breeches, when the cook, armed with her broom, the ancillary and
forsworn sceptre, comes to protect the traitor, and you are obliged to
go back to your hole, where, with eyes filled with impotent and
slanting flames, you growl out frightful, but futile curses, thinking
within yourself that this is the end of all things, and that the human
species has lost its notion of justice and injustice....

Is that all? Not yet; for the smallest life is made up of innumerous
duties, and it is a long work to organize a happy existence upon the
borderland of two such different worlds as the world of beasts and the
world of men. How should we fare if we had to serve, while remaining
within our own sphere, a divinity, not an imaginary one, like to
ourselves, because the offspring of our own brain, but a god actually
visible, ever present, ever active and as foreign, as superior to our
being as we are to the dog?

[Illustration]

We now, to return to Pelléas, know pretty well what to do and how to
behave on the master's premises. But the world does not end at the
house-door, and, beyond the walls and beyond the hedge, there is a
universe of which one has not the custody, where one is no longer at
home, where relations are changed. How are we to stand in the street, in
the fields, in the market-place, in the shops? In consequence of
difficult and delicate observations, we understand that we must take no
notice of passers-by; obey no calls but the master's; be polite, with
indifference, to strangers who pet us. Next, we must conscientiously
fulfil certain obligations of mysterious courtesy toward our brothers
the other dogs; respect chickens and ducks; not appear to remark the
cakes at the pastry-cook's, which spread themselves insolently within