"Don't sit there, those are my dog's ashes." Recently, a psychoanalyst friend of mine told me about a somewhat unusual session. Arriving at her practice one morning, she found that she had been robbed. Hastily searching for cash, the intruders spilled the contents of a small box onto the couch. These were the ashes of Fifinou, her Coton de Tuléar who had died a few years ago, an irresistible white fur ball. While she was on her knees frantically sweeping to save Fifinou's remains, a patient came in. She apologized for not being able to receive him in these conditions, the couch being covered with a fine mortuary dust.

It's easy to imagine the abyss of questions likely to open up in the patient's mind. Should my therapist have warned me that her practice was also a canine mausoleum? How can I recover from my trauma if she can't get over the loss of her dog?

Because let's face it, these days, mourning the loss of a pet gets bad press. Any excess of sadness seems suspect, a sign of worrying psychological fragility. Some don't hesitate to see a sign of rejection of the human species in this deviant love. After all, Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest misanthrope on Earth, made his poodle Atma his sole heir. Closer to home, Karl Lagerfeld bequeathed the princely amount of €3 million to his cat Choupette. Both of them adopted their pets in old age, believing that they would outlive them. But for most of us, life with an animal is inseparable from the heartbreaking experience of its death. This pain is all the more profound in that it is little recognized by society.

Proof of this very real taboo is the unexpected success of Cédric Sapin-Defour's book Son Odeur Après la Pluie ("Its Smell After Rain"). Published in March, the surprise bestseller has already sold over 70,000 copies in France. In it, the author, a teacher in Haute-Savoie (a region in the French Alps), recounts the 13 years he spent with his dog Ubac, a Bernese Mountain Dog. Instead of the traditional photo of the author on the banner, the publisher has chosen to feature a photo of Ubac, as if to signify the birth of a new genre, that of animal autofiction.

"Ubac is not only the subject of the book. He is in a way the narrator, since this relationship was built between two people," said Sapin-Defour. It was his death that prompted his master to take up the pen: "The real hero of this book is love, told through the extremely powerful relationship one can have with an animal," he said. "But it's a grief that's not very welcome to express. Faced with a tragedy like the murder of a teacher or the conflict in the Middle East, being inconsolable over the death of your dog seems out of place, even obscene."

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