many dog books, Behind the Bathtub ends unhappily. While she’s still quite young, Douchka is bitten by an infected rat, grows sick, and one night crawls to the place where she always used to hide when she’d been reprimanded—behind the bathtub. It’s a heartbreaking scene. Audry describes it clearly and without sentiment, struggling to understand the unique nature of the wordless, cross-species relationship the two females have shared. Reading this part of the book, I found myself wondering whether, when Grisby dies, I’ll look on our relationship with sorrow and regret, or whether memories of him will fade away fast as I move on to my second dog. Perhaps I’ll look at my photographs of Grisby the way I look at pictures of former lovers, wondering, as I toss them into the trash, what I ever saw in him, and how I could have deluded myself for so long.
The Prix Médicis is traditionally awarded to underrated authors with the aim of boosting their literary reputations and launching them to the next level of their careers (prizewinners have included such acclaimed writers as Monique Wittig, Elie Wiesel, Hélène Cixous, and Bernard-Henri Lévy). Yet the prize did little for Colette Audry, and some even ridiculed the committee for giving this important award to “a dog book.” Sadly, this brave and serious work of autobiography has long been out of print; its critical reception is illustrative of our uneasy cultural relationship not only with dogs but also with those who write about them. Many French reviewers were unable to take Behind the Bathtub seriously, dismissing it as a minor or negligible work.
Despite England’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers, response to the British edition (Douchka—The Story of a Dog) was equally condescending. According to one Sister Mary William in Best Sellers: “The book is easy reading and, I suppose, pleasant reading for dog lovers.” Sister William added sneeringly: “It seems to me that five dollars is quite a price to pay for this sentimental journey into the past of dog and mistress even though it … is said to have been a best seller in France.” Naomi Lewis in the Observer called Douchka “an angry, tormented book,” and Robert Nye in the Guardian described it as “run-of-the-mill animal stuff, all right if you can stomach it but otherwise about as appetising as cat’s meat and dog’s biscuits.” Francis Wyndham, reviewing Douchka in the New Statesman in 1963, was of the opinion that Audry “presumably writes that aggressively colloquial prose often favoured by intellectual French women” and suggests that “books about animals often seem unduly egotistic” because “there isn’t that much that can be written about them.” Finally, in her 1990 obituary of Colette Audry, Maryvonne Grellier in the Guardian completely mischaracterized Behind the Bathtub as “based on a childhood episode when she found the family’s pet dog dead behind the bath.”
We still make fun of women like Colette Audry who love their dogs “excessively.” (But who decides how much love is “too much”?) There seems to be an unstated assumption that this love is being “wasted” on an animal, that women who devote themselves to their dogs are slightly unhinged. For this reason, many women keep such feelings to themselves—but such emotions may be far more common than we think. The website Dogster includes a regular feature called “Doghouse Confessional,” where readers send in their secrets about their dogs. Past columns (all by women) have included “I Love My Dog More Than I Love My Husband,” “I Put My Dog’s Happiness First,” and “My Dog Has Outlasted All My Romantic Relationships.” If such feelings are widespread, moreover, it should be cause for celebration, not concern. You might love your dog more than you love your husband, but loving a dog doesn’t mean you stop loving people; in fact, evidence suggests that love for animals encourages a broader sense of general empathy.
Even today, despite the increasing importance of dogs in our lives, books about them are invariably dismissed as sentimental and lighthearted, lucrative but simplistic, the lowest form of literature. Alice A. Kuzniar, the author of Melancholia’s Dog, opens her thoughtful book on human-canine kinships by remarking that the subject of dogs is presumed to be unfit for serious scholarly investigation; “it is held,” she writes, “to be sentimental, popular, and trivial … Whenever I had to explain and justify to what I was devoting years of research and writing, I felt embarrassed.” Why can’t we let ourselves take dog love seriously? Is it because, if we did, we’d have to think seriously about other nonhuman animals, including those on our dinner plates? One way to keep these anxieties at a distance is to make fun of people who’ve got their pets out of all proportion; this is how we can restore the balance, reassuring ourselves that of course, although some people take their feelings for dogs too far, we know dog love isn’t “real love” (if it were, what would stop us from choosing dogs over people?). This, at least, is the only way I can possibly make sense of one reviewer’s perplexing summary of Behind the Bathtub: “Beneath the story of Mme. Audry and Douchka lies, almost hidden, the terrible tragedy of a loveless life.”
EOS, NAMED AFTER the Greek goddess of dawn, was a beloved female greyhound belonging to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. The German-born prince had a lonely childhood. His parents’ marriage was notoriously turbulent, and they divorced when Albert was five. The prince’s mother was exiled from court, his father grew cold and distant, and the boy’s only companion was his brother, Ernest, but when Albert was fourteen, Ernest left for college in Bonn. To keep the young Albert entertained, Eos, then a six-month-old puppy, was delivered to the royal family’s home in the Schloss Rosenau, and the pair were soon inseparable. “She was my companion from my fourteenth to my twenty-fifth year,” wrote the prince upon his greyhound’s death, “a symbol therefore of the best and the fairest section of my life.”
When it was Albert’s turn to go to school in Bonn, Eos went with him, and when the prince married Victoria in 1840, at age twenty, the greyhound was sent ahead to Buckingham Palace in the care of her own personal valet. She’d grown into a fetching beast, black with white paws, a white underbelly, and a white tail tip. The newlyweds were both fond of animals and kept a number of dogs at court, but most of these belonged to the queen; Eos alone was decisively Albert’s dog. Six months after their marriage, the prince turned twenty-one, and in honor of the occasion, Victoria commissioned the royal jeweler, Garrard, to make an eight-by-ten-inch silver model of her husband’s greyhound (according to her diary, Albert was “much pleased” with his gift).
On their first anniversary, the queen presented Albert with another surprise: a portrait of Eos by the painter of animals Sir Edwin Landseer. This famous picture is entitled Eos, A Favourite Greyhound, Property of HRH Prince Albert, and it shows the dog posed against a rich red tablecloth, her muscles tense and rippling. Around her neck is a royal red-and-gold collar. With an eager and servile expression, she guards her master’s top hat and gloves, which are laid out ready for him on a hoof-footed, deerskin-covered stool. On a table behind the dog lies her master’s cane, topped with a red tassel and an ivory handle.
In terms of its pose, content, and composition, Eos, A Favourite Greyhound is regarded as an early example of the Victorian tradition of formal pet portraiture, but although the title describes it as a painting of Eos, it is, essentially, a portrait of Albert in absentia. The prince’s status and dignity are represented by his property: the eager bitch and the gentlemanly accessories. In light of the fact that Albert was himself sometimes dismissed as Victoria’s lapdog, perhaps the queen intended the painting as a form of subtle compensation. Either way, Albert was not offended; in fact, the portrait was so well received that she chose to commission another painting by Landseer for Albert’s next birthday, in 1842. In this picture, entitled Victoria, Princess Royal, with Eos, the new princess lies in her crib, and the greyhound—the prince’s other daughter—rests her slim snout protectively between the child’s bare feet. The dog’s gentle pose is perhaps deliberately reminiscent of the legendary hound Gelert, who gave his life to protect a royal baby (see HACHIKŌ).