Theophile Gautier - My Private Menagerie

I have often been caricatured in Turkish dress seated upon cushions, andsurrounded by cats so familiar that they did not hesitate to climb uponmy shoulders and even upon my head. The caricature is truth slightlyexaggerated, and I must own that all my life I have been as fond ofanimals in general and of cats in particular as any brahmin or old maid.The great Byron always trotted a menagerie round with him, even whentravelling, and he caused to be erected, in the park of Newstead Abbey,a monument to his faithful Newfoundland dog Boatswain, with aninscription in verse of his own inditing. I cannot be accused ofimitation in the matter of our common liking for dogs, for that lovemanifested itself in me at an age when I was yet ignorant of thealphabet.

A clever man being at this time engaged in preparing a "History ofAnimals of Letters," I jot down these notes in which he may find, so faras my own animals are concerned, trustworthy information.

The earliest remembrance of this sort that I have goes back to the timeof my arrival in Paris from Tarbes. I was then three years old, so thatit is difficult to credit the statement made by Mirecourt and Vapereau,who affirm that I "proved but an indifferent pupil" in my native town.Home-sickness of a violence that no one would credit a child with beingcapable of experiencing, fell upon me. I spoke our local dialect only,and people who talked French "were not mine own people." I would wake inthe middle of the night and inquire whether we were not soon to start onour return to our own land.

No dainty tempted me, no toy could amuse me. Drums and trumpets equallyfailed to relieve my gloom. Among the objects and beings I regrettedfigured a dog called Cagnotte, whom it had been found impossible tobring with us. His absence told on me to such an extent that onemorning, having first chucked out of the window my little tin soldiers,my German village with its painted houses, and my bright red fiddle, Iwas about to take the same road to return as speedily as possible toTarbes, the Gascons, and Cagnotte. I was grabbed by the jacket in thenick of time, and Josephine, my nurse, had the happy thought to tell methat Cagnotte, tired of waiting for us, was coming that very day by thestage-coach. Children accept the improbable with artless faith; nothingstrikes them as impossible; only, they must not be deceived, for thereis no impairing the fixity of a settled idea in their brains. I keptasking, every fifteen minutes, whether Cagnotte had not yet come. Toquiet me, Josephine bought on the Pont-Neuf a little dog not unlike theTarbes specimen. I did not feel sure of its identity, but I was toldthat travelling changed dogs very much. I was satisfied with theexplanation and accepted the Pont-Neuf dog as being the authenticCagnotte. He was very gentle, very amiable, and very well behaved. Hewould lick my cheeks, and indeed his tongue was not above licking alsothe slices of bread and butter cut for my afternoon tea. We lived on thebest of terms with each other.

Presently, however, the supposed Cagnotte became sad, troubled, and hismovements lost their freedom. He found it difficult to curl himself up,lost his jolly agility, breathed hard and could not eat. One day, whilecaressing him, I felt a seam that ran down his stomach, which was muchswelled and very tight. I called my nurse. She came, took a pair ofscissors cut the thread, and Cagnotte, freed of a sort of overcoat madeof curled lambskin, in which he had been tricked out by the Pont-Neufdealers to make him look like a poodle, appeared in all the wretchedguise and ugliness of a street cur, a worthless mongrel. He had grownfat, and his scant garment was choking him. Once he was rid of hiscarapace, he wagged his ears, stretched his limbs, and started rompingjoyously round the room, caring nothing about being ugly so long as hewas comfortable. His appetite returned, and he made up by his moralqualities for his lack of beauty. In Cagnotte's company I graduallylost, for he was a genuine child of Paris, my remembrance of Tarbes andof the high mountains visible from our windows; I learned French and Ialso became a thorough-paced Parisian.

The reader is not to suppose that this is a story I have invented forthe sole purpose of entertaining him. It is literally true, and provesthat the dog-dealers of that day were quite as clever as horse-coupersin the art of making up their animals and taking in purchasers.

After Cagnotte's death, my liking was rather for cats, on account oftheir being more sedentary and fonder of the fireplace. I shall notattempt to relate their history in detail. Dynasties of felines, asnumerous as the dynasties of Egyptian kings, succeeded each other in ourhome. Accident, flight, or death accounted for them in turns. They wereall beloved and regretted; but life is made up of forgetfulness, and theremembrance of cats passes away like the remembrance of men.

It is a sad thing that the life of these humble friends, of theseinferior brethren, should not be proportionate to that of their masters.

I shall do no more than mention an old gray cat that used to side withme against my parents, and bit my mother's ankles when she scolded me orseemed about to punish me, and come at once to Childebrand, a cat of theRomanticist period. The name suffices to let my reader understand thesecret desire I felt to run counter to Boileau, whom I disliked then,but with whom I have since made my peace. It will be remembered thatNicolas says:

"Oh! ridiculous notion of poet ignorant
Who, of so many heroes, chooses Childebrand!"

It seemed to me that the man was not so ignorant after all, since he hadselected a hero no one knew anything of; and, besides, Childebrandstruck me as a most long-haired, Merovingian, medival, and Gothic name,immeasurably preferable to any Greek name, such as Agamemnon, Achilles,Idomeneus, Ulysses, or others of that sort. These were the ways of ourday, so far as the young fellows were concerned, at least: for never, toquote the expression that occurs in the account of Kaulbach's frescoeson the outer walls of the Pinacothek at Munich, never did the hydra of"wiggery" (perruquinisme) erect its heads more fiercely, and no doubtthe Classicists called their cats Hector, Patrocles, or Ajax.

Childebrand was a splendid gutter-cat, short-haired, striped black andtan, like the trunks worn by Saltabadil in "le Roi s'amuse." His greatgreen eyes with their almond-shaped pupils, and his regular velvetstripes, gave him a distant tigerish look that I liked. "Cats are thetigers of poor devils," I once wrote. Childebrand enjoyed the honour ofentering into some verses of mine, again because I wanted to teaseBoileau: