100 Cats Who Changed Civilization

THE HERMITAGE GUARDS ^{THE CATS WHO WATCH OVER RUSSIA’S GREATEST MUSEUM}

Cats have always been great friends of libraries and museums. Because mice and rats will chew up an important old manuscript or a priceless painting just as readily as they would an ear of corn, numerous cultural centers have employed feline assassins to keep vermin damage to a minimum. But few such groups are as ancient, as numerous, or of such regal ancestry as the feline army defending the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Today a force of roughly fifty cats watches over the sprawling complex, just as they have for more than two and a half centuries. Their work began back in the days when the Hermitage was still a palace for the czars. In 1745 Peter the Great’s daughter, Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, decided she’d had enough of the rodents in the building. She issued a royal proclamation decreeing the roundup of “better cats, the largest ones, able to catch mice.” They were to be dispatched to the court, accompanied by someone who could look after them.

The first contingent of felines arrived shortly thereafter. They must have done their work well, because they remained through the reign of every czar. They also survived the communist revolution intact, though the descendants of the original band were decimated during World War II. Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad) was blockaded for months by German troops. Food became very scarce, and many of the Hermitage cats became entrées.

After the war, their numbers were replenished. While the cats the czars kept were said to be Persians, today’s collection is a somewhat motley assortment of former strays domiciled in the building’s basement. Donations by employees and proceeds from an annual sale of paintings made by the children of Hermitage workers are used to pay for the cats’ medical care, shelter, and food to supplement whatever they catch on their own.

Though the felines regularly patrol outdoors, they’re no longer allowed in the galleries and exhibit halls. On rare occasions, however, some do find their way in. But since they usually trigger the museum’s elaborate electronic security system in the process, they’re promptly escorted right back out.

SELIMA ^{THE CAT WHO DIED FOR ART’S SAKE}

Many cats enjoy posthumous honors, but few have been commemorated so artfully, or in such varied mediums, as Selima, the companion of eighteenth-century British author, politician, and aristocrat Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford. Perhaps she received so much attention because she died so colorfully. While attempting to reach some goldfish in a porcelain vase, Selima fell in and drowned.

Walpole was bereft. He had an inscription about the cat carved on the offending vase (which can still be seen at his mansion, Strawberry Fields), and asked a poet friend, Thomas Gray, to author an epitaph. Gray went him one better, composing Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat. It advises the reader against striving blindly for unworthy goals, and it ends with the line that has made it immortal: “Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes / And heedless hearts is lawful prize. / Nor all that glitters, gold.”

As if this weren’t enough of a monument, in 1776 the artist Stephen Elmer executed a painting called Horace Walpole’s Favourite Cat, showing Selima perched precariously over the goldfish bowl. Nearby sits a book, opened to Gray’s Ode.

BEERBOHM ^{THE CAT WHO UPSTAGED BRITAIN’S FINEST THESPIANS}

For centuries no self-respecting English theater—at least, none that wished to be free of vermin—could do without a cat. But besides hunting mice, these felines came to serve other functions. Actors considered them good luck charms, and their calming presence cured many a bout of stage fright. They grew so useful that even the most egotistical performers overlooked the fact that the cats occasionally wandered onstage during productions, upstaging their human associates.

No modern theater cat served as ably, as famously, or as long as Beerbohm, who handled vermin suppression duties at the Gielgud Theatre (formerly the Globe) in London’s West End from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The regal-looking tabby often picked certain actors to fawn over, and he wandered onto the boards at least once during the run of every show. Named after British stage veteran Herbert Beerbohm Tree, he worked in show business for twenty years before retiring to Kent to live with the company’s carpenter. He died in March 1995—a sad passing that was honored with a front-page obituary in the theater newspaper The Stage. His portrait still hangs in the Gielgud.

