Donkeys

The donkeys of the Lyon episode are not merely passing beasts of burden: one hesitant, heavily laden animal draws the narrator into an extended act of imagined conversation and exposes the distance between humane feeling and the violence built into its daily treatment. The encounter moves from patient attention to a broken halter, a driver’s blow, and a torn pocket, leaving compassion vivid but imperfectly clean of self-interest.

The Ass at the Gate

A poor ass carrying two large panniers stops the narrator at a gate. Its forefeet stand inside the threshold and its hind feet remain toward the street, as though it cannot decide whether to enter. The obstacle is practical, but the narrator’s attention settles on the animal’s hesitation and burden rather than on the delay to his journey down the Rhône.

He says that he cannot bear to strike an ass. Its patient endurance, expressed in its looks and carriage, disarms him wherever he meets one—whether in town or country, harnessed to a cart or carrying panniers, free or in bondage. His response is unusually relational: he has something civil to say to the animal and readily begins a conversation.

Imagined Conversation

The narrator treats the ass’s face as a kind of text, framing possible replies from its expression and, when that does not suffice, imagining what it might think by consulting his own heart. He contrasts this exchange with the silence he feels before parrots, jackdaws, apes, dogs, and cats. In his account, those animals either act or speak by rote, or cannot sustain the sort of dialogue he seeks; with an ass, he says, he could commune indefinitely.

At the gate he asks whether the animal means to come in or go out. The ass turns its head to look up the street, and the narrator proposes waiting for its driver. The scene grants the animal a conversational presence without claiming that it literally speaks: its gesture prompts the narrator to supply a voice and to linger over the uncertainty of its position.

Hunger, Burden, and the Broken Halter

As the conversation continues, the ass chews an artichoke stem, repeatedly dropping and retrieving it in a small struggle between hunger and distaste. The narrator imagines the stem as a bitter breakfast and the animal’s working life as a succession of bitter days and blows. He suspects its mouth must be as bitter as soot and wonders whether it has a friend in the world who would give it a macaroon.

He gives the ass one from a packet he has just bought. The gesture appears generous, but the narrator immediately qualifies his own benevolence: he recognizes that curiosity about how an ass would eat a macaroon may have mattered more to him than kindness. The passage thus keeps the act of care from becoming a simple moral triumph; attention to the animal’s appetite is mixed with amusement at its unusual recipient.

After the ass eats, the narrator urges it to come through the gate. The heavily loaded animal seems to tremble, hangs back, and resists as he pulls its halter. The halter breaks in his hand. Looking pensively at him, the ass seems to anticipate another beating; the narrator refuses that possibility, but before the exchange can continue, someone arriving strikes the animal’s hindquarters with a heavy bastinado, abruptly ending the encounter.

Violence and the Narrator’s Complication

The blow supplies the scene’s sharpest contrast: the narrator has treated the ass as a possible interlocutor, while another person responds to it with force. His protest follows, but even that moment is entangled with a bodily mishap. As the animal rushes away, a protruding end of osier from its pannier catches the narrator’s breeches pocket and tears it in a disastrous direction.

The torn pocket does not erase the animal’s suffering or make the narrator’s concern false. Instead, it prevents the episode from separating humane feeling neatly from inconvenience, comic observation, and self-regard. The ass’s burden, hunger, fear of a blow, and sudden flight remain the scene’s central facts; the narrator’s damaged clothing makes his response part of the same material encounter rather than a detached sermon about kindness.