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.