It wasn’t easy for a dog used to the freedom of the San Gabriel Mountains to accommodate herself to the constraints of an apartment. She was taken out six times a day. The schedule was stable, and everybody had their allotted times. But Hamlet could never resign herself to the regimen of the leash; her pace never quite matched that of her companion. She made a great hit on the sidewalks, though. A basset was not a common sight in 1961, and she looked so tortured in her collar that even the proverbially stony Parisian hearts would soften. “Does she bite?” they asked. “No, but I do,” I replied, for I was eleven and thought that the height of humor.
It was during my four o’clock walks with Hamlet that I grew to know Paris in its inward life: the housewives shopping with their net-string bags, the men playing boules in the park, the white-grey colors of the squat, serried buildings.Hamlet, alas, was less appreciative. I had been given a pair of three-wheeled skates from Italy, and I would sometimes put these on, forcing Hamlet to trot miserably behind as I rolled down the Champs-Élysées in my schoolboy shorts. On Avenue Foch, with its bordered lawns, tall chestnuts, and signs reading ne pas marcher sur la pelouse, we could sometimes let her off the leash if there were no gendarmes about. But Paris is a city of stone and iron, pedestrians and pigeons. Its pocket parks and grated trees could not satisfy a California dog’s craving for dusty trails and the smell of sagebrush. Though she liked disbanding parliaments of pigeons, though the world’s most famous monuments offered themselves for her peeing pleasure, Hamlet was not enriched by her sojourn.
Unfortunately, she not only urinated on the Arc de Triomphe – a mere two blocks away – she left landmarks of her own in our apartment. She knew this was defendu but acted purely in the spirit of revenge. She did not like to be left alone. When we came back from an evening out, we could be sure of finding a sign of her displeasure. However much we beat her, she was a refractory hound. Because we lived in mortal terror of our concierge (who never did come into the apartment), we were always moving furniture around to hide the latest spot. The concierge and his wife also had a dog, a large standard poodle named Vulcan who threw himself in barking fury against the window of their apartment at the appearance of anybody, whether a stranger or tenant of 10 years standing. Hamlet regarded Vulcan with disdain. When she was angry, as when some curious male would sniff her backside, she’d growl once, bare her teeth, and turn on her suitor in a flash – end of courtship.
As for humans, they never disturbed Hamlet’s composure unless they bore food or had rattled her leash. Even though she had no talent for them, Hamlet was avid for walks. If she heard the clink of her leash, though you might have touched it by the merest accident, you were committed to taking her out. She could be dead asleep (or wide awake – even connoisseurs of the breed have trouble distinguishing between the two states), the softest chink would bring her bounding and barking into the foyer. It got to the point where we had to spell the word “w-a-l-k.”
But there were fabulous promenades in our part of Paris. Each street raying from the Étoile had its own ambiance: cosmopolitan Kléber framing the Eiffel Tower, Victor Hugo with its elegant shops and window displays, park-lined Foch, quiet Carnot, and the white, glamorous sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. My favorite walk was one we sometimes took at night on the quays of the Seine. The windows of Notre Dame might glow in the distance or we might see a lacework of light ring the Place de la Concorde, but on the quays of the river it was shadowed, fresh, and lonely. In that dark artery of Paris, we walked in quiet, in leisure, and – the veils of nostalgia drop heavily here – in peace. For me, the family found its perfect unity in these dark moments, surrounded by the city. And Hamlet, as unconscious as we, padded along the stone quays by the murmuring waters of the Seine.
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