The eternal feline

PAUL MORAND

■ I like cats, because they are silent introverts and, therefore, misunderstood. By silent I do not mean that they never miowl, but that they miowl only for definite reasons—to demand precise things. In this, they are very different from dogs and birds, whose incessant barking and twittering are so appreciated by superficial people. Cats are misunderstood, because they disdain understanding; they appear enigmatic only to those who are not sensitive to the expressive power of silence. There is not another living creature whose countenance is more eloquent than a cat's. In their lambent eyes one perceives fear, terror, amusement, ferocity, greediness, voluptuousness, deception, rage and even love as crouching and purring, they gaze at you with drooping eyelids. I know only one other regard—a human one—that is more infinite, richer in nuances: Greta Garbo's. If she is inclined to take offence at this comparison, let me remind her that five thousand years before she was born, the cat was a goddess.

The Egyptians deeply venerated the god of Music and the goddess of Love, who were represented as having human bodies and the heads of cats. In ancient Memphis, the more a woman resembled a cat, the more beautiful she was considered. (Why was I not living then? I have always loved women with short noses and cat-like eyes.) The supreme rank in the hierarchy of divinities was vested in Osiris, the Sun, whose emblem was a male cat, while his bride, Isis, the Moon, was worshipped in Bubastis in the image of a female cat.

Legend has it that in order to escape the persecution of giants, the gods transformed themselves into animals, the sun and the moon choosing feline forms. But the historical fact is that fear and its corollary gratitude gave birth to the cult of the cat. After a particularly disastrous overflow of the Nile, Egypt was overrun by such an invasion of rats and spiders that if the cats had not slaughtered them by the thousands, all the inhabitants who had survived the flood might have perished from this secondary danger.

Each of the Egyptian temples where cats were worshipped as divinities sheltered a particular species. Medals were struck off with effigies of these idols, and hung about the neck of children who were "consecrated to the cat." Herodotus relates that when a cat died in an Egyptian household, all of its occupants shaved their eyebrows as a sign of mourning. The body was carefully embalmed with aromatic fluids and placed in a little bronze coffin cast in the likeness of the animal, or else in a wooden one painted in rich colours. The eyes were reproduced in enamel and often the entire tomb encrusted with gold. Then, followed by the high priests, the body was borne to its burial place in a cemetery reserved especially for cats. In 1890, in an excavation called the Grotto of Diana (near Beni Hassan) some 180,000 cat mummies were found and brought back to London.

If anyone killed a cat, even accidentally, the Egyptians threw themselves upon the murderer and cruelly tortured him to death. When Cambyses, King of Persia, wanted to capture the city of Pelusa he placed a platoon of cats at the head of his troops, and gave each of his soldiers and officers a cat instead of a shield. So great was the Egyptians' fear of injuring these animals that they surrendered without giving battle.

Cats were believed to be hunters of serpents. They were perfumed, lain on sumptuous couches and placed in the seats of honour at feasts and festivals.

Homer spoke of cats with the highest regard. Corinth erected a colossal bronze statue of a crouching cat. The German barbarians adopted the cat as a symbol of liberty, and also of adultery and of independence.

In the middle ages the cat was thought to be the visible form of the Devil and black cats were the inevitable companions of the sorcerers. The Scandinavians made the cat their emblem of love. And all this liberty, adultery, sin, love, magic remain different facets of the same mystery.

There is a celebrated legend which tells how Mahomet, rather than disturb Muezza, his favourite cat, who was sleeping up his sleeve, cut away this portion of his garment. Muezza thanked him so gracefully for this delicate attention that the Prophet, not to be outdone promised her a place in Paradise. And then, stroking her back three times, he granted Muezza and the race of cats forever the privilege of landing always on their feet. Since then Mussulmans and Turks consider the cat a pure animal, allowing it the run of their homes from which the "unclean" dog is excluded.

The English, who have a great fondness for animals, are sincere admirers of the cat. They have founded fourteen cat clubs under the aegis of the National Cat Club, established in 1887. The Silver and Smoke, the Persian Cat Society, the Black and White Club, the Blue Persian Cat Society, the Orange, Fawn, Cream and Tortoise-shell Society, the Chinchilla Cat Club, the Short Haired Cat Club, etc. We are not so far removed from the Egyptians who dedicated their various temples to different species of cats.

There is a restaurant for animals in the Westminster section of London where tables are reserved for cat boarders, who wear members' badges around their necks. The celebrated and encyclopedic American author, Carl van Vechten dedicated one of his finest books The Tiger in the House, to the cat. The protective society for cats in Germany is richly and sonorously called the Deutschango-rakatzenschutzverein.

But Paris is the true sanctuary of cats. There, enthroned in the half-twilight of a concierge's loge, you will usually discover an enormous, immobile cat. In French, the very word "Chat" seems to evoke an image of the beast: soft, velvety, tense. Strangely vital, electric, capricious, and inspired, capable of frantic joy or suffering, above all feminine—with women's grace and women's formidable resourcefulness and uncanny resistance to death, this most nervous of all feline races is a truer incarnation of the secret essence of Paris than the unsinkable galley emblazoned on the coat of arms of the city.

