“This is my companion at the sunset of my life. I love him like a child. Over my whole life I have had fifty dogs, but with him I have a special bond.”
This is how Alain Delon spoke about his dog Loubo. In these words one hears a special intonation—not of an actor or a movie star, but of a man for whom a dog was the embodiment of pure devotion.
“Once I shouted at my dog and hit her on the back. She sat down and looked at me… and I saw that she was crying. From that day I understood how deeply dogs are able to express their feelings.”
Perhaps it was there, in that gaze of a dog who had burst into tears, that his long path toward understanding true devotion began. Since then, Delon has never lived without dogs. There were many of them, and each left a mark.
“What is great in a dog is that a dog knows that you go, but does not know whether you will come back.”
For Delon, this simple thought was the quintessence of loyalty. Dogs know neither ambition nor fame. Their love always remains unconditional.
“I am always moved by the dogs who stay beside the homeless. They do not care that their master is homeless. They love the person like Mitterrand’s Labrador loved his master, without knowing that he was the president of the country.” “Dogs—they are like people, only they have fewer flaws. A human being can be a sadist and even worse. An animal—what bad can it do, apart from urinating on a flowerbed?”
Thus Delon defined for himself the purity of the animal world: sincerity without unnecessary words and fidelity without conditions.
But along with tenderness there always lived an intolerance of cruelty.
“Animals mean a lot to me. I hate bastards who hurt them.”
“Just imagine: torturers doused a dog with gasoline and set her on fire for entertainment! If I had seen this with my own eyes, I would have risked spending the rest of my life in prison. I would simply have killed the one who did it. Even animals attack each other only for food, not for ‘entertainment.’”
In these words lie his hot blood and his intransigence toward injustice.
And if in his youth he warmed puppies beneath the flap of a military jacket, then later, already being famous, he allowed himself the “luxury” of maintaining five shelters for stray dogs and cats.
“My ex-wife and my children were at the vet when they brought a cat that someone had tied to a car. Her paw was almost torn off. I called a helicopter to take the animal to my Paris veterinarian, who amputated her paw. Since then she has lived in my house.”
Delon’s care for animals was never limited to words. It was always deeds.
“Every dog has his share of life, his gravestone… And couples rest together. And I will be buried in my chapel, next to my dogs.”
“Everything is fake, everything is a lie… But when I leave, I want to leave together with my dog.”
These confessions sound like a spiritual testament.
Alain Delon is an actor, a symbol, a legend. But perhaps the main thing he will leave behind is not only films, but also his love. Love for those who will never betray. Love for animals who, in his words, “know how to love for nothing in return.”
Perhaps it was precisely because, from his earliest years, he had tasted the bitterness of betrayal from those dearest to him, that Alain Delon spent his whole life searching for that selfless love in which there are no conditions, no calculations, no masks. And he found it in dogs. In their loyalty, in their sincerity, in their ability to love not for fame, not for beauty, not for a name, but simply for presence. For him it was a refuge — an island of pure feelings, untouched by lies and disappointment.
And if a human being is capable of loving with the same selflessness, then perhaps this is the true measure of human greatness? What do you think about this? How often do we miss what truly matters. How often do we fail to notice what is right beside us, far more important than fleeting vanity. Alain Delon is not just the name of an actor. Alain Delon is an example of a man, yes, with human weaknesses, but with great dignity, which he proved with his entire life.
Great!