HODGE ^{THE CAT WHO HELPED WRITE A DICTIONARY}

Many a famous poet or novelist has written under the languid gaze of a feline. But few such four-legged muses can match the grit and staying power of a black cat named Hodge. He provided companionship to lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) as he single-handedly composed the first truly authoritative dictionary of the English language.

Johnson gave eleven years to the work, churning out definition after definition at his home at 17 Gough Square in London. As the great lexicographer labored at his desk, Hodge was often at his elbow, amusing and diverting his owner from what must have been an unimaginable grind. The project was finally completed in 1775. It won universal acclaim, became the literary world’s reference of choice for more than a century, and earned its author the nickname “Dictionary Johnson.”

However, the world knows about Hodge (and his master) not because of the dictionary, but because of a young Scotsman named James Boswell. Boswell befriended Johnson in 1763 and spent the next few decades following him around, scribbling down the sage’s comments and making no secret of his desire to write the great man’s biography. In 1799, he duly produced The Life of Samuel Johnson, considered the first truly well-rounded, sympathetic, modern biography. It made Johnson, who might have merited no more than a footnote in the history books, into an immortal literary character.

Boswell also turned Hodge into a famous literary cat, despite being pathologically afraid of him. “I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature,” Boswell wrote in The Life of Johnson. “I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this’; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’ ”

Johnson supported his four-legged companion to the bitter end. Boswell notes how the great lexicographer, as his cat’s final hours approached, went off to purchase some valerian (a relative of catnip) to ease his suffering. Upon his death the poet Percival Stockdale wrote An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat, which reads in part, “Who, by his master when caressed / Warmly his gratitude expressed / And never failed his thanks to purr / Whene’er he stroked his sable fur.”

Today, across the street from the building where Johnson composed his masterwork, stands a statue of Hodge perched atop a copy of his owner’s book. In his dictionary, Johnson defined cats in general as “a domestic animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.” But it is his more gracious assessment of Hodge, as “a very fine cat indeed,” that adorns the statue of his literary soul mate.

CATTARINA ^{THE CAT WHO TOUCHED THE DARK HEART OF POE}

During his short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe wrote great poems, penned some of the world’s most terrifying horror stories, and invented the detective novel. But his achievements brought him neither happiness nor material success. Quite the contrary. Before his death from alcohol abuse in 1849 at age forty, he suffered more than a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, rejection, and grief.

In 1842, his wife, Virginia, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. For the next five years, until her death in 1847, her health deteriorated. The couple’s poverty exacerbated her suffering. Poe, though intermittently employed at various magazines, was never well off. And his personal demons, chiefly his inability to stop drinking, brought turmoil to his home. His problem grew so severe that he feared he might actually hurt Virginia during one of his drunken fits.

Throughout these years the couple’s most devoted companion was a feline named Cattarina. The Poes, who didn’t stand on ceremony, sometimes called their tortoiseshell cat Kate (Poe himself was often referred to as “Eddie”). The cat would sit on her master’s shoulder as he wrote and would cuddle next to Virginia, sometimes providing the only warmth that their freezing cottage had to offer.

Poe never physically harmed his wife, who by all accounts he loved deeply. But the fear was always there, along with what must have been searing guilt over his inability to give her a better life. He shared those feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in his story The Black Cat—a tale of unparalleled gruesomeness inspired in part by Cattarina’s devotion to Virginia and by Poe’s anxiety about his own dark side.

The story, written in 1842, tells the tale of a drunk who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, hangs his cat, who Poe describes as a “beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.” Not long afterward he’s followed home by another feline that looks almost exactly like the one he killed—except for an unnerving ring of white fur around the creature’s neck.

The man’s wife takes an immediate liking to the newcomer, and they become inseparable. The man, however, comes to believe that his new pet wants to avenge his earlier crime. During yet another drunken rage he tries to kill it with an ax, only to murder his wife instead. He quickly walls up her body in the basement and is relieved to find that the cat has disappeared.