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And I, a born Parisian, also bow to the cult of the cat, modestly adding my name to the list of its illustrious devotees. And what an astonishing list it is: Tasso, Petrarch, Montaigne, Colbert, Bernardin Saint-Pierre, Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Châteaubriand, Victor Hugo, Hoffmann, Mérimée, Théophile Gautier, Maupassant, Flaubert, Taine, Loti, Alexandre Dumas, Richelieu— with his "cattery" installed near his bedroom; Baudelaire, who has sung them in immortal verse, and the superb Colette. Clemenceau, our national Tiger, had a little Persian cat called Prudence for bis mascot. Lenin ruled in the Kremlin with his cat upon his knees. President Poincaré described his Siamese cat Gri-Gri delightfully. "He has a strange and complex personality. Voluptuous and greedy, perfidious and sly, stubborn and ferocious, exacting to the point of tyranny, he has nothing but faults. And yet these faults, half of which would make any other cat intolerable, assume in him the nature of qualities. He is really full of spirit, propriety and caprice, impulsive and facetious. He knows the value of a timely jest. With a flirt of the tail, he can extricate himself from the most difficult predicament. He could give many a helpful lesson to timid and irresolute humans."

As for myself I have owned at least a hundred cats, or rather as Michelet said of his wife's pets, "A hundred cats have owned me." My cats were highly bred, Siamese like Poincaré's, Angoras like Queen Carmen Sylva's. But it was a little alley-cat that made me shed my first real tears. To her 1 owe my first contact with suffering, pity and death. Run over and half-crushed by a carriage, a long martyrdom preceded her pathetic end.

After she had gone, I became the slave of a dynasty of blue-eyed white Angoras. I remember one in particular. Petit Patou with his bouffant pantaloons and white ruff looked like a Franz Hals Dutchman. He was a good sailor and a great traveller. He had retraced Ulysses' route in the Mediterranean; he was an explorer and a fearless hunter. He put dogs, pigs, sheep to flight. But his bravado finally wilted when a field rat, a veritable giant, leapt at his throat. All we saw of Petit Patou was his tail as he fled like a cyclone.

In order to keep him at home, I purchased a wife for him. We called her Chinchilla. She was presented to me as a young cat, but actually she was quite old and grimly virtuous, repulsing her husband's attentions with ear-splitting howls. She would hide all day long under my bed, emerging slyly and cautiously on the very stroke of five to take her "constitutional" in the corridor.

Chinchilla's successor in my home was an extraordinary being, a marvellously beautiful Blue Persian, called Amelia. Today at the age of twelve she has run the gamut of the heart's vicissitudes. From the day that my wife (whom she adored) adopted a young Siamese, Amelia's character underwent a metamorphosis. A human face never expressed more clearly bewilderment, dawning horror, despair and, finally, mournful resignation. It is a wonder she did not die of this treachery. Her spirit in any case did not survive, as thenceforth she became aloof, cold and worldly.

By a strange reciprocity it was the little Siamese cat Wampoum who mothered Amelia's abandoned kittens and completed their education; but not without using much tact and time in gaining Amelia's consent to nurse them. Amelia herself no longer cared for anything but pleasure, only appearing in the drawing-room on days when we received. One day, having hidden herself in our motor, she even obliged us to take her to the English Ambassador's ball. She began to lead a life entirely apart from ours and only showed herself to us in moments of strange caprice, in which I divined the efforts of a dislocated soul to conceal the emptiness of her heart.

Cats have the most delicate, varied impetuous sensibilities. How can anyone consider these mysterious beings inert or indifferent?They generate currents of an unfathomable force, of a nature akin to Hertzian waves. Their tense and vibrant immobility responds to the slightest shock. Twenty-seven tiny muscles must move to twitch an ear; their blood which beats at the rate of one hundred and sixty pulsations a minute makes them as warm to the touch as a bird, their whiskers are much more sensitive than our fingertips. "They have", said Madame Michelet, "brains in their paws". Their exacting and easily tired nerves are spent in simulated combats, atavistic reminders of the great ancestral hunts in the forest or African jungles.

In fine, nothing is more varied than the temperament of cats. One can say that white cats are lazy, black ones vagabonds, grey ones good hunters, fawn-coloured ones very affectionate, tortoise-shell cats remarkable for their fertility, tawny ones for their playfulness and orange cats are hypocrites.

"Cats are only affectionate in appearance" Buffon said, although he usually understood animals well. Precisely the contrary is true. Beneath a mask of indifference, the cat is capable of profound affection. But she is an oriental, and like one, is careful not to disclose her feelings. A cat never makes the first advances. Patiently it waits until we come to it. Like a woman it attracts without seeming to. "A cat does not caress us, it caresses itself against us," Revirol said unjustly. But misogynists have often said the same thing about women, and quite as unjustly.