Our Friend the Dog | Page 7

intelligent creatures that have rights,
duties, a mission and a destiny, the dog is a really privileged animal. He
occupies in this world a pre-eminent position enviable among all. He is
the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable,
tangible, unexceptionable and definite god. He knows to what to devote
the best part of himself. He knows to whom above him to give himself.
He has not to seek for a perfect, superior and infinite power in the
darkness, amid successive lies, hypotheses and dreams. That power is
there, before him, and he moves in its light. He knows the supreme
duties which we all do not know. He has a morality which surpasses all
that he is able to discover in himself and which he can practise without
scruple and without fear. He possesses truth in its fulness. He has a
certain and infinite ideal.

IV
And it was thus that, the other day, before his illness, I saw my little
Pelléas sitting at the foot of my writing-table, his tail carefully folded
under his paws, his head a little on one side, the better to question me,
at once attentive and tranquil, as a saint should be in the presence of
God. He was happy with the happiness which we, perhaps, shall never
know, since it sprang from the smile and the approval of a life
incomparably higher than his own. He was there, studying, drinking in
all my looks; and he replied to them gravely, as from equal to equal, to
inform me, no doubt, that, at least through the eyes the most immaterial
organ that transformed into affectionate intelligence the light which we
enjoyed, he knew that he was saying to me all that love should say.
And, when I saw him thus, young, ardent and believing, bringing me,
in some wise, from the depths of unwearied nature, quite fresh news of
life and trusting and wonderstruck, as though he had been the first of
his race that came to inaugurate the earth and as though we were still in
the first days of the world's existence, I envied the gladness of his
certainty, compared it with the destiny of man, still plunging on every
side into darkness, and said to myself that the dog who meets with a
good master is the happier of the two.

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