Dumas started Histoire de mes bêtes as a series of 28 columns in his
newspaper,
Le Mousquetaire,
which he published in Paris after his return,
financially refreshed, from Brussels in 1854. When the
Le Mousquetaire
folded, he dropped the topic of animals for a decade, and then returned to
it, writing a second set of 15 pieces for a new journal in 1864. The two
sets of columns were collected into a single work and published in book
form in 1867.
The style of the work is light and conversational. Dumas successfully
creates the illusion that he parked on a sofa next to the reader and is
telling a funny story. The 1855 chapters tend to be thin: Dumas was
clearly stretching a single comic idea across two or three issues of the
paper, but remains amusing: the literary equivalent of a snack food. Most
of the events described took place in 1845-1852, when Dumas was at the
height of his success, and was building his folly, the Chateau de Monte Cristo
in the country. While several animals wander through the book, notably the
vulture Jugurtha, two monkeys, and a blue macaw, the principal hero of the
book is a dog, the Scottish pointer Pritchard, who combines high
intelligence with a marked propensity for theft. The stories about
Pritchard give the book a striking degree of unity, despite being composed
in two parts.
The 1960 Chilton translation by
A. Craig Bell
omits the last two chapters,
because Mr. Bell felt they were anticlimactic. There is apparently a 1909
Methuen translation, which (for reasons of contemporary English taste)
omitted an extended joke in Chapter 41, titled "A Natural History into the
Origins of the Peculiar Fashion of Greeting Among Dogs."
