Chiens

Chiens are the two starving dogs who confront a mother rat and her litter in Stefania’s account of an early-morning journey. They are not a continuing cast of animal characters, but their encounter with the rat—and Stefania’s decision to intervene—gives them a lasting place in her moral imagination. When she later reflects on the scene, pity no longer belongs only to the vulnerable: she finds herself in the young animals and in the hungry dogs as well.

Appearance and Encounter

The dogs appear among scattered rags in a poor neighborhood, where they face a large rat. Stefania describes their coats as bristling and their bodies as gaunt, with their ribs showing. Though they bare their teeth, they initially hesitate to attack. The rat, for its part, has established that it can defend itself and is using its body to cover something beneath it.

When the dogs rush forward, the scene becomes a struggle rather than a simple contest between predator and prey. The rat darts from one dog to the other, and the animals tumble together in a confusing knot of movement. Stefania’s attention shifts to the place the rat is guarding; she sees that the dogs have uncovered a nest, where tiny creatures move among the rags. The revelation changes the meaning of the dogs’ confrontation: the rat is defending her young, and the dogs threaten a family already exposed and vulnerable.

Stefania’s Intervention

Stefania is on her bicycle and initially considers turning back. Instead, she presses hard on the pedals and drives toward the animals, shouting. The dogs scatter. The mother rat is knocked aside, but gets back onto her feet and returns to her litter. Stefania’s intervention interrupts the attack and gives the rat access to the nest again; the account does not say what becomes of the dogs afterward.

Only after the immediate danger passes does Stefania register her own fear. The episode is thus not presented as a calculated act of rescue: she acts before she has time to think through what she is doing, and understanding follows the action. The dogs’ flight marks the immediate consequence, while the return of the mother rat to her young leaves the vulnerable nest at the center of the scene.

The Dogs in Stefania’s Later Reflection

The dogs reappear in Stefania’s thoughts when words spoken by a priest provoke a powerful emotional response. She cannot take in those words as an ordinary explanation; instead, her feelings gather around images of helpless creatures and hunger. She associates herself with a defenseless kitten and with the hairless baby rats left among refuse, at risk of dying from poison or between the jaws of gaunt dogs. Yet the dogs, too, deserve her pity. That qualification prevents the animals from settling into a simple moral division between innocent victims and evil attackers.

Stefania then recognizes that her compassion extends to herself as well as to the animals. She understands herself simultaneously as a helpless creature and as a hungry dog trying to tear at someone weaker while suffering from pain and need. In this recollection, the dogs make vulnerability morally complicated: the capacity to harm does not erase deprivation, and suffering does not make harm disappear. Their role is not to excuse the attack but to help Stefania perceive a shared exposure to need across the scene.

Narrative Significance

The dogs’ encounter with the rat gives a visible form to a conflict over care and survival. The mother rat protects her young; the dogs press toward a nest they have uncovered; Stefania becomes an unexpected intervening force. The sequence moves from apparent menace to recognition of what is being defended, then to a choice that interrupts the attack. It also gives concrete shape to Stefania’s later, difficult self-pity, which includes both the powerless and those whose hunger makes them dangerous.

That complexity distinguishes the dogs from mere symbols of cruelty. Their physical condition matters to Stefania’s retrospective understanding: she sees them as hungry and worthy of compassion even as they threaten the litter. The episode does not provide their names, history, or fate, and it does not resolve the material conditions that produced their hunger. Its significance lies instead in how Stefania carries the encounter forward, refusing to reserve pity exclusively for the innocent or the weak.