[Illustration: THE FALSE CAGNOTTE.]
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.
MY
HOUSEHOLD OF PETS.
Translated
BY SUSAN COOLIDGE.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1882.
_Copyright, 1882_,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OLD TIMES 5
II. THE WHITE DYNASTY 25
III. THE BLACK DYNASTY 45
IV. OUR DOGS 66
V. CHAMELEONS, LIZARDS, AND MAGPIES 100
VI. HORSES 119
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE FALSE CAGNOTTE _Frontispiece_
AS FOR THE EYES OF THE CAT, THEY WERE RIVETED ON THE
BIRD WITH A FASCINATED INTENSITY 17
THE WHITE DYNASTY 23
PIERROT 29
THE BLACK DYNASTY 43
LEAVE IS GIVEN HER TO PLACE HER FOREPAWS ON THE EDGE OF
THE TABLE 57
OUR DOGS 67
MONSIEUR WAS STUDYING HIS LESSON 81
WHEN PAYING LITTLE ATTENTIONS TO HIS LADY-LOVES HE STOOD
ALWAYS ON HIS HIND LEGS 85
THE CHAMELEON 101
MY HOUSEHOLD OF PETS.
CHAPTER I.
OLD TIMES.
Caricatures are in existence which represent us clothed in Turkish
fashion, sitting cross-legged on cushions, and surrounded by cats, who
are fearlessly climbing over our shoulders and even upon our head.
Caricature is nothing more than the exaggeration of truth; and truth
compels us to own that for animals in general, and for cats in
particular, we have, all our lives long, had the tenderness of a Brahmin
or of an old maid. The illustrious Byron carried a menagerie of pets
about with him even when on his travels, and raised a tomb at Newstead
Abbey to his faithful Newfoundland, “Boatswain,” which bears an epitaph
of the poet’s own composition. But although we thus share his tastes, we
must not be accused of plagiarism; for in our case the tendency
manifested itself even before we had begun to learn the alphabet.
We are told that a clever man is about to prepare a “History of Educated
Animals;” so we offer him these notes, from which, so far as our animals
are concerned, he will be able to extract reliable information.
Our earliest recollections of this nature date back to our arrival in
Paris from Tarbes. We were then precisely three years of age,—a fact
which renders difficult of belief the statements of MM. de Mirecourt and
Vapereau, who assert, that at that time we had already “received a bad
education” in our native city. A homesickness of which one would hardly
believe so young a child to be capable took possession of us. We could
speak only in _patois_, and those who expressed themselves in French
seemed to us like foreigners and aliens. In the middle of the night we
would wake up and disconsolately ask if we might not soon be allowed to
go back to our own country.
No dainty could tempt us to eat. No plaything gave amusement. Drums and
trumpets even, failed to rouse us from our melancholy. Among the things
most mourned over was a dog named Cagnotte who had necessarily been left
behind. His absence produced such wretchedness that, one morning, after
having thrown out of window our tin soldiers, a German village painted
in gaudy colors, and our reddest of red fiddles, we were on the point of
following by the same road in hopes of finding the sooner Tarbes,
Gascony and Cagnotte, and were only dragged back in the very nick of
time by the collar of our jacket. The happy thought occurred to
Josephine, our nurse, to tell us that Cagnotte, impatient at being
separated from us, was coming to Paris that very day in the diligence.
Children accept the incredible with an artless faith; nothing seems
impossible to their minds; but it is dangerous to deceive them, for once
their opinions are formed the attempt to alter them is hopeless. All
that day long we asked every quarter of an hour if Cagnotte had not come
yet. At last, to pacify us, Josephine went out and bought on the _Pont
Neuf_ a little dog who somewhat resembled the dog of Tarbes. At first we
were mistrustful, and would not believe him to be the same; but we were
assured that travelling produces strange changes in the looks of dogs.
