L’aima jusqu’à la folie.
Pourquoi le dire? On le voit bien.
Or to put it into English: ‘Here lies a handsome cat. Her mistress, who loved nothing, loved her out of caprice. Why say so? All the world knew it well.’
‘Grandfather,’ a feline Nestor, belonging to a lady in Scotland, was something more than handsome. When he had passed his twenty-first year, he could climb a tree, catch a bird, hunt a mouse, or kill a rat, as cleverly as in his younger days; and when he died, at the age of twenty-two, had well earned himself a memorial stone and an epitaph. Both were accorded him, the last-named running thus:
‘Life to the last enjoyed,’ here Pussy lies,
Renowned for mousing and for catching flies;
Loving o’er grass and pliant branch to roam,
Yet ever constant to the smiles of home.
. . . . .
The Preux Chevalier of the race of Cats,