Later, he brazenly shows the basement to searchers sent to investigate his wife’s disappearance. But suddenly, a terrible wail erupts from behind the masonry. The wall is pulled down, revealing the dead woman with the black cat perched on her head, screeching. In his haste the man had sealed up the animal with his wife.

The story’s finale is one of the most unforgettable scenes in horror literature—and one of the most psychologically revealing. In the real world, Poe tried his best to care for his wife, and never gave so much as a dirty look to his dark muse, Cattarina. But it probably crossed his mind that this tortoiseshell feline served his wife better and more faithfully than he ever managed to. If so, then perhaps The Black Cat accomplished two things: It cast the fears and inadequacies of its author into sharp relief, and it honored the memory of the selfless Cattarina, whose literary incarnation has outlived both herself, her mistress, and her master.

PANGUR BAN ^{IRELAND’S MOST FAMOUS FELINE}

For most of history, the only way to create a new copy of an old book was to obtain a stack of fresh parchment, pull up a chair, break out a pot of ink, and laboriously copy every line by hand. During the Middle Ages this mind-numbing task was raised to an art form by Catholic monks, legions of whom spent their lives huddled over tables in stone cells all over Europe, copying everything from Greek and Roman classics to the latest papal pronouncements. Much of the knowledge that survived from ancient times did so only because of their unceasing efforts.

Working as a scribe was important, but not very creative. That’s why so few of these human photocopy machines made any sort of mark on history. One of that handful was a young man who, sometime in the ninth century, perhaps trained as a student copyist at the Monastery of St Paul in Carinthia, Austria. We don’t know his name, but thanks to a short poem he scribbled on the back of a copy of St Paul’s Epistles, we do know the name of his cat—Pangur Ban.

That feline, apparently, was the medieval manuscript copier’s bosom friend. The young Irishman (his origin is known because the poem was written in Gaelic) traveled all the way from the Emerald Isle to Austria to acquire the skills of a scribe. There he must have spent endless days and nights in relative isolation, his only company the manuscript he was working on and his faithful white cat, Pangur Ban. Again, scholars can guess at the feline’s color because in Gaelic ban means “white.” This man, who was obviously a long way from home, decided, for reasons unknown, to slip among the monastery’s weighty manuscripts a short poem about his relationship with his cat. Reading it now (in a translation by Robin Flower), one can almost hear the feline frisking around the lonely monk’s cell as he works:

No one will ever learn the ultimate fate of either the poetic monk or his cat. And of course, he can never know that his poem, authored perhaps in a moment of fatigue or whimsy, would leave its mark on history. Found centuries later, the little ditty became one of the greatest examples of early Irish poetry.

PETER ^{THE CAT WHO DROVE HIS MASTER NUTS}

One of the most famous illustrators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an Englishman named Louis Wain. He made his fortune drawing fanciful pictures of anthropomorphized cats doing everything from playing golf to having tea. This feline version of the dogs-playing-poker franchise was inspired by Wain’s own pet, Peter.

Sadly, Wain’s cat pictures provide a riveting visual record of his eventual descent into madness. Born August 5, 1860, Wain began his artistic career as a teen. During his early twenties he worked as a freelancer of modest reputation. Then his wife, Emily, began a long struggle with cancer, which would eventually claim her life. Since she took great solace from their black and white cat, Peter, Wain taught him tricks, such as wearing spectacles. Then he started drawing the cat in more fanciful situations, and a new career was born. “To him properly belongs the foundation of my career, the developments of my initial efforts, and the establishing of my work,” he wrote.

For years thereafter, Peter would be seen again and again in his master’s renderings. In 1886, Wain drew a massive piece called A Kitten’s Christmas Party for the Illustrated London News. It won him wide acclaim, and soon his pictures of upright-walking, clothes-wearing cats were everywhere. It’s hard to overestimate Wain’s popularity. His felines graced everything from greeting cards to children’s books to the Louis Wain Annual, a magazine devoted to his caricatures. He was to cats what Thomas Kinkade is to cottages.

