got up and began his coaxing over again. And M. Bergeret, turning away from the printed lore before him, saw two brown eyes gazing up at him lovingly.

“What gives a human beauty to the gaze of this dog,” he thought, “is probably that it varies unceasingly, being by turns bright and vivacious or serious and sorrowful; because through these eyes his little dumb soul finds expression for thought that lacks nothing in depth nor sequence. My father was very fond of cats, and, consequently, I liked them too. He used to declare that cats are the wise man’s best companions, for they respect his studious hours. Bajazet, his Persian cat, would sit at night for hours at a stretch, motionless and majestic, perched on a corner of his table. I still remember the agate eyes of Bajazet, but those jewel-like orbs concealed all thought, that owl-like stare was cold, and hard, and wicked. How much do I prefer the melting gaze of the dog!”

Riquet, however, was agitating his paws in frantic fashion, and M. Bergeret, who was anxious to return to his philological amusements, said kindly, but shortly:

“Lie down, Riquet!”

Upon which Riquet went and thrust his nose against the door through which AngÉlique had passed out. And there he remained, uttering from time to time plaintive, meek little cries. After a while he began to scratch, making a gentle rasping noise on the polished floor with his nails. Then the whining began again followed by more scratching. Disturbed by these sounds, M. Bergeret sternly bade him keep still.

Riquet peered at him sorrowfully with his brown eyes, then, sitting down, he looked at M. Bergeret again, rose, returned to the door, sniffed underneath it, and wailed afresh.

“Do you want to go out?” asked M. Bergeret.

Putting down his pen, he went to the door, which he held a few inches open. After making sure that he was running no risk of hurting himself on the way out, Riquet slipped through the doorway and marched off with a composure that was scarcely polite. On returning to his table, M. Bergeret, sensitive man that he was, pondered over the dog’s action. He said to himself:

“I was on the point of reproaching the animal for going without saying either good-bye or thank you, and expecting him to apologize for leaving me. It was the beautiful human expression of his eyes that made me so foolish. I was beginning to look upon him as one of my own kind.”

After making this reflection M. Bergeret applied himself anew to the metamorphosis of the ships of Æneas, a legend both pretty and popular, but perhaps a trifle too simple in itself for expression in such noble language. M. Bergeret, however, saw nothing incongruous in it. He knew that the nursery tales have furnished material for nearly all epics, and that Virgil had carefully collected together in his poem the riddles, the puns, the uncouth stories, and the puerile imaginings of his forefathers; that Homer, his master and the master of all the bards, had done little more than tell over again what the good wives of Ionia and the fishermen of the islands had been narrating for more than a thousand years before him. Besides, for the time being this was the least of his worries; he had another far more important preoccupation. An expression, met with in the course of the charming story of the metamorphosis, did not appear sufficiently plain to him. That was what was worrying him.

“Bergeret, my friend,” he said to himself, “this is where you must open your eyes and show your sense. Remember that Virgil always expresses himself with extreme precision when writing on the technique of the arts; remember that he went yachting at BaÏae, that he was an expert in naval construction, and that therefore his language, in this passage, must have a precise and definite signification.”

And M. Bergeret carefully consulted a great number of texts, in order to throw a light upon the word which he could not understand, and which he had to explain. He was almost on the point of grasping the solution, or, at any rate, he had caught a glimpse of it, when he heard a noise like the rattling of chains at his door, a noise which, although not alarming, struck him as curious. The disturbance was presently accompanied by a shrill whining, and M. Bergeret, interrupted in his philological investigations, immediately concluded that these importunate wails must emanate from Riquet.

As a matter of fact, after having looked vainly all over the house for AngÉlique, Riquet had been seized with a desire to see M. Bergeret again. Solitude was as painful to him as human society was dear. In order to put an end to the noise, and also because he had a secret desire to see Riquet again, M. Bergeret got up from his arm-chair and opened the door, and Riquet re-entered the study with the same coolness with which he had quitted it, but as soon as he saw the door close behind him he assumed a melancholy expression, and began to wander up and down the room like a soul in torment.

