CHAPTER 5: THE DOG.

CHAPTER 7: THE HORSE.
CHAPTER 8: THE BIRDS.
CHAPTER 9: THE INSECTS.

CHAPTER 6: THE CAT

It takes an essentially feminine and poetic nature to understand the cat. – Champfleury.

The Egyptians appreciated the beauty of a woman according to her degree of resemblance to the Cat; Cleopatra had a very marked resemblance, according to the coins which preserve her effigy. When fire consumed a house, they were mainly concerned with saving the Cats. They killed anyone who killed one, even unintentionally. They deified this much-loved animal, making it represent the goddess Isis, or the sun, because the proportions of its pupils follow the height of that star above the horizon. They placed him on the altars of their temples sumptuously adorned: his ears pierced with gold jewellery, on his neck a necklace marked with hieroglyphics, around his body bands covered with very laudatory hieratic characters. They celebrated festivals in his honour followed by thousands of pilgrims. When he died, they embalmed him so well that these mummies are preserved in our museums; they gave him a magnificent funeral, followed by public mourning; and they placed his body in a special necropolis. Cambyses, king of the Persians, took a city in Egypt by having soldiers attack it, each soldier carrying a cat on their arms; for them it was the best shield.

The Romans saw in him the household genie house, genius loci, the incarnation of the Penates and the Lares gods. They based oracles on his antics and his meows. In consideration of his independent character, they sculpted him lying at the feet of Liberty.

His fate was much different later in some of our Western countries. We were afraid of the cat. We saw him as a diabolical being; the Black Cat, with green eyes, seemed the ironic and wicked incarnation of the Spirit of Evil. These pretty beasts, who are so wise during the day, but who have a nocturnal and mysterious side, were accused of giving their complicity to the disorders hidden in the night, of making pacts with all the prowlers of darkness, the ghosts, the evildoers, the lovers stealthy. They were suspected of crawling into the forest of chimneys, above the sleeping city, to assemble in sabbaths and cast spells. They were believed to be associated with the research of alchemists and magicians, with the evocations of necromancers, with the curses of witches, with all occult sciences, and with all demonic practices. - For so many good reasons, they were sometimes delivered to torture. In Metz, once a year, they were burned in cages, on a pyre; and this execution of high justice was only abolished in 1750.

This gentle victim of popular superstitions was collected and avenged by higher elites. Let's just name a few.

Mohammed loved his cats so much that one day, called to the mosque at prayer time, and seeing one of them asleep on a side of his priestly robe, he cut the robe to leave without waking it. – Richelieu had a real passion for Cats. He had a dozen, looked after by two servants. Lucifer was jet black. The poet Racan, received in audience, took off his wig because of the high summer heat; a cat came to give birth there, and she was thereafter called Perruque. The cardinal himself tolerated Miriane giving birth to her babies on the trail of his red cassock. He left them annuities in his will. - Colbert always had little cats frolicking in his study. To these leaders of men, the Cat undoubtedly gave lessons in patience, flexibility and cunning. And, accustomed to seeing human baseness, they appreciated even more this animal of independent character.

We can mention among the most distinguished friends of the Cat, in our time, the Shah of Persia. There are five hundred cats, on a farm assigned to them, surrounded by a large park where they frolic.

Here, then, are brought together, by this common taste, statesmen, a monarch, a founder of religion, a cardinal. Do you want to add a pope? After the death of Pius VI, Chateaubriand wrote from Rome, where he was ambassador: "They have just brought me the poor pope's little cat. He is all grey and very gentle like his former master."

In fact, in good taste, no authority is equal to that of women. We will only mention one. The incomparably beautiful Madame Récamier, in the middle of her court of worshippers, had her favourite cat, Dorothy, on her knees.

Pierre Loti wrote: "In small elegant bodies, they are small patrician souls, but shady, very closed to the vulgar, penetrable only for a few initiates." And Champfleury: "To understand the Cat well, one must have the soul of a poet or a woman." We have just said that the Cat has women on his side; we are going to show that he also has poets on his side. He would not conclude from this that he can only be loved by effeminate people and dreamers. Here are two peoples, two races, who are perhaps the most practical and energetic of our time, and who hold the Cat in great sympathy:

The Japanese show themselves to be excellent painters of Cats, in the curious albums which come from them, and which circulate in our countries. This faithful reproduction in art proves a marked taste in everyday life. – The English have a circle of amateurs in London, the Cat Club, which organizes a cat show and championships every year to promote breeding. – Let us add, without claiming the people qualifiers that we have just given, that Paris has also had, in recent years, some beautiful feline exhibitions.

