Behind the Bathtub the story of a French Dog by Colette Audry

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good. 1963. Little, Brown and Co. 1st Edition. 

In these pages Colette Audry tells the strangely compelling story of the six years during which a dog played a major part in her own and her son's life. Douchka, a handsome Alsatian bitch of great vitality, and little in common with the traditional hero of animal literature. She loathed small children. She was a terrible barker. She created havoc in Mme. Audry's small Paris apartment. 'Because of Douchka I was obliged to perform innumerable tiresome chores, take countless tedious precautions. She was, slowly but surely, crushing my independence--and I, far from resisting, had begun to aid and abet the process. It was not so much Douchka I was turning my back on as myself. Because I loved her. To her I surrendered what no man had ever taken from me--my freedom of movement and decision.' As the author of this memoir, no one could seem less likely than Mme. Audry, a lycée professor, novelist, politician, fighting feminist, divorcée and unsentimental intellectual. As she candidly describes the rewards and penalties of her extraordinary involvement with Douchka, she is gradually seeing her own life from a new vantage point. Behind the bathtub, where Douchka customarily retired when punished, is also where the stricken dog goes to die--after having changed the existence of her owner. This book is a sentimental journey into the past, to be sure, but it is a rigorously intellectual one. In the end, Colette Audry has written an amazingly subtle and perceptive examination of the devotion that can and often does exist between two living things belonging to essentially different worlds.