PIERRE LOTPS CATS.

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 15960, 26 October 1923, Page 3

PIERRE LOTPS CATS.

Pierre Loti, whose death recently is so deeply deplored, adored cats, the New York World tells us. For many years he was president of a society of cat lovers known as “La Patte de Velours” (The Velvet Paw). In the story he wrote “for my son Samuel when he has learned to read” Loti describes how he once saw the soul of a cat reveal itself suddenly for a moment, “sad as a human soul and searching for my soul with plead-* mg tenderness.” In his Le Livre de la Pitie et de la Mort there is a terrible picture of a cat dying of mange. “It must have felt in its awful plight the worst of all sufferings of a cat — that of not being able to make its toilet, to lick its fur, and to groom itself with the care cats bestow upon this operation.” A cat which formed part of the Loti household for ten years had her own visiting cards inscribed, “Mile Moumoutte.” Charles Pierre Baudelaire, poet, who so greatly admired Edgar Allan Poe, was even more fantastic in his love of cats than Pierre Loti. Not one particular cat, but all cats claimed Baudelaire’s affection, and he would not pass even a stray tabby on the street without bestowing a caress. On entering a house his first anxiety was to become acquainted with the household cat; often he would sit fondling it and talking to it, indifferent to the mere humans who were present. This, Baudelaire’s critics said, was merely a pose. But his friend, Champfleury, who wrote a book on the cat, tells how the poet used to take his walks past a certain laundry where dwelt a particularly fine cat—and thereby unconsciously touched the hearts of the coquettish laundresses, who thought he was flirting with them.