Cats are particularly the writer's friends. They come and sit near his table, on his table, and they keep him company, discreetly. Theophile Gautier explained this camaraderie in the following lines:

Baudelaire adored Cats, who like him were lovers of perfumes, and whom the smell of valerian throws into a sort of ecstatic epilepsy. He sought their tender, delicate, feminine caresses. He loved these charming, quiet, mysterious and gentle beasts, with electric shivers, whose favourite attitude is the reclining pose of the Sphinxes who seem to have transmitted their secrets to them. They wander with velvety steps through the house, like the spirits of the place, or come to sit on the table, near the writer, keeping company with his thoughts and looking at him from the depths of their gold-dusted pupils... They delight in silence, order and tranquillity, and no place suits them better than the study of the man of study. They wait with admirable patience until he has finished his coward, while spinning their guttural and rhythmic spinning wheel, [purring] as a sort of accompaniment to the work. Sometimes, they polish with their tongue some dishevelled patch of their fur, because they are clean, careful, coquettish, and allow no irregularity in their grooming; but they do all this in a discreet and calm manner, as if they were afraid of being a distraction or annoyance.

To give examples of this camaraderie, we will not go right back to Petrarch, Tasso, Montaigne, who had Cats around them and celebrated them in their writings, nor to La Fontaine who presented Rominagrobis so well:
A cat making a humble face,
A holy man of cats, well furred, large and fat.

Let us only cite writers and poets of our time.

V. Hugo had a cat named Chanoine, of whom he speaks in his "Letters on the Rhine". And it was he who wrote this well-known word: "God made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the Tiger." We said that Musset had Dogs and Cats at home. Michelet treated his Cats with great consideration: he let them climb onto his draft table and rummage through his papers. Sainte-Beuve, in his study where he accumulated so much erudition, described his Cat as a rascal that he could not do without.

And here is Renan's Cat: Renan's cat, Minet, was a beautiful black Angora, with a soft belly and white paws. Every morning he scratched at the master door. With the door open, he entered majestically, jumping onto Renan's armchair, then onto his shoulder, finally onto the desk which he circled. Avoiding the inkwell, he placed his white paws on the papers, newspapers and books; then, having found that everything was in order, he jumped down and set to work. His job was to wrestle with the collection of Academy proceedings. Minet would not have touched any other books, but he knew that these were left to him. (Journal des Debats, November 17, 1903.)

Other great friends of the Cat: Mery, Mérimée, Banville, Maupassant, Coppee, Sardou, Pierre Loti, Edmond Rostand. – Some masters of prose have even become poets, to speak more dignifiedly about the Cat. In the contemplation of his life in the countryside, Taine rested from his colossal work on the Origins of Contemporary France by celebrating his Cats, in philosophical sonnets which are his only works as a poet.

The pearl of poetry about the friendly beast is perhaps this sonnet by Baudelaire:

Ardent lovers and austere scholars
On reaching their mature years both love
The strong and gentle cat, pride of the house,
Who like them are sedentary and sensitive to cold.

Friends of learning and of sensual pleasure,
They seek the silent fearful darkness;
Erebus would have them as his shadowed steeds:
ere they not too proud to condescend to bondage.

When they dream, they assume the noble attitudes
Of great sphinxes reclining in deepest silence,
Seeming to sleep in endless dreams.

Their fertile loins dusted with magic sparks,
And particles of gold, like fine grains of sand,
Sparkle faintly in their mystic eyes.

2. ITS PHYSICAL QUALITIES.

The Cat justifies these sympathies by its qualities.

First of all, his beauty. Everything about him is symmetrical; no part of the body is too big or too small. There is nothing angular in his form; on the contrary, everywhere there are harmonious curves. His head, especially, has graceful lines, and no other animal is so beautiful. Observe him. You will admire his large eyes, carbuncles or living emeralds, sometimes drowned in melancholy, sometimes lit with sudden attention; his pointed ears; his face well defined and slender at the bottom; his little wet nose; his mouth so fine that it has never been called "gullet"; his pink tongue, only visible when he yawns or polishes his coat.