He had a sudden way of appearing to find something of interest beneath the chairs and tables, and would sniff long and noisily; then he would walk aimlessly about or sit down in a corner with an air of great humility, like the beggars who are to be seen in church porches. Finally he began to bark at a cast of Hermes which stood upon the mantelshelf, whereupon M. Bergeret addressed him in words full of just reproach.

“Riquet! such vain agitation, such sniffing and barking were better suited to a stable than to the study of a professor, and they lead one to suppose that your ancestors lived with horses whose straw litters they shared. I do not reproach you with that. It is only natural you should have inherited their habits, manners, and tendencies as well as their close-cropped coat, their sausage-like body, and their long, thin nose. I do not speak of your beautiful eyes, for there are few men, few dogs even, who can open such beauties to the light of day. But, leaving all that aside, you are a mongrel, my friend, a mongrel from your short, bandy legs to your head. Again I am far from despising you for that. What I want you to understand is that if you desire to live with me, you will have to drop your mongrel manners and behave like a scolar, in other words, to remain silent and quiet, to respect work, after the manner of Bajazet, who of a night would sit for four hours without stirring, and watch my father’s pen skimming over the paper. He was a silent and tactful creature. How different is your own character, my friend! Since you came into this chamber of study your hoarse voice, your unseemly snufflings and your whines, that sound like steam whistles, have constantly confused my thoughts and interrupted my reflections. And now you have made me lose the drift of an important passage in Servius, referring to the construction of one of the ships of Æneas. Know then, Riquet, my friend, that this is the house of silence and the abode of meditation, and that if you are anxious to stay here you must become literary. Be quiet!”

Thus spoke M. Bergeret. Riquet, who had listened to him with mute astonishment, approached his master, and with suppliant gesture placed a timid paw upon the knee, which he seemed to revere in a fashion that savoured of long ago. Then a kind thought struck M. Bergeret. He picked him up by the scruff of his neck, and put him upon the cushions of the ample easy chair in which he was sitting. Turning himself round three times, Riquet lay down, and then remained perfectly still and silent. He was quite happy. M. Bergeret was grateful to him, and as he ran through Servius he occasionally stroked the close-cropped coat, which, without being soft, was smooth and very pleasant to the touch. Riquet fell into a gentle doze, and communicated to his master the generous warmth of his body, the subtle, gentle heat of a living, breathing thing. And from that moment M. Bergeret found more pleasure in his Virgilius nauticus.

From floor to ceiling his study was lined with deal shelves, bearing books arranged in methodical order. One glance, and all that remains to us of Latin thought was ready to his hand. The Greeks lay half-way up. In a quiet corner, easy of access, were Rabelais, the excellent story-tellers of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Bonaventure des PÉriers, Guillaume Bouchet, and all the old French “conteurs” whom M. Bergeret considered better adapted to humanity than writings in the more heroic style, and who were the favourite reading of his leisure. He only possessed them in cheap modern editions, but he had discovered a poor bookbinder in the town who covered his volumes with leaves from a book of anthems, and it gave M. Bergeret the keenest pleasure to see these free-spoken gentlemen thus clad in Requiems and Misereres. This was the sole luxury and the only peculiarity of his austere library. The other books were paper-backed or bound in poor and worn-out bindings. The gentle friendly manner in which they were handled by their owner gave them the look of tools set out in a busy man’s workshop. The books on archÆology and art found a resting-place on the highest shelves, not by any means out of contempt, but because they were not so often used.

Now while M. Bergeret worked at his Virgilius nauticus and shared his chair with Riquet, he found, as chance would have it, that it was necessary to consult Ottfried MÜller’s little Manual, which happened to be on one of the topmost shelves.

