« La rage n’existe pas »

“La rage n’existe pas” is the certifying practitioner’s sweeping claim that rabies does not exist. The expression turns a routine certificate into a comic confrontation between asserted personal experience and established veterinary authority; its immediate consequence is that the narrator keeps Dingo under close supervision and confines him to a sedentary life.

The Claim and Its Setting

The practitioner makes the declaration while handing over a certificate. He challenges the narrator to rely on personal experience rather than certificates, autopsies, books, and clinical teaching, and dismisses the belief in rabies at Alfort, Lyon, and Toulouse as either credulity or a bluff. His certainty is not presented as an established medical finding: it is the practitioner’s own emphatic position.

He extends that denial into an accusation against the Institut Pasteur, alleging that it invented rabies and treats it to avoid financial failure. He compares the institution’s supposed decision to attribute rabies to dogs with governments’ decision that the people need a religion. The argument thus shifts from a diagnosis to a broader suspicion of institutions, while the practitioner’s ridicule substitutes confidence for proof.

The Practitioner’s Evidence

To support his position, the speaker invokes ten years of collecting ownerless dogs at Raincy. He says he took in dogs that panted, held their tails low, or were losing their coats, including animals described as rabid that the police wanted killed or that others brought to be put down. He claims that he never had an accident with them. These are presented as the grounds for his certainty, not as independent confirmation that rabies is nonexistent.

He offers an alternative explanation: an epileptiform condition, which he associates with essential, Jacksonian, or latent epilepsy. He points to symptoms such as drooling, biting the tongue, and convulsions as signs that can resemble rabies. His account also includes a counterexample that he explains away: his wife’s aunt was bitten by one of his dogs and died two days later, he says, from anthrax at the age of eighty-four. He accepts that dogs can have anthrax while continuing to reject rabies. After delivering this confident account, he charges the narrator a very high price for the certificate.

Consequences for Dingo

The narrator responds not by adopting the practitioner’s certainty but by becoming more cautious. He watches Dingo closely, keeps him at home, allows only short walks for exercise when accompanying him, and most often keeps him on a leash. The certificate episode therefore precedes a practical restriction, whether or not the practitioner’s explanation is persuasive.

Dingo’s new indoor routine is described as a sharp contrast with his former freedom and adventures in Paris. After inspecting the rooms, he appears to accept that the small antechamber cannot serve as a place to play and settles into the immobility of an apartment dog. His resignation carries humiliation and languor; he lies down persistently, loses his appetite, and does not wake even when offered raw meat. The sequence leaves the practitioner’s pronouncement shadowed by an outcome it cannot explain away: the certificate is followed by vigilance and confinement, while Dingo’s condition visibly worsens.

Narrative Function

The expression’s force lies in the gap between its absolute wording and the limited evidence offered for it. The speaker invokes clinical terminology and years of experience, yet his account relies on personal testimony and sweeping dismissal of institutions. The narrator’s response is equally concrete: rather than resolving the medical dispute, he changes Dingo’s daily life. The episode makes the phrase a piece of overconfident speech with material consequences, and places medical authority, skepticism, and the care of an individual animal in uneasy tension.