And set its vibrant chord in whirl,
As thy rich voice mysterious.
Champfleury, another French writer, has recorded that, visiting Victor Hugo once, he found, in a room decorated with tapestries and Gothic furniture, a cat enthroned on a dais, and apparently receiving the homage of the company. Sainte-Beuve’s cat sat on his desk, and walked freely over his critical essays. “I value in the cat,” says Chateaubriand, “that indifferent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents itself from attaching itself to any one; the indifference with which it passes from the salon to the housetop.” Marshal Turenne amused himself for hours in playing with his kittens. The great general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar at the time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats. Montaigne wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert each other with our play. If I have my hour to begin or refuse, so has she.” As George Eliot puts it, “Who can tell what just criticisms the cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?” Chateaubriand’s cat Micette is well known. He used to stroke her tail, to notify Madame Récamier that he was tired or bored.
Cats and their friendships are not spoken of in the Bible. But they are mentioned in Sanskrit writing two thousand years old, and, as has been said before, they were household pets and almost idols with the Egyptians, who mummied them in company with kings and princes. They were also favourites in India and Persia, and can claim relationship with the royal felines of the tropics. Simonides, in his Satire on Women, the earliest extant, sets it down that froward women were made from cats, just as most virtuous, industrious matrons were developed from beer. In Mills’s History of the Crusades the cat was an important personage in religious festivals. At Aix, in Provence, the finest he cat was wrapped like a child in swaddling clothes and exhibited in a magnificent shrine: every knee bent, every hand strewed flowers.
Several cats have been immortalized by panegyrics and epitaphs from famous masters. Joachim de Bellay has left this pretty tribute:
C’est Beland, mon petit chat gris—
Beland, qui fut peraventure
Le plus bel œuvre que nature
Fit onc en matière de chats.
The pensive Selima, owned by Walpole, was mourned by Gray, and from the Elegy we get the favourite aphorism, “A favourite has no friends.” Arnold mourned the great Atossa. One of Tasso’s best sonnets was addressed to his favourite cat. Cats figure in literature from Gammer Gurton’s Needle to our own day. Shakespeare mentions the cat forty-four times—“the harmless, necessary cat,” etc. Goldsmith wrote: