We generally kept Sylva away from the garden, which was too vast to be easily and effectively fenced in; but we did not, for all that, deprive her of fresh air and exercise or of the rustic pleasures that appealed to her nature. The farmyard is extremely large and surrounded by buildings on all sides, and Sylva would spend long hours there whenever the weather was fine, amidst the chickens, ducks, turkeys and rabbits.

The first few times she had been frightened of the dogs. Even though they were chained up, a bark or a growl was enough to put her to flight. She would go and cower behind some barrels or a cart, and stay there shaking for a long time. One day, however, she lost her fear in rather strange circumstances.

I have said that the two dogs—strong, brawny mastiffs—though tied up all day and ferocious-looking, were actually the most harmless creatures alive. I could not have borne to keep vicious ones about. They were only dangerous to nightly prowlers carrying a sack or a stick. Although they would shake their chains with alarming fervor, they were in fact merely impatient to play; and as soon as they were set free, whoever was about had to beware of one thing only, and that was the too exuberant tokens of their gratitude.

Whenever they saw Sylva playing and running around amid the poultry, they just could not keep still. She had a way of scaring the whole barnyard and transforming it into a deafening aviary of squawks and snowy down that made them marvel with excitement. Their delight knew no bounds. I can’t say the same of the farmer and his folk. They would glare at this daily pandemonium with every sign of a most sullen disapproval. They claimed that if it went on, Sylva would cause the hens to stop laying, make the turkeys succumb to blood pressure, and jeopardize the whole poultry breeding.

“She’ll turn all your fowl into walking skeletons, the poor thing will,” they said, for they blamed not the “backward” child but me—and my unjustifiable leniency which, in their eyes, was past comprehension.

The fact was that Sylva was not content to chase and scare birds and rabbits. Now and then she would grab hold of one. She would suddenly swoop on a fowl with such force that anybody else would have had bruised elbows and knees. Her astonishing litheness spared her such consequences. For a few seconds there would be a turmoil of feathers, shrill squawks and flapping wings, then she would jump to her feet with her quarry clasped against her and dart off to some shed into which she would disappear. Later the corpse of her victim would be found there, showing the symbolic tooth marks of an animal that kills without hunger.

(In the end I found a remedy for these murders by forcing Sylva to eat the birds she had killed. I would wait until she had finished her ordinary meal, which was always very abundant, and under the threat of the stick and despite her heaving stomach she then had to devour her victim from head to tail. With the result that she quite soon stopped killing birds and rabbits and was content to keep them tightly clasped in her arms for a long moment. This produced an unexpected result: prompted by this gesture of motherly tenderness, she took an affectionate liking to these animals, and instead of killing them began to rock them as a child rocks its teddy bear.)

Now on that particular day, while the farmyard was echoing with frightened clucking, one of the dogs somehow managed to get loose by shaking his chain. Sylva, seeing him rush up to her, mingled her shrieks with those of the fowl and tried to run away. Bumped into a rabbit as panic-stricken as herself. Stumbled and fell flat against a chopping block. Tried to retrieve herself by catching hold of an object that protruded over the rim of the block. This object was a long, two-pronged boring bit, used to drill holes in barrels. Sylva straightened up, holding it tight with all the strength that her terror gave her, as if seizing her last chance. Whereupon she saw the dog before her, yelping with fright, his tail between his legs, decamping so fast that the soles of his feet kept kicking his hindquarters. Sylva had not seen the volley of stones with which one of the farm boys had pelted the animal in order to scare it away from her, so a strange confusion must have occurred in her little head. A strange correlation between this reversal of the situation, the headlong flight and the object to which she had clung like a drowning man and which she was still clutching for dear life.

At all events when, after remaining trembling and rooted to the spot for quite a time, she saw the dog, who had first sheltered behind a barrel and was now, with his courage returning, coming back toward her, shyly wagging an anxious tail, Sylva stopped clutching the saving bit with both hands and, instead, brandished it in front of her. The dog stopped irresolutely. When he started moving again, it was with hanging head and sidling body, in the time-honored attitude of dogs uncertain of the welcome they will get. Sylva, hanging onto her bit, did not budge. The dog took the last steps almost on his belly. And stayed there at Sylva’s feet, waiting to be punished or fondled at her choice.

When she bent down he rolled over on his back, his legs limply bent, offering his defenseless underside to her blows. Sylva lowered the hand that was holding the bit and placed the prongs on the frail, disarmed belly, and thus they remained for a long moment, like St. George and his dragon, in the silence of the reassured farmyard, where rabbits and feathered fowl had distractedly returned to their occupations.

Sylva straightened up at last and the dog immediately got to his feet, licked her hand with a brief flick of his tongue as if hurriedly discharging a duty, and threw himself among the chickens and turkeys with joyous barks, turning around toward Sylva as if to say: “Coming?” And indeed Sylva ran after him and, between the two of them, they had soon transformed the yard once more into a flying merry-go-around, such as it had never been before. And suddenly, amidst the uproar, I saw Sylva laugh.

It was the first time, and it was a laugh if you cared to call it that, a yapping less close to laughter than to a cry. Her mouth was wide open, not so much in width as in height, and what came cascading out of it might just as well have been screams of fright. Yet there was no doubt that she was laughing, and even violently. So much so that (yielding once more to the deceptive ease of ingenious explanations) I could not help working out new theories on the nature of laughter.

According to a certain Irish philosopher whom the French have annexed and whose name is Bergson, laughter is supposed to be a social defense against the individual’s possible degradation to the level of an automaton: “Something mechanical clapped onto something alive.” I had always considered that this was indeed probable but insufficient, since it leaves out of account the very form of laughter, that strange eruption of spasmodic gasps. Another Frenchman who also had a great fancy for what are called “rational” systems and concepts, Monsieur Valery—a rather distinguished gentleman with the face of an old woman furrowed with a thousand wrinkles, who came to talk to us at the Athenaeum about the death of civilizations some two or three years ago—explains in one of his books that laughter is a refusal to think, that the soul gets rid of a picture which seems to it inferior to the dignity of its own function, just as the stomach gets rid of things for which it won’t bear the responsibility, and by the same means of a brutal convulsion.

This certainly accounts for the convulsion but is far from comprising all the occasions that make us laugh. Whereas, when I witnessed Sylva in the throes of her first outburst, still so close to fright, I could see very well that it had sprung from that very fright which had suddenly been transformed into joy: a needless alarm that frees itself in this reflex, in this brutal, jolting release from stress which, in a great burst of elation, puts the nerves, frozen with fear, back into service—as a dog warms himself by shivering when coming out of the water.