Thoughts on Coco

As I continue working with the book, I’ll edit this into a coherent text, but I kept extending this short footnote about Coco and needed to move it to its own document…

Coco makes his first appearance in Volume 1, Chapter 26, and is immediately ambiguous:

Still, a man needs some relaxation to avoid falling into the trap of a life that is too severe, and kept a few of my most innocent occupations to bring me a little pleasure. I purchased a young squirrel, two months old, young enough to train and raise…but my enemies would not allow me even this little pleasure. Dr. Pinel, who would not let me any joy if a monster like him could possibly deprive me of it, went invisibly to my house to torment the little animal, to make it unruly and ill-behaved, and spoil what entertainment it might bring me. There was nothing they wouldn’t do, and much they did. 

It’s worth calling out the “actual” of Coco’s story, filtered through an unreliable narrator. Some time during the night in October 2017 Coco’s tail was injured (see v1ch31), though this oddly detached chapter is called “I become increasingly doubtful about the methods use for my remedy” rather than “DEMONS RIPPED MY SQUIRREL’S TAIL OFF.” In this scene, Prieur was in M.B.’s house the night before, and a part of Coco’s tail was cut off when M.B. finds him in the morning. No one was awakened by squirrel screams, and Prieur laughs the incident off the next day. 

It is always tempting to take an author at his word, but is that appropriate here? Later, M.B. talks in his memoir [cite chapter] about being urged to harm the squirrel. Coco’s death is described in v2ch16, but it is confusing. In September 1819 the squirrel, who does not live in a cage, doesn’t eat his food. He may perhaps be sick, unknown. Typically M.B. leaves his coat piled on his bed for Coco to sleep in, but this night, Coco is under M.B.’s bedsheet, and as M.B. climbs into bed, he feels like the goblins shove him, and he crushes Coco. How true is any of this? Small animals are resilient, they’re not fragile things made of glass. It’s hard to tell exactly what happened here. Coco is variously described as being sweet and gentle, and badly behaved, and his injuries vary (while M.B. repeatedly mentions Coco’s tail being injured several times, Coco’s broken leg is mentioned off-handedly once in v2 [cite when found], and never again.) 

Take this from v2Ch49: “They had found a way to get into his fur to torment him, agitate him, to make him unbearable, by making him jump in various directions, go up and down along my clothes, to upset me to the point of making me lose my temper, to force me to hit this poor little animal, to the point of diminishing the friendship that we had for each other, and to expose me to being bitten by him, without there being any bad intention on his part, any more than on mine, when I beat him.”

Atlas Obscura has a fun article on the pet squirrel craze of this period, and there’s an interesting thread here about keeping a pet squirrel. Opinions range from “they’re adorable” to “horrible bastards.”

All that is to say, M.B.’s relationship to Coco is ambiguous, at best, and if he has a condition like paranoid schizophrenia, who can say what M.B.’s behavior to the creature was before he filters it through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Coco has been a terrible bastard, M.B. is keeping him in a hotel room, he’s running loose, we’ve established that he’s poorly trained, and that means likely to bite and gnaw. M.B.’s landlord is likely a very tolerant person, but what happens if M.B. is told that Coco is damaging the room, and he’ll have to get rid of him, and then what story will Berbiguier tell the reader?