A Dog of Flanders
by Louise de la Ramée (writing as Ouida)
***
There I was, pecking away at
my laptop’s keyboard last week when—I realized there was no Internet connection
at my location in the old Mexican colonial town of San Miguel de Allende.
Possibly because the city sits on a 6,000-foot high plateau between two major
mountain ranges, Internet connectivity can be slow, problematic or even
nonexistent. So be it. Or as the locals say, “ni moto.”
But now I’m back in the
flatlands of North Texas and picking up where I left off two weeks ago with
Louise de la Ramée’s story of a boy and his dog, the 1872 A Dog of Flanders .
Adventure classics left off
the story of the young orphan Nello, his impoverished, crippled grandfather
Jehan, and their milk cart dog Patrasche as Nello was nurturing a growing dream
of becoming an artist. Self-taught Nello draws a picture of his friend Alois,
daughter of the wealthy local miller. The girl’s father offers to buy the
portrait. The money would have enough to let Nello pay the fee charged to view
the paintings of his Flemish artist-idol Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings in a
nearby town. Valuing friendship more than money, Nello gives Alois’s picture
away to her father.
Meanwhile, he works on his
boyish masterpiece, hoping to enter it in an art contest whose winner will be
announced on the coming Christmas Eve. But things go from bad to worse. Alois’s
father worries about the growing intimacy between Nello and his budding
daughter. As old Jehan grows more feeble, he loses the customers who formerly
paid him to cart their milk to the local market. When Jehan dies two days
before Christmas, the last of his money goes for his burial, and Nello and the
dog Patrasche are left without shelter. Can things get any worse?
Or will they perhaps get
better? After all, there’s still the art contest to count on. And a lost purse full of money. . .
If for Edgar Allan Poe the
most poetic subject in world was the death of a beautiful young woman, for
animal lovers the most heartrending is the death of an old dog. It’s a story
trope at least as old as Homer, who broke his hero Odysseus’s heart with the
death of his faithful old hound Argos. Fast forward a couple of millennia to the
Victorian idealization of the innocence of both children and animals, and
you’ve got a combination that was guaranteed to make tears gush from the eyes
of nineteenth-century readers. Even this twenty-first century reader’s eyes
grew damp reading A Dog of Flanders.
Then I wondered, is Ramée
just manipulating my emotions? The answer apparently is yes, but. As Carol Christ writes in “A Victorian Obsession With Death,” the high mortality rates in Victorian England made
mourning a way of life. “Fifty-seven of every 100 children in working class
families were dead by five years of age,” Christ writes.
The rituals associated with
mourning at least recognized the need for stability in the face of so much
loss. It was a need recognized as much by Ramée as by her more famous literary
contemporary, Charles Dickens, who was self-traumatized by his own writing of
the death of his fictional character Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.
For Ramée, writing about the
sufferings of the cart dog Patrasche may have evoked a similar feeling. Although
unmarried and childless, she was devoted to animals to a degree that might be
described today as hoarding, sometimes keeping as many as thirty dogs. After
her death, her friends memorialized her fittingly by installing a fountain
for horses and dogs in her name, where “God’s creatures whom she loved (may)
assuage her tender soul as they drink.”
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics concludes a February of animal adventures with Louise de la Ramée’s A Dog of Flanders.)
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