SCALING NEW HEIGHTS IN LOVE

After losing his beloved Labrador to cancer, 37-year-old PE teacher and mountain guide Cédric Sapin-Defour stood quietly before a litter of twelve Bernese Mountain Dog puppies he had seen advertised in a local newspaper.

Most of the puppies bounded toward him with wagging tails and hopeful eyes. But one didn’t. The sweet one with the blue collar stayed where he was, casting only a shy glance. “He didn’t seem the least bit interested I was there – unlike his brothers and sisters,” says Cédric. And, as with every relationship, indifference is magnetic”.

That puppy would become Ubac – named after the shaded, often mist-covered north side of a mountain – and the steadfast companion of a man who found in the black-and-tan dog an unconditional friendship that asked for nothing and gave everything.

He had spent months looking in rescue centres, preferring to adopt rather than buy, but had no success. Then along came the advert. “I’d been seriously looking for another dog and was keen to adopt a Bernese. I love all dogs but I see this breed as [open itals] the [close itals] dog for the mountains, and having been raised on Alpine myths, I wanted that breed above all others.”

He had lost Iko to cancer when he was nine, after seven years together. “It was violent, quick, cruel,” he recalls of Iko’s death. “I wasn’t ready.” But as grief turned to acceptance, he found himself feeling open to the possibility of new life. The relationship with Ubac was destined to be so intense that Cédric wrote a bestselling first book about what happened next.

His glorious ode to the dog, Son Odeur Après La Pluie (His Smell After the Rain, in French), became a literary sensation in his native France and is about to be published in translation in the UK.

In France it was a sleeper hit that quietly and steadily became a cultural, word-of-mouth phenomenon among booksellers and their readers and went on to sell more than 600 thousand copies. It won the prestigious 30 Millions d’Amis literary prize [for books about animals] and had soon wiggled its way into every bookshop in the country.

Yet there was no flash marketing campaign. Instead, says Laure Barros of Garin bookshop in Chambery, in South-Eastern France: “There was a steady flow of customers asking for ‘that book about the dog’ after [publishers] stuck up for it. It became a media phenomenon.”

For Cédric, who had never thought of writing a book before, the project began not as a commercial proposition but as something deeply personal. “Living was enough in itself,” he says of his deep relationship with his pet. “And one of the risks of writing is making us forget to live.”

But when Ubac died of advanced old age in 2017, aged nearly 14 – an extraordinary lifespan for a breed with a life expectancy of seven to ten years – something shifted as Cédric let grief take shape.

“I wanted the book to be driven by happiness,” he explains. “And by how much I missed him, of course, but mostly the joy associated with his time on earth.”

Cédric wrote not from journals, but from memory, summoning the feel of fur beneath his fingers; the scent of warm, wet dog; the quiet companionship that asked no questions and offered no judgment. “I decided to write about Ubac to give myself an opportunity for one last walk with him,” he tells me. “I wanted the book to be mostly the joy associated with his time on earth, because living with a dog is first and foremost about summoning joy and having it by your side.”

The book is not sentimental in the way some animal memoirs can be. It is quiet and reverent, observant and accidentally profound. “Loving an animal really does mean just one thing: loving,” Cédric writes. “Whether the source of this emotion is a man, a woman, a place, an animal doesn’t matter at the end of the day. They’re our teachers, and the finest homage we can pay them is to try to love in the way they do.”

This unashamed declaration – of the legitimacy of grief over an animal – is part of what made the book so striking to readers in France, where pet ownership is common, but where public mourning for animals is often brushed aside. “The comment, ‘Oh well, you’ll get another dog’ is unbearable,” points out Cédric.

Instead, in a country with more than eight million pet dogs, the book struck a collective nerve and changed attitudes around the topic. Released quietly in the spring of 2023 with just 4,300 copies and no advertising budget, it wasn’t expected to sell. By summer it had become a bestseller, with tens of thousands of copies sold. By the end of the year, it had been reprinted multiple times to cope with demand.

“I’m very happy to live in a world where a book telling a love story between a man and an animal can find such a big audience,” explains the author. “When I meet booksellers and readers, I can see the book means something to them. It comforts and validates this possibility of loving an animal.”

He thinks its success is explained because at heart the book is about the fundamental universal yearning to be understood. “The real hero of the book is the connection [between man and dog]. It’s the love. With its joys and tragedies,” Cédric says. “And every human on this earth has experienced these tremors in their heart.”

Readers who met him at events – and there were many as he travelled France for the best part of two years, visiting festivals and bookshops to promote the title which is also a homage to a life of adventure in the great outdoors – often tell him how the book seemed to be speaking directly to them personally in its universality. “Some told me it had reminded them of a relationship with a person, a place, a memory,” he says.

This explains, perhaps, why it has also resonated far beyond those who consider themselves pet or “dog people”. Readers have told him they resonate with a story of home or one of loss; a cautionary tale that illustrates time passing and the importance of living each day fully.

“Because dogs age so much faster than humans, time is stacked against the relationship,” he writes.

Cédric’s own story only deepens the emotional weight of the book. Raised in the outdoors by two PE teachers, he absorbed early the rhythms of the natural world – “play, freedom, autonomy, the value of the little things in life and being in harmony with the natural world” as he puts it. He too became a sports teacher, and hikes together created a bond that brought Cédric a sense of fulfilment as well as new love.

In 2006 he married his wife Mathilde, whom he had met as a student, and decided to start a life on the road in a campervan, travelling the mountains with Ubac.

Unfortunately, Mathilde had a paraglider accident in the Italian Dolomites. When she awoke from her coma she couldn’t remember her mother’s name, the village she lived in or which country she was in, but she remembered that Cédric was writing a book about Ubac.

“Mathilde had a very serious accident in the mountains,” says Cédric. “She could easily have died. For the last three years she’s been fighting to get back to a normal life.” At the time of her accident, at the age of 46, the book wasn’t finished and Mathilde who also worked as a PE teacher before retirement, asked him to carry on. “She knew how much Ubac had changed our lives and how crucial it was to write about him. So, I went back.”

Perhaps this is why the final chapters carry such a powerful undercurrent – not just of grief, but of gratitude, of what a privilege it is to love anything deeply at all.

Cédric, who does not have children by choice, remains adamant that he has not written a grief manual. “I never wanted this to be a book about loss,” he says. “This is a book about joy. I didn’t want to share sadness. I wanted to share joy and beauty. And you can do that even in mourning.”

Publication in the UK arrives at a moment when conversations around pet grief are beginning to open up, and as the connection we form with animals is increasingly recognised as psychologically significant to our wellbeing.

Says Cédric: “Perhaps we humans develop this sort of love for animals, precisely because they’re different to us and are way ahead of us in their ability to give love continuously, lastingly, loyally, freely. When it comes to the capacity for love, they’re our teachers.

But ultimately, it is a beautifully written memoir, infused with alpine light and mountain silence, that makes a case for slowing down, for noticing, for remembering.

It also quietly resists the idea that animal grief is somehow “lesser”. “Grief always has the same stages,” Cédric reminds me. “You can’t and shouldn’t try to cut corners with them.”

And if it takes a shaggy 45kg Bernese Mountain Dog to help us face those truths with tenderness, so be it.

Ubac and Me by Cédric Sapin-Defour (Harvill Secker, £18.99) is out now