From her portraits and sculptures, we know Eos was a sleek and dignified dog, but we know little about her personality or temperament other than a brief description included by Albert in a letter he wrote to Victoria from Germany before their marriage. In this letter, he describes Eos as “very friendly if there is plum-cake in the room … keen on hunting, sleepy after it, always proud and contemptuous of other dogs.” She may have been rather less keen on hunting after January 1842, when she was accidentally shot by Prince Ferdinand, a relative of Albert’s visiting from Germany. (“Favorites often get shot,” Lord Melbourne reassured the queen, adding that he “has known it happen often.”)
When the queen informed her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, of the accident, he immediately replied to say how sorry he was to hear about what had happened to “dear Eos, a great friend of mine,” and expressed his annoyance at the culprit, Prince Ferdinand, suggesting that “he ought rather to have shot somebody else of the family.” The queen’s subsequent letters are full of information about the dog’s recovery and convalescence. On February 1, 1842, Victoria wrote that Eos “is going on well, but slowly, and still makes us rather anxious.” Four days later, she wrote to let her uncle know that “Eos is quite convalescent; she walks about wrapped up in flannel.”
Happily, the greyhound went on to live two more years after her injury, dying in 1844. Her demise may have been hastened by overindulgence. Shortly before the dog’s death, Victoria wrote to tell King Leopold that Eos had recently suffered from an “attack” that was attributed to “overeating (she steals wherever she can get anything), living in too warm rooms, and getting too little exercise.” She died very suddenly, after seeming quite well an hour before. Albert was devastated. “I am sure,” he wrote to his grandmother, “you will share my sorrow at this loss. She was a singularly clever creature, and had been for eleven years faithfully devoted to me.” Eos was buried beneath a mound above the slopes at Windsor Castle, the resting place of many royal pets before her. On hearing of her demise, Viscount Melbourne, perhaps alarmed that more hideous mementos might be forthcoming, declared himself “in despair at hearing of poor Eos,” but he was on safe ground: the Prince Consort limited himself to designing a life-size bronze monument marking the spot of the greyhound’s grave, and a second sculpture based on Landseer’s original portrait. “Poor dear Albert,” the queen wrote in her journal. “He feels it terribly, & I grieve so for him.” Grieving was something Victoria did well; her mourning for Albert, after he died in 1861, lasted almost forty years.
Even today, dogs are injured and sometimes killed in hunting accidents, though far fewer than in Albert’s day, thank goodness. Still, every age brings its own dangers, and whatever other concerns he may have had about Eos, at least Albert didn’t have to worry about her suffocating in the backseat of a car, overheating in an airplane cargo compartment, or drowning in a swimming pool—all accidents to which, as I know only too well, bulldogs are especially prone. The last of these dangers is perhaps my greatest anxiety, at least in relation to Grisby. It’s obvious these top-heavy dogs aren’t natural swimmers. Their bodies don’t bend in the middle, and their legs can’t paddle fast enough to keep them afloat. “Do not allow your bulldog near water!” warns the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog. “He will sink like a stone!”
But dogs are individuals just as people are, and the fact is, some bulldogs love to swim, just as others—as YouTube amply testifies—love to skateboard, dive, ride on the back of motorcycles, and rock out to the blues. Grisby happens to be one of those dogs that just love water (though he doesn’t like rain and flees from the tub). The first time we took him to a beach, he ran straight into the sea and began to do an odd kind of doggy paddle. Despite his manifest enthusiasm, however, he’s too heavy to keep himself above the surface for long, and I’m always worried about him getting in over his depth.
For two years we lived in California, renting a beautiful ranch-style house with a pool in the backyard. At first, I was kept awake at night by the thought of coming home from work only to find my bulldog’s dead body at the bottom of the pool. And for a while, it seemed my fears were justified—on two occasions, after watching us dive into the deep end, Grisby, wanting in on the fun, did the same thing. Luckily, these two soakings seemed to work as shock therapy; after that, he seemed afraid of the pool and, apart from occasionally growling at the floats, wouldn’t go near it. I couldn’t even get him to sit in the shallow end to cool off. He preferred to snooze under my deck chair in the shade, and his happy snores gave me a good reason to stay lazing in the sun. (One of the many advantages of having a dog is that it gives you an excuse for doing things that might seem too indulgent if you were doing them alone. “I don’t like to disturb the dog,” you can tell yourself as you linger another hour in bed or at the beach.)
Back home on the East Coast, I take Grisby to the Chesapeake Bay to escape the summer heat. Our favorite beach is just a twenty-minute drive from the city; it’s free, easily accessible, and totally deserted. Here’s the catch: it’s filthy. For most people, this would be a deal breaker, but dogs are different. It’s true that the water is cloudy and the sand strewn with plastic debris, but none of that bothers Grisby, so it doesn’t bother me. One of the many things he’s reminded me of is that it’s more fun to be dirty than clean. He loves the smells and textures of trash, and he spends hours digging for buried chicken bones and discarded sandwiches. We spend many summer mornings on our special dirty beach, sunbathing, swimming together, dozing, and searching for treasure. At times, I have to veto Grisby’s playthings—used diapers and dead fish are going too far—but in short, I’ve learned to love a beach with dog-friendly detritus.
Speaking on behalf of Grisby, filth is fun, and it’s a rare dog that looks forward to bath night. Charles Robert Leslie, a nineteenth-century royal academician, wrote in his autobiography that when Victoria returned from her coronation, she heard her spaniel barking in the hall, and was apparently “in a hurry to lay aside the sceptre and ball she carried in her hands, and take off the crown and robes, to go and wash little Dash.” It’s hard to imagine the older Victoria washing her many dogs, and equally difficult to imagine the dignified Prince Albert bathing Eos. On the other hand, I can’t imagine the stately Eos bounding, as Grisby did recently, into a stagnant cemetery pond and emerging covered in stinking graveyard mud (naturally, he climbed into my lap in the car and sat there steaming and reeking all the way home). I also can’t help wondering whether Eos ever actually did guard Albert’s possessions, as she does in the Landseer portrait, or whether the picture’s composition is purely symbolic. Another question that’s crossed my mind is whether Albert struck his dog with the same cane Eos is carefully guarding; according to the biographer Jules Stewart, the prince “took a severe hand to his children’s upbringing” and “could easily sink into ill-temper.”
Grisby’s never been known to guard any of my possessions, though since we go for a run together every week, he’s grown especially attached to my running shoes (so much could be said about what shoes signify to dogs), not only because they’re sweatier and smellier than most of my other shoes but also because they speak his language; he knows what they mean. Thomas Mann observed a similar skill in his dog Bashan: “He sees what my intentions are. My clothes betray these to him, the cane that I carry, also my attitude and expression, the cool and preoccupied look I give him, or the irritation and challenge in my eyes. He understands.” Heatstroke is another anxiety when we go running since, like other flat-faced breeds, bulldogs are particularly susceptible to overheating and should be watched in hot weather (we never leave home without water, and I’m well versed in snout-to-mouth resuscitation). Still, he seems pretty resilient, and when he’s well and truly beat, he’ll flop down in the shade and refuse to move.