He is pleasant in all his poses. Sitting, his four feet close together and his tail wrapped around him, he is the ideal image of rest and calm meditation; with half-closed eyes, he seems to be pursuing some deep dream. Lying on one side or on his stomach, he has the poses of the Sphinx or sleeping wildcats. When he starts walking, he reminds us of the big cats, the Lion and Tiger, with his undulating, nonchalant gait and his soft steps.

The Angora, especially, is superb, with its silky fur, so long and thick that our fingers are drowned in it. It is said that there are white Angoras with blue eyes, which are a marvel, but we must resign ourselves to knowing this only by word of mouth, because the pure Angora is very rare in our country, and we only have half-bloods. – A few years ago an American owned an Angora of extraordinary size and beauty, which he refused to sell after an offer of 125,000 francs. (Le Gaulois, January 10, 1901.)

And what could be more graceful than the young Cat! From his meows, you think you are hearing a baby wailing in the cradle. He plays with anything, with nothing, showing facial games that are alternately frightened and mischievous, with his mother's tail, with his own as soon as it is long enough for his paws to grasp it and his teeth to bite; he makes playful jumps, pirouettes, and extravagant capers. In all these antics, he shows at the same time the flexibility and charming awkwardness of his friend, the child. And we have fun seeing him so happy to be alive. - But, if he sees a Dog appear, he suddenly becomes serious: he recognizes his hereditary enemy; he arches his back, hisses, takes on the formidable air of a lion cub, and his little claws are already emerging from their sheaths.

The senses of the Cat have the finest acuity.

His clear eyes seem to reflect the stars. Their pupils are only slits which widens as the day dies; we see them shining in the night like two diamonds. His sight is so penetrating that it defies the darkness and is sufficient for the nocturnal hunt. His translucent ears move at a simple breath. At the slightest alarm, he rounds them into conch shells, he projects them forward to catch the slightest shivers of the air, he perceives the trotting of a hidden Mouse. His whiskers have the tactile sensitivity of an insect's antennae. If we blindfold him, he walks without hitting anything, thanks to them. If we cut his whiskers and blindfold him again, he bumps into obstacles; then he experiences, as with a mutilation, a discomfort which can lead to illness.

He is highly electric. If you rub his back against the grain, his skin emits voltaic battery glows, visible in the night. He has a sense of direction. If we transport him in a basket far from his home, he returns there by the right path, which he could not see. His purr, which recalls the sound of a spinning wheel, is formed in the larynx, and is a sign of health and vigour, because in old age it spins less.

His meow is varied, to the point that a fairground proprietor was able to organize a cat concert in the following way. - A dozen Cats were lined up, their tails pressed by springs corresponding to the keys of a keyboard. By pressing each button, the recipient cat's tail is pinched, and it meows. These virtuoso martyrs thus form a choir, with the tomcats for bass and the she-cats for sopranos. In front of them is a music stand where they appear to be reading music in bass or treble clef. But they would probably prefer the key to the fields rather than any musical key.

He walks on his fingers like the Lion and Tiger, his nails tucked into his knuckles and not touching the ground; his step is thus padded, muffled, imperceptible even to the ears of a Mouse. He only takes his claws out of their sheathes, using a constrictor muscle, to use them as weapons, or to escape from a Dog by climbing a tree, from where he taunts his persecutor.

He is as flexible as a clown, as dextrous as a juggler. He can brush past anything without bumping anything, wander across the study desk or over a woman's dressing table, among inkwells or bottles, without knocking over the slightest object. As soon as he gets excited about running, hunting or fleeing, he leaps and stretches with such elasticity that he barely touches the ground. When falling, he knows how to turn or twist so that the centre of gravity is positioned in the middle of the lower part of his body; he thus lands on the ground on his paws, and generally without any harm, even when he falls from a 4th or 5th floor. This has been turned into a proverb, and we say of a clever man: he always lands on his feet like a Cat.

3. ITS MENTAL QUALITIES.

He is cautious, observant, thoughtful, and methodical. Attentive to his safety and always circumspect, he weighs the pros and cons before taking any action. The same accident doesn't happen to him twice and, as we say, a scalded cat fears hot water [English equivalent: "a scalded cat fears even cold water."]. When he falls from a window, his first movement, as soon as he hits the ground, is to raise his head and look at where he fell from, as if not to go there again or to hold on better another time.

He is wise, "resourceful", more so than the Dog; If we put both of them back in the haunts of their ancestors, the Cat would become at ease more quickly, because he is less removed from primitive independence. Above all, he knows about mechanisms, to a point that no other animal does, except the Monkey and perhaps the Elephant. It is not uncommon for him to know how to pull the bell cord to open the door to our apartment. It is common for him to know how to open the door of a food cupboard, by operating the latch or bolt. We sometimes see him, struck by fire, running and throwing himself into a basin or a trough, although he does not like water; proof of observation, reasoning and composure: he has observed that fire is extinguished with water, and he concludes that he will do the same. - He is ingenious, as we know, in hunting mice and birds. It is also good at fishing. He has a taste for fish and hates water at the same time. Sitting like a sphinx at the edge of a pool or a river, he watches the minnows wriggling and seems hypnotized: he would like to take one and enjoy it, but without getting wet. A cruel enigma, to which he has thus found the answer, so the story goes: he goes furtively to examine the lines that the fishermen have left stretched; if he sees the line moving, he understands that the hook has been bitten, he moves the line, pulls the line, pulls in the caught fish and eats it on the bank. We recognize, however, that this must happen more on the banks of the Garonne.

He likes order. He doesn't disturb anything on the tables when he passes by. He seems to be uncomfortable in clutter and satisfied in a well-ordered environment. Even more, he likes cleanliness. He wants it around him and he wants it on himself. A hundred times a day, with his moistened paw he washes his face and slicks his muzzle. He is careful with his attire; he does not suffer a stain, not even an irregularity: if any part of his coat seems dishevelled, he smooths it and polishes it with his tongue. Watch him walk in the rain: he skims the walls or jumps on the stones, for fear of being splashed. - He hides what should be hidden [i.e. bodily waste]. Darwin says that he covers his excrement by habit inherited from his wild ancestors who thus concealed their traces. This explanation does not hold, because if this were the reason for this action, we would see other animals doing it for this same reason. The Cat does this for the sake of cleanliness. Outside, he scratches the ground to cover it with earth. In the house, he looks for ash or charcoal, the disinfectant properties of which he seems to have discovered long before our chemists.

He hides everything that needs to be hidden [i.e. mating]. At certain times, he escapes surveillance, he escapes from home, he goes truant from school; and it is not to hunt birds or rats. But if he shouts his loves from the rooftops or in the street, it is only during the night, he never lets us see them. Crazy nights, fine games, arguments and epithalamia, duels and duets without worrying about our slightly disturbed sleep, which made Buffon say: The Cat is very inclined towards passion and, something rare among animals, the female seems more ardent than the male: she invites his approaches, she seeks him, she calls for him, she announces with loud cries the nature of desire , or rather the excess of her needs, and if the male flees from her, she pursues him, bites him, and forces him, so to speak, to satisfy her, although their couplings are always accompanied by severe pain.

This dignity extends to noble pride. It is rare that circus training can be imposed on him; he refuses to do acrobatics. He allows his neck to be adorned with a ribbon, but he would not tolerate a collar and chain. This is why the Romans of the Republic made him the symbol of Liberty. He is more primitive than the Dog; human civilization has not become second nature to him, and he only takes what he pleases from our society. He is willing to enter into a cordial agreement with us, but on condition that he maintains his freedom and his habits. He agrees to be our guest, but not our servant. He is reserved; he is a philosopher withdrawn into himself. Such noble pride of character gives more charm to the caresses he condescends to grant us from time to time. He does not give himself away, he abandons himself momentarily, he lends himself, he deigns to let himself be loved so long as no one bothers him. And the nonchalance of his welcome sincerely means that he considers our sympathy as a tribute due to him.

This independence makes us call him selfish, because we call anyone who doesn't take notice of us selfish. - We say that, when his prolonged purring indicates sleep, we must be careful not to wake him: Never wake a sleeping Cat! But do we like to be woken up? - We say that he is attached to houses, not to people. This is incorrect. His conformation makes him less able than the Dog to accompany us everywhere, and makes him a sedentary animal. But he becomes attached to us in the home, he follows us from one room to another; he likes to be near us, be on our knees. - You say that he caresses himself more than he caresses us. Hey! Isn't everyone rather selfish in their pleasures?

His sensuality has the advantage of frankness over ours. He is sincerely, ingenuously sensual. He likes perfumes, as Th. Gautier has just told us, and he lets himself be more easily picked up by people who wear them. When we pet him he purrs, arches his back and writhes with pleasure. - His sensuality, however, is not as selfish as people say. See him at the table: he is greedy, but at the same time he is a gourmet; he meditates before a fine treat, to savour it, relish it, analyse it; he curls up, head tucked into his shoulders, and he seems to forget the rest of the world. But, if he has companions eating with him, he does not compete with them for their ration, as the Dog sometimes does, but he shares peacefully, fraternally with them.