Sadly, though the artist’s work is still remembered today, it is for a darker reason. Late in life Wain developed schizophrenia and spent almost two decades confined to mental hospitals before his death in 1939. He painted until the end, unwittingly creating a disturbing record of his descent into madness. As his schizophrenia took hold, the clothes-wearing cats disappeared. Instead Wain created ever more abstract-looking feline portraits, with the subjects rendered in bright, almost psychedelic colors and sporting surprised, even terrified, expressions. In his final works—basically collections of small, geometric shapes—the “cats” are merely complex kaleidoscopic patterns. And yet, even toward the end, the poor mad artist occasionally created portraits that looked like Peter, the cat who started it all.

MASTER’S CAT ^{THE CAT WHO CHARMED THE DICKENS OUT OF DICKENS}

English novelist Charles Dickens was a great fan of dogs and birds—so fond, in fact, that for years cats were banned from his London household, lest they make off with his feathered friends. But all that changed when Dickens’s daughter, Mamie, received a white kitten as a gift. The cat was christened William. Shortly thereafter, after giving birth to kittens, she was rechristened Williamina.

The feline family was supposed to stay in a box in the kitchen. But Williamina had other plans. One by one she carried her kittens into Dickens’s study and deposited them in a corner. Dickens told his daughter that they couldn’t stay and had her take them back to the kitchen. But Williamina brought them back. Mamie removed them again, only to have the mother once more laboriously haul them into the study. Only this time she laid them directly at the great man’s feet and then stared at him imploringly, as if begging permission to stay.

It was finally granted, and the kittens enjoyed the privilege of climbing up the curtains and scampering across Dickens’s desk as he tried to work. When they were old enough, all were found good homes—except for a single deaf kitten. Because it could never hear its name, it was never given one. Instead he was known simply as “the master’s cat.” And indeed he was. He followed Dickens like a dog throughout the house and would sit by him at his desk as he wrote.

Not that the master’s cat didn’t demand a certain level of attention from the master. One night, when the rest of his family went out to attend a ball, Dickens sat in his study by a candle, engrossed in a book. The cat, as usual, was at his side. Suddenly the candle flickered out. Dickens, too engrossed in his reading to notice the cause, relit the candle and continued. He also gave a passing pat on the head to his cat, who stared at him longingly.

A minute or two later, the candle flickered again. Dickens looked up just in time to see his companion deliberately trying to put out the flame with his paw. The author set his book aside and played with the cat, then shared the story with his family the next day.

HAMLET ^{THE CAT WHO HELD COURT OVER A LITERARY ROUND TABLE}

For decades, Manhattan’s elegant Algonquin Hotel has been a gathering place for the city’s theater crowd and literati. But during its heyday, its greatest celebrity arguably wasn’t Dorothy Parker or Robert Benchley but a scraggly former stray cat named Hamlet.

According to legend, the feline, originally called Rusty, was an unemployed theater cat taken in by the hotel’s owner, Frank Case. It must have been quite a step up. The old tomcat was renamed Hamlet and given the run of the hotel. He even got his own cat door to ease his travels and is said to have enjoyed lapping milk from a champagne glass. When he passed away after only three years on the job, the New York Times noted his departure in its gossip column.

Though the original Hamlet is a distant memory, the tradition of keeping a cat at the Algonquin lives on. Today the position is held by a former animal shelter inmate named Matilda. Like her predecessors, she has the run of the place (save for the kitchen and hotel dining room) and receives fan mail from around the world.

PULCINELLA ^{THE CAT WHO WROTE A FUGUE}

Today the name Domenico Scarlatti doesn’t exactly fall trippingly off the tongues of music aficionados. In the early eighteenth century, however, the Italian-born composer was famous throughout Europe. A master of the keyboard, he commanded respect both from his contemporaries and successors. He was considered George Frederic Handel’s equal on the harpsichord. Artists ranging from Chopin to Brahms to Vladimir Horowitz have idolized his work for centuries, but he was also extremely popular with lay audiences.