There was no need of one of those tall ladders on wheels topped by railings and a shelf, to enable him to reach the book; there were ladders of this description in the town library, and they had been used by all the great book-lovers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; indeed, several of the latter had fallen from them, and thus died honourable deaths, in the manner spoken of in the pamphlet entitled: Des bibliophiles qui moururent en tombant de leur Échelle.

No, indeed! M. Bergeret had no need of anything of the sort. A small pair of folding steps would have served his purpose excellently well, and he had once seen some in the shop of ClÉrambaut, the cabinet-maker, in the Rue de Josde. They folded up, and looked just the thing with their bevelled uprights each pierced with a trefoil as a grip for the hand. M. Bergeret would have given anything to possess them, but the state of his finances, which were somewhat involved, forced him to abandon the idea. No one knew better than he did that financial ills are not mortal, but, for all that, he had no steps in his study.

In place of such a pair of steps he used an old cane-bottomed chair, the back of which had been broken, leaving only two horns or antennÆ, which had shewn themselves to be more dangerous than useful. So they had been cut to the level of the seat, and the chair had become a stool. There were two reasons why this stool was ill-fitted to the use to which M. Bergeret was wont to put it. In the first place the woven-cane seat had grown slack with long use, and now contained a large hollow, making one’s foothold precarious. In the second place the stool was too low, and it was hardly possible when standing upon it to reach the books on the highest shelf, even with the finger-tips. What generally happened was that in the endeavour to grasp one book several others fell out, and it depended upon their being bound or paper-covered whether they lay with broken corners or sprawled with leaves spread like a fan or a concertina.

Now with the intention of getting down the Manual of Ottfried MÜller, M. Bergeret quitted the chair he was sharing with Riquet, who, rolled into a ball with his head tight pressed to his body, lay in warm comfort, opening one voluptuous eye, which he reclosed as quickly. Then M. Bergeret drew the stool from the dark corner where it was hidden and placed it where it was required, hoisted himself upon it, and managed by making his arm as long as possible, and straining upon tiptoe to touch, first with one then with two fingers, the back of a book which he judged to be the one he was needing. As for the thumb it remained below the shelf and rendered no assistance whatever. M. Bergeret, who found it therefore exceedingly difficult to draw out the book, made the reflection that the reason why the hand is a precious implement is on account of the position of the thumb, and that no being could rise to be an artist who had four feet and no hands.

“It is to the hand,” he reflected, “that men owe their power of becoming engineers, painters, writers, and manipulators of all kinds of things. If they had not a thumb as well as their other fingers, they would be as incapable as I am at this moment, and they could never have changed the face of the earth as they have done. Beyond a doubt it is the shape of the hand that has assured to man the conquest of the world.”

Then, almost simultaneously, M. Bergeret remembered that monkeys, who possess four hands, have not, for all that, created the arts, nor disposed the earth to their use, and he erased from his mind the theory upon which he had just embarked. However, he did the best he could with his four fingers. It must be known that Ottfried MÜller’s Manual is composed of three volumes and an atlas. M. Bergeret wanted Volume I. He pulled out first the second volume, then the atlas, then volume three, and finally the book that he required. At last he held it in his hands. All that now remained for him to do was to descend, and this he was about to do when the cane seat gave way beneath his foot, which passed through it. He lost his balance and fell to the ground, not as heavily as might have been feared, for he broke his fall by grasping at one of the uprights of the bookshelf.

He was on the ground, however, full of astonishment, and wearing on one leg the broken chair; his whole body was permeated and as though constricted by a pain that spread all over it, and that presently settled itself more particularly in the region of the left elbow and hip upon which he had fallen. But, as his anatomy was not seriously damaged, he gathered his wits together; he had got so far as to realize that he must draw his right leg out of the stool in which it had so unfortunately become entangled, and that he must be careful to raise himself up on his right side, which was unhurt. He was even trying to put this into execution when he felt a warm breath upon his cheek, and, turning his eyes, which fright and pain had for the moment fixed, he saw close to his cheek Riquet’s little face.

