NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
The gray cat bel Vionnet and Steve Strether adopted after a storm last year, Marie-Josèph-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, or Josephine, had five kittens. Two were given to a French family who named them after a couple of Napoleon’s Marshals.
“Marie-Josèph-Rose…what did you say?”
“It is, Marie-Josèph-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie.”
“All that, bel ?”
“Well she was known as ‘Cat’ until the family suggested the longer name.”
“How can you remember it?”
“With practice. It was a challenge!”
“That’s a bit of a mouthful to call your cat!”
“Not for the French, Fred, Americans can call her Josephine.”
“The French family who returned them said those two tabies raised too much hell. So, they brought the Marshals back to us.”
“Now they are raising it here!”
“Well, they’ve got competition here, and we didn’t want them to go to the pound.”
“When was that?”
“Back in January. Of course, we never knew who Napoleon was.”
“What do you mean, you must know who the emperor was.”
“No, not that self-crowned revolutionary, the Corsican.”
“Well, who then?”
“I mean the father of the kittens!”
“But Napoleon and Josephine had no children together!”
“Oh no? You’re looking at two of them, at least, right in this house!”
“I mean historically!”
“Fred, don’t be so literal!”
“Okay, so what did you call the others?”
“Well, I never took to the Corsican dictator or his Marshals. We chose the names of revolutionary women who were left out of the history books written by men.”
Bel Vionnet goes into the kitchen and brings out a large packet of cat treats. She calls the cats as she walks through the living room to the hall that leads to the bedrooms. Only one cat responds to bel’s call, en Française, “Venez! Venez au couloires! “
“You see, Millicent Fawcett, snoozing over there on the dining table.
“Yeah, looking very comfortable, with her back against the fruit bowl.”
She jumps down on to a chair at once, and then to the floor and trots over with one black ear and one white ear, and two white front socks.
“Yes, and who was Millicent Fawcett?”
“A moderate suffragist, she did a lot to improve higher education for women.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Hardly surprising! By the way, she was not part of Emmeline Pankhurst’s WSPU not a suffragette.”
‘I see.”
“And she also co-founded, Newnham College, Cambridge.”
“Is that so!”
“Yes, the Brits just put up a statue of her in Parliament Square.”
Bel throws a handful of treats down the hall where they land like hail scattering on pavement, a sound which gets everybody’s attention.
“Look at the gray and white Fred. That is Alexandra Kollontai, asleep in the windowsill.”
“She has a sunbeam all to herself!”
She awakens and jumps down in front of a Black cat, racing towards the hall.
“Now there! That black one is, Olympe de Gouges. Now, she is named after an 18th century French playwright and political activist. Widely read, she revved up feminist and abolitionist movements.”
“Well I do know that it was angry women who mobbed Versailles.”
“Right, by October 1789 they were fired up. They got the Revo. going and then it was stolen by that diminutive dictator and his “Code” which, set us back a hundred years!”
“I thought the Code Napoleon, was a great social advance.”
“Not for women.”
“So, the Revo. was betrayed!”
Bel spreads her arms as she speaks.
“Men must be liberated from their dominance.”
Some more cat treats spill out of the packet.
“Interesting way of putting it. Dominance is so often the successor of liberations!”
Millicent is on them, with paws spread to possess two treats at once.
“So true Fred! Every Revolution in history has been betrayed.”
Josephine looks out from under the couch, twitching her torn ears which were crushed by the motion of her head against the front of the couch. She bounds across the room and races towards the hall speedway with the others. Two tabbies, Mashall Joachim Murat and Marshal Ney, Prince of the Moskovie, collide in the hall doorway closing in behind Josephine, but skidding on the parquet as they make the turn. Bel closes the door, as hissing and some yowls ensue from the advance of the Marshals. The feline mob is blocked from the living room, kitchen and dining rooms. Bel walks back to the kitchen and puts the dog food down for their visiting cocker spaniel, sniffing the bottom of the trash can. It gives her a solemnly sagging look. The dog munches noisily, its tags tinkling and tapping on the shiny steel rim of the bowl. It goes on licking the empty bowl long after any sign of the meal is evident to human curiosity.
There is a lot of mewing to be heard from behind the hall door.
“When did you get the dog?”
“Oh Flush? He’s staying with us while Liz and Bob Browning are away.”
Flush moves over to drink at the water bowl wetting down the surrounding floor.
Steve comes in the back door.
“Hey flush! Going to mop the kitchen with those ears?”
Flush looks up and pants.
“You made a great start! Go for it!”
Flush barks.
Steve bends down to give Flush an ear rub.
“Steve, keep ahold of him okay?”
“Yeah okay, ah…what’s up?
“I just put the cat treats down, and their dinner is coming right up.”
“Well I’ll close him on the back porch for a minute.”
“He will try and eat the cat food Fred, and that leads to mayhem.”
Bel has arranged six small steel dishes of cat food in a row along the counter.
“Fred, can you lend a hand?”
There are some loud thumps on the hall door and rasping scratches too. Bel offers me two dishes.
“Just put these dishes in that crate in the dining room.”
I carry the dishes in.
“Okay, Fred, stand by.”
Bel puts another dish on the windowsill where the gray and white cat, Alexandra Kollontai, was sleeping. According to bel, historically, she was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a Menshevik, then as a Bolshevik.
“She was an advocate for free love you know.”
“Or do you mean free sex?”
“Fred, there you have a question!”
Bel puts three dinners in the corner of the kitchen on a mat in front of the dryer.
Steve is back from securing Flush on the porch and we can hear the dog barking.
“Are you ready for the Feline Five Hundred, Fred?”
“Is it formula one?”
“No formula, sheer chaos though.”
“Bel told me to stand by this crate.”
“Did you put those two bowls of food in there?”
“Yup”
“Great, as soon as the two tabby Marshals go in there close it.”
“Okay.”
“They will try to eat everyone’s food if they aren’t separated by Flush’s crate.”
“What about when Flush isn’t here with his crate?”
“They eat on the screened porch, or in the broom closet if it’s too cold out on the porch.”
“What about the brooms?”
“They don’t mind at all!”
Bel opens the closet where I can see a number of things from across the room, including two brooms hanging from the wall leaving a small floor space.
She gets out the sponge mop and mops up around the dog bowl.
“So they eat in there? In the dark?”
“No, it’s not dark. See, these are louvered doors.”
Bel’s shouts out.
“Are you ready Fred?’
“Okay!”
“Bel opens the door to the hall and five revolutionaries and one mother race out as if to Versailles in a tumbling mob. They might be five hundred. Tails cross, heads butt, and whiskers are cruelly crushed as the crowd with no starting line climbs over itself to get to the food. Olympe de Gouges, the black cat, is in front like, ‘Liberty Leading the People”, with tail high instead of the tricolor. She jumps against the side of the couch bouncing off to make a skillful ninety degree turn without skidding. This opens the field to the tabby Marshals who are right behind, only they skid and head into the crate at my feet. The windowsill cat, Alexandra, has peeled off from the crowd and does a ‘thunder paw’ to her dish in place.
“Alexandra Kolentai can gallop as loud as a horse!”
“Bel, she is a revolutionary cat!”
“She is like the others, hungry!”
Mother cat, Josephine, and Millicent are neck and neck as they race down the straight away into their Indianapolis, the kitchen. Olympe first leapt up on to the counter and then into the sink. She mews and laps some water out of a mug. Josephine has started feasting with Millicent beside her when the Olympe jumps down from the sink and drives between them. They all try to eat from the same two bowls until Millicent finds a bowl to herself only inches to the right. The race is over.