He was as prolific as he was skilled. During his lifetime (1685–1757) he created several operas and produced some five hundred sonatas, all while holding various high-profile musical posts in Italy, England, Portugal, and Spain, where he lived for more than two decades. Scarlatti became famous not just for his intricate, innovative keyboard pieces, but also for his somewhat unorthodox style, which sampled everything from religious themes to Spanish, Moorish, and Jewish folk music. But one of his most famous pieces was inspired not by some rustic melody or the work of another composer. It was a collaboration with his cat. Officially called the Fugue in G minor, Kk. 30, this one-movement harpsichord sonata is unofficially known as the Cat’s Fugue.

According to legend, the maestro owned a cat named Pulcinella, who enjoyed walking up and down the keyboard of his harpsichord. Usually this produced only random, meaningless noise. But during one of these “improvisation sessions,” the feline plinked out an unusual, though quite catchy, series of notes. Scarlatti grabbed a pad and wrote down the short phrase. Inspired, he composed an entire fugue around it.

The piece became an instant success, and it remains so today. During the 1840s, the great pianist Franz Liszt added the work to his repertoire—it became a regular part of his performances. By that time a major oversight on Scarlatti’s part had been rectified. At the time he wrote it, the idea of somehow noting the origin of the piece in the title simply didn’t occur to him. But by the early nineteenth century the brilliant bit of feline-inspired music had become universally known as the Cat’s Fugue.

CALVIN ^{THE CAT WHO INSPIRED TWO AUTHORS}

It is the rarest of literary cats who serves as the muse of not one but two writers. Such was the case for a fluffy Maltese named Calvin. He entered the world of letters in the mid-nineteenth century, when he wandered “out of the great unknown” into the household of Harriet Beecher Stowe. “It was as if he had inquired at the door if this was the residence of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, upon being assured that it was, had decided to dwell there,” remarked family friend Charles Dudley Warner. Calvin immediately made himself at home. He hovered nearby as Stowe wrote, sometimes even perching on her shoulders. All were impressed not only by the feline’s self-confidence, but by his intelligence. “He is a reasonable cat and understands pretty much everything except binomial theorem,” said Warner.

He was in a unique position to know. When Stowe decamped from her New England home to Florida, custody of Calvin was awarded to him. The cat prowled his Connecticut estate for eight years. “He would sit quietly in my study for hours, then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented,” Warner wrote. He could also open doors on his own and open register vents when he felt cold. According to his owner, Calvin seemed equal to almost any challenge, save for one: “He could do almost any thing but speak, and you would declare sometimes that you could see a pathetic longing to do that in his intelligent face.”

Calvin became such a part of the family that, when the feline finally passed away, he received a long, loving eulogy in the author’s bestselling collection of 1871 essays, My Summer in a Garden. The elegy, called Calvin (A Study of Character), became nationally famous. “I have set down nothing concerning him but the literal truth,” Warner wrote. “He was always a mystery. I did not know whence he came. I do not know whither he has gone. I would not weave one spray of falsehood in the wreath I lay upon his grave.”

The pint-sized literary lion who loved the world of letters had now become a part of it forever.

DINAH ^{THE SECOND-MOST-FAMOUS CAT IN ALICE IN WONDERLAND}

Ask the typical reader to name the feline star of the Lewis Carroll books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and he or she will likely mention the Cheshire Cat. But another cat plays an important role in the two works. It’s a cat who, like so many characters in the books, was based in reality.

Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, first spun the tale during a lazy afternoon boat trip down the Thames River with a friend, Robinson Duckworth, and three little girls of whom he was particularly fond: Lorina, Alice, and Edity Liddell. The three enjoyed the story so much that Alice, the tale’s namesake, asked Dodgson to write it down. He did, showed the draft to friends, and was encouraged to find a publisher. The first of the two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was published on July 4, 1865. It became an immediate sensation and has remained in print ever since.

