"a spaniel, and very small; she littered not long ago; she is lame of
the left forefoot; and she has very long ears." "So you have seen her?"
cried the eunuch. "No," Zadig answered; "I have never seen her; and I
never even knew that the queen had a dog."

About the same time the handsomest horse in the king's stables escaped;
and the chief huntsman, meeting Zadig, inquired if he had not seen the
animal. And Zadig responded: "It is the horse that gallops the best; he
is five feet high; his shoe is very small; his tail is three and a half
feet long; the knobs of his bit are of twenty-three-carat gold; and he
is shod with eleven-penny silver." And the chief huntsman asked, "Which
way did he go?" To which Zadig replied: "I have not seen him; and I have
never heard anything about him."

The chief eunuch and the chief huntsman naturally believed that Zadig
had stolen the queen's dog and the king's horse; so they had him
arrested and condemned, first to the knout, and afterward to exile for
life in Siberia. And then both the missing animals were recovered; so
Zadig was allowed to plead his case. He swore that he had never seen
either the dog of the queen or the horse of the king. This is what had
happened: He had been walking toward a little wood and he had seen on
the sand the track of an animal, and he judged that it had been a dog.
Little furrows scratched in the low hillocks of sand between the
footprints showed him that it was a female whose teats were pendent, and
who therefore must have littered recently. As the sand was less deeply
marked by one foot than by the three others, he had perceived the
queen's dog to be lame.

As for the larger quadruped, Zadig, while walking in a narrow path in
the wood, had seen the prints of a horse's shoes, all at an equal