At the sound of the fall Riquet had jumped down from the chair and run to his unfortunate master; he was now standing near him in a state of great excitement; then he commenced to run round him. First he came near out of sympathy, then he retreated out of fear of some mysterious danger. He understood perfectly well that a misfortune had taken place, but he was neither thoughtful nor clever enough to discover what it was; hence his anxiety. His fidelity drew him to his suffering friend, and his prudence stopped him on the very brink of the fatal spot. Encouraged at length by the calm and silence which eventually reigned, he licked M. Bergeret’s neck and looked at him with eyes of fear and of love. The fallen master smiled, and the dog licked the end of his nose. It was a great comfort to M. Bergeret, who freed his right leg, stood erect, and limped good-humouredly back to his chair. Riquet was there before him. All that could be seen of his eyes was a gleam between the narrow slit of the half-closed lids. He seemed to have forgotten all about the adventure that a moment before had so stirred them both. The little creature lived in the present, with no thought of time that had run its course; not that he was wanting in memory, inasmuch as he could remember, not his own past alone, but the far-away past of his ancestors, and his little head was a rich storehouse of useful knowledge; but he took no pleasure in remembrance, and memory was not for him, as it was for M. Bergeret, a divine muse.

Gently stroking the short, smooth coat of his companion, M. Bergeret addressed him in the following affectionate terms:

“Dog! at the price of the repose which is dear to your heart, you came to me when I was dismayed and brought low. You did not laugh, as any young person of my own species would have done. It is true that however joyous or terrible nature may appear to you at times, she never inspires you with a sense of the ridiculous. And it is for that very reason, because of your innocent gravity, that you are the surest friend a man can have. In the first instance I inspired confidence and admiration in you, and now you show me pity.

“Dog! when we first met on the highway of life, we came from the two poles of creation; we belong to different species. I refer to this with no desire to take advantage of it, but rather with a strong sense of universal brotherhood. We have hardly been acquainted two hours, and my hand has never yet fed you. What can be the meaning of the obscure love for me that has sprung up in your little heart? The sympathy you bestow on me is a charming mystery, and I accept it. Sleep, friend, in the place that you have chosen!”

Having thus spoken, M. Bergeret turned over the leaves of Ottfried MÜller’s Manual, which with marvellous instinct he had kept in his hand both during and after his fall. He turned over the pages, and could not find what he sought.

Every movement, however, seemed to increase the pain he was feeling.

“I believe,” he thought, “that the whole of my left side is bruised and my hip swollen. I have a suspicion that my right leg is grazed all over and my left elbow aches and burns, but shall I cavil at pain that has led me to the discovery of a friend?”

His reflexions were running thus when old AngÉlique, breathless and perspiring, entered the study. She first opened the door, and then she knocked, for she never permitted herself to enter without knocking. If she had not done so before she opened the door, she did it after, for she had good manners, and knew what was expected of her. She went in therefore, knocked, and said:

“Monsieur, I have come to relieve you of the dog.”

M. Bergeret heard these words with decided annoyance. He had not as yet inquired into his claims to Riquet, and now realized that he had none. The thought that Madame Borniche might take the animal away from him filled him with sadness, yet, after all, Riquet did belong to her. Affecting indifference, he replied:

“He’s asleep; let him sleep!”

“Where is he? I don’t see him,” remarked old AngÉlique.

“Here he is,” answered M. Bergeret. “In my chair.”

With her two hands clasped over her portly figure, old AngÉlique smiled, and, in a tone of gentle mockery, ventured:

“I wonder what pleasure the creature can find in sleeping there behind Monsieur!”

“That,” retorted M. Bergeret, “is his business.”

Then, as he was of an inquiring mind, he immediately sought of Riquet his reasons for the selection of his resting-place, and lighting on them, replied with his accustomed candour: “I keep him warm, and my presence affords a sense of security; my comrade is a chilly and homely little animal.” Then he added: “Do you know, AngÉlique? I will go out presently and buy him a collar.”