For a tale of fantasy, the book includes a great many thinly disguised real people. The protagonist is, of course, Alice Liddell. Robinson Duckworth becomes the Duck, and Carroll himself becomes the Dodo (perhaps because he stuttered, which caused his real last name to often come out as Do-Do-Dodgson). As for pets, the book’s Alice talks repeatedly about Dinah, Alice Liddell’s real tortoiseshell tabby. Interestingly, the references form one of the dark, rather sadistic veins that flow through the text.

Whenever poor Dinah comes up in conversation, it’s always in the context of thoughtless cruelty. For instance, early in Wonderland, Alice mentions how her pet is “such a capital one for catching mice,” apparently forgetting that she’s conversing with a talking mouse at the time. And later, in Looking Glass, she makes the same sort of faux pas when addressing a group of birds. “Dinah’s our cat,” she says. “And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!” No wonder Alice got into so much trouble in Wonderland.

FOSS ^{THE CAT WHO WAS ALMOST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE}

The cats of great artists and writers often find themselves immortalized in their masters’ works. But in the strange case of nineteenth-century British artist and writer Edward Lear, a bit of poetic whimsy seems to have found its way into the real world.

The bearded, bespectacled eccentric gained fame as a painter of animals and landscapes. But he also published several books of children’s nonsense poems that made him internationally famous. Many, including The Owl and the Pussycat, are still read to toddlers today.

Lear illustrated his poems with lighthearted cartoons. One of his favorite subjects was a striped tomcat named Foss, who he acquired in 1872. Lear’s devotion to his pet is quite amazing, considering that Foss was by all accounts a most unattractive subject. He was fat, with a bobbed tail reportedly cut off by a superstitious servant who believed it would stop him from roaming. Yet there’s no end to the pictures Lear drew of himself and his rotund friend on adventures. No photos exist of the famous feline. When Lear tried to take one, the big orange cat jumped out of his master’s arms just before the shutter clicked.

Lear loved Foss so much that, when the artist built a new home, he made it look exactly like his old one, so as not to upset the cat. And when Foss passed away in 1887, he was buried in his master’s garden under a large memorial stone. Lear himself died only two months later.

Today pictures of Foss can still be seen in collections of Lear’s nonsense poems. But there’s something mysterious about them. The real Foss didn’t enter the artist’s life until 1872. Yet years earlier he regularly produced drawings of a similar fat, striped, stub-tailed cat. And for some reason, Lear was convinced that Foss lived a near-impossible thirty-one years—so much so that he had that figure carved on his friend’s tombstone. Perhaps he saw the real Foss as the incarnation of the imaginary cat he’d carried in his mind’s eye for decades. “Edward adored Foss, and it was mutual, but the Foss we know belongs more to the world of nonsense stories than he does to the real world,” says Lear biographer Peter Levi. Maybe he always did.

COBBY ^{THE CAT WHO STOLE HIS MASTER’S HEART—LITERALLY}

After the death of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy on January 11, 1928, his pet cat, Cobby, reportedly vanished, never to be seen again. This strange occurrence gave rise to one of the most macabre stories in the history of Western literature.

It began shortly after the great man’s passing, when a contest broke out over where to bury his body. Hardy’s will stated explicitly that he wanted to be laid to rest with minimal ceremony in his hometown of Stinsford. However, the executor of his will thought that the author of such classics as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Return of the Native should enjoy more august accommodations. Specifically, he wanted Hardy to find repose in the fabled Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

After heated debate with the family, a compromise was reached: Hardy’s body would go to Westminster Abbey and his heart to Stinsford. This would require a bit of postmortem surgery—a job that Hardy’s personal physician reportedly declined to undertake. Another doctor was found, and the organ was removed while the great author lay in state at his home. Tradition says it was wrapped in a tea cