At the end of the movie there is the discussion about the dog who bit his owner and then died of remorse. Does anyone know where this comes from? I could not catch the source the Mother Superior quoted.
shareIt was the closing line of a poem by Oliver Goldsmith titled "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog". You can find it at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17102
shareThis is more fully explained in the book by Somerset Maugham, "The Painted Veil". In the book, the main characters are Dr. Walter Fane and his wife Kitty. The colonial official with whom Kitty has an affair is Charles Townsend.
Upon his deathbed, Walter says "... the dog it was that died". This is a quote from Goldsmith's Elegy, although Kitty does not understand it until the reference is explained to her by Waddington, the local official who has befriended the Fanes when they travel to the interior and into the epidemic.
I do not believe they used the line, nor did they make any reference to it, in the 2006 remake "The Painted Veil".
The book is marvelous and remains my favorite of Maughams work.