This explanation was satisfactory, and the dog of the Pont Neuf was
received as the authentic Cagnotte. He was an amiable dog, gentle and
pretty. He licked our cheeks amicably, and his tongue condescended to
stretch farther and extend itself to the bread-and-butter which had been
cut for our luncheon. The best understanding existed between us. In
spite of this, the false Cagnotte little by little became sad, dull, and
constrained in his motions. He no longer curled himself up easily for a
nap; all his joyous agility vanished; he panted for breath, and ate
nothing. One day, when caressing him, we discovered on his stomach what
appeared to be a seam, tightly stretched as if swollen. The nurse was
called; she came, she cut a thread with the scissors, and lo! Cagnotte,
emerging from a sort of jacket of curly lamb’s-wool with which the
dealers on the Pont Neuf had invested him in order that he might pass
for a poodle, stood revealed in all his poverty and ugliness as a common
street cur, ill-bred and valueless. He had grown fat, and his tight
garments were suffocating him. Relieved from his cuirass, he shook his
ears, stretched his legs, and gambolled joyfully round the room, not at
all disquieted at his own ugliness, now that he once more found himself
at ease. His appetite came back, and in his moral qualities we found
compensation for his loss of good looks. In the companionship of
Cagnotte, who was a true child of Paris, we forgot by slow degrees
Tarbes and the high mountains which we had been used to see from our
windows. We learned French, and we also became Parisian.
Let no one suppose that this is an imaginary tale invented to amuse the
reader. The facts are strictly true, and they show that the
dog-merchants of that period were as ingenious as are the jockeys of
to-day in disguising their wares to cheat unsuspecting country-folk.
After the death of Cagnotte our affections turned to cats as more truly
domestic animals and better friends for the fire-side. We will not
attempt to give a detailed history of all of them. Whole dynasties of
felines, as numerous as those of the Egyptian kings, succeeded one
another in our house; accident, death, escape, in turn carrying them
away. All were loved, and all were regretted; but life is made up of
forgettings, and the remembrance of departed cats is gradually effaced
like the remembrance of men.
It is a sad fact that the lives of these humble friends, our inferior
brothers, are not better proportioned to those of their masters.
After briefly alluding to an old gray cat, who took our part against our
own flesh and blood, and bit our mother’s ankles whenever she scolded or
seemed about to punish us, we pass on to Childebrand, a cat belonging to
the days of romance. From his name the reader will detect the secret
desire which we felt to dispute Boileau, whom at that time we did not
love, though since we have made peace with him. Does he not make Nicolas
say:—
“Oh charming thought of poet, most ignorant and bland,
Among so many heroes to choose out Childebrand”?
It did not seem to us that it argued such a depth of ignorance to select
a hero of whom no one knew anything. Beside Childebrand struck us as an
impressive name; very long-haired, very Merovingian, Gothic and Mediæval
to the last degree, and much to be preferred to a Grecian name,—be it
Agamemnon, Achilles, Idomeneus, Ulysses, or any other. These names,
however, were the fashion of the day, especially among young people;
for—to use a phrase taken from the notice of Kaulbach’s frescoes on the
outside of the Pinacothek at Munich—“Never did the Hydra of wigginess
dress more bristling heads than at that period;” and persons of a
classical turn doubtless gave their cats such names as Hector, Ajax, or
Patrocles. Our Childebrand was a magnificent cat of the house-tops, with
shaven hair, striped fawn color and black like Saltabadil’s clown in “Le
Roi s’Amuse.” His great green eyes of almond shape, and his velvet,
striped coat, gave him a resemblance to a tiger, which we found
extremely pleasing; for, as we have elsewhere said, cats are nothing
more than tigers under a cloud. Childebrand has the honor to figure in
some verses of ours, also intended for the discomfiture of Boileau:—
Then I for you will paint that picture of Rembrandt
Which pleases me most greatly; and meanwhile Childebrand,
According to his custom soft couched upon my knee,
Lifts up his pretty head and watches anxiously
The movement of my finger, which traces in the air
The outline of the picture to make it clear and fair.
Childebrand came in nicely as a rhyme to Rembrandt; for this fragment
was a sort of confession of faith and romance to a friend, since dead,
who at that time shared all our enthusiasms for Victor Hugo,
Sainte-Beuve, and Alfred de Musset.
We must say of our cats as said Ruy Gomez de Silva to the impatient Don
Carlos, when giving him the names and titles of his ancestors, which
began with “Don Silvius, three times elected Consul of Rome,” “I have
skipped some of the best——,” and so pass on to Madame Theophile, a
reddish cat, with a white breast, pink nose, and blue eyes, who was thus
named because she lived with us in an almost conjugal intimacy, sleeping
on the foot of our bed, or on the arm of our writing chair; following us
in our walks in the garden, assisting at our meals, and not infrequently
intercepting the morsels which we were conveying from our plate to our
mouth.