We say he is cruel in his hunts. This is incorrect. If, in the countryside, he stalks and eats birds, and sometimes young rabbits, it is because the peasant's stinginess does not give him sufficient food. - When he has picked up a Mouse, he stimulates it to move, with little pats. We blame him for this because we don't understand him. We think it's to have fun by making his little captive suffer. If he wanted to make it suffer, he would bite or scratch it. He only taps on it, with his claws sheathed, with velvet paws, to make it move. And what is the purpose of this? Quite simply an aesthetic pleasure: he enjoys seeing its movements, like a sultan watching a sacred dancer from India. Then he eats it, it's true; but don't you eat the game you hunt?

He is, on the contrary, fundamentally gentle. He gets along well with his neighbours at the table, with the Dog in the house, with the Horse in the stable. He puts a tireless gentleness into enduring being moved, badly carried, shaken, teased, mishandled by us, particularly by a child. If he likes caresses, he caresses in return, and very delicately; we often see him show his friendship to a person by climbing on their shoulder and licking the tip of their ear. - The Mother Cat is admirable. While she suffers the pain of childbirth she is silent; but as soon as the kittens are born, she recovers her voice for a maternal call that resembles the cooing of a dove. At the slightest danger, she grabs her young by the scruff of the neck and moves them so gently that they hardly notice. As long as she is nursing them, she only leaves them to go get her food which is also theirs.

He does us services, although he is too proud to be a mere servant. He gives these services through taste, not by force, but we nonetheless owe him some gratitude. Him hunts rodents in our homes, Mice and Rats, and, in certain countries, he hunts snakes. What patience on the prowl! What vivacity in pouncing on prey! And the proverb tells us how necessary this hunting is: When the Cat's away, the Mice will play. – He even has a posthumous use, since we make fur from his skin, and from his guts the chanterelle which is the best string on the violin. He even has another use, which is to be eaten: the Chinese make a luxury dish of him, and restaurants in our countries often serve cat as a "rabbit stew."

4. A LIKENESS.

Finally, the cat's supreme charm is that, in many ways, it resembles a woman. This is why we sometimes call the woman we love "my little puss", while it never occurs to us to affectionately call her "my bitch".

An Egyptologist wrote: A woman condemned to death for the crime of adultery was thrown into the Nile, sewn into a bag with a cat: a refinement of cruelty due to the oriental idea that, of all female animals, the cat is the one that most closely resembles women by its suppleness, its tenderness, its inconstancy and its fits of rage.

When we see in a woman who is nonchalantly graceful in her attitudes, suppleness and harmonious in her movements, we say that she has feline poise. The Cat has feminine coquetry in the care given to its beauty. Alphonse Karr said: "The three animals which take the longest time to wash are the Fly, the Cat and the Woman."

He has feminine coquetry in his way of receiving our advances, of making himself desired. - In a friend's house, an Angora cat always welcomed me in the following way. She would come into the room where I was and start to attract my attention with mischief: she would play hide and seek under the armchairs, with little muffled meows; and she only responded to my calls with pirouettes. I then pretended not to think about her anymore. And immediately, with a jump, she was on my knees. It made me think of the old saying: A woman is like your shadow: run after her and she runs away from you; run away from her and she's running after you.

He has feminine sensuality in the way he receives our caresses or caresses us: in his touches, his cuddles, his abandon, his voluptuous contortions, the languid look of his half-closed eyes or the flash of his pupils. suddenly grown, the confidential language of his purr to signify well-being and his intimate satisfaction. He has feminine nervousness and all that goes with it: impressionability, changeable mood, sometimes the unexpected in his welcome. His complacency has its times and its limits. Nerves have too much preponderance in his body for him not to be capricious.

And then the Cat has claws, and the woman...how should I put it? Let's have recourse to poets who can dare to say anything. V. Hugo, recounting the creation of the poet, says that, when God had made the woman's pretty finger, the Devil appeared and added the nail. Well then, yes, the Cat has claws, but if it happens that he makes you feel them a little, it is because you have upset him, startled him; your hand was too heavy or too rough, you may have stroked his fur the wrong way. Be more skilful, know how to pick him up gently, delicately, and he will only touch you with a velvet paw.