One day a friend, who was leaving home for a short time, left in our
charge a favorite parrot. The bird, feeling lonely in a strange house,
climbed by the help of his beak to the top of the perch, and sat there
rolling about in a scared way his eyes, which glittered like gilt nails,
and wrinkling over them the white membranes which served for eyelids.
Madame Theophile had never before encountered a parrot, and the novelty
awoke in her mind an evident astonishment. Motionless as an Egyptian cat
embalmed in its network of bandages, she sat regarding the bird with an
air of profound meditation, and putting together all the ideas of
natural history which she had been able to collect during her excursions
on the roofs or in the courtyard and garden. The shadows of her thoughts
flitted across her changeful eyes, and it was not difficult to read the
decision at which she finally arrived: “This is—decidedly it is—a green
chicken!”
This conclusion reached, the cat jumped from the table which she had
chosen as her observatory, and crouched in a corner of the room, her
belly on the floor, her knees bent, her head lowered, her spine
stiffened like that of the black panther in Gérome’s picture as it
glares at the gazelles who are drinking by the lake.
The parrot followed each movement of the cat with a feverish
disquietude. His feathers bristled; he rattled his chain, raised one of
his claws and exercised its talons, while he whetted his beak on the
edge of the feeding cup. Instinct revealed to him that this was an enemy
who was plotting mischief.
[Illustration: AS FOR THE EYES OF THE CAT THEY WERE RIVETED ON THE BIRD
WITH A FASCINATED INTENSITY.]
As for the eyes of the cat, they were riveted on the bird with a
fascinated intensity, and said plainly as eyes could speak, and in a
language which the parrot understood only too well, “Green though he be,
this chicken is without doubt good to eat.”
While we watched this scene with interest, ready to interfere whenever
it should seem necessary, Madame Theophile was imperceptibly drawing
nearer to her prey. Her pink nose quivered, her eyes were half shut, her
elastic claws projected and then disappeared again in their velvet
sheaths. Little shivers ran down her spine: she was like an epicure as
he seats himself at table before a dish of truffled chicken, and smacks
his lips in advance over the choice and succulent repast which he is
about to enjoy. This exotic dainty tickled all her sensuous
capabilities.
Suddenly her back curved like a bow which is bent, and with one strong
elastic bound she alighted on the perch. The parrot, seeing his danger,
remarked in a deep bass voice, as low and solemn as that of M. Joseph
Prudhomme, “Hast thou breakfasted, Jacquot?”
This remark created in the mind of the cat an evident dismay. She took a
sudden leap backward. A blast from a trumpet, a pile of plates crashing
to the floor, a pistol shot close to the ear, could not have inspired
more sudden and giddy terror in an animal of her race. All her
ornithological ideas were in one fell moment overturned.
“And on what? On the roast beef of the king?” continued the parrot.
The face of the cat now said, as distinctly as words, “This is not a
bird. It is a gentleman! He speaks!”
“When I on wine have feasted free,
The tavern turns around with me,”
sang the bird in a tremendous voice; for he perceived that the alarm
caused by his words was his readiest means of defence. The cat cast a
questioning glance toward us, and, getting no reassurance in reply, took
refuge under the bed, from which place of safety she could not be
enticed for the remainder of that day.
People who are not accustomed to live with animals, or who, like
Descartes, see nothing in them but irrational organisms, will no doubt
suppose that these designs and reflections which we attribute to birds
and beasts, are pure inventions of our fancy. In this they are mistaken:
we but interpret their ideas, and faithfully translate them into human
speech.
Next day Madame Theophile, regaining courage, made another attempt on
the parrot, which was repulsed in the same way. After that she gave it
up, and accepted the bird as a man.
This sensitive and charming animal adored perfumes. Patchouli, the scent
of cashmeres, threw her into ecstasies. She had also a taste for music;
perched upon a pile of score, she would listen attentively and with
evident pleasure to vocalists who came to test their voices at our piano
and receive criticism. Sharp notes, however, made her nervous, and at
the upper “la” she was apt to close the mouth of the songstress with a
tap of her little paw. It was an experiment which caused us much
amusement, and was unfailing. Our feline amateur never mistook the note,
and never let it pass unrebuked.
[Illustration: THE WHITE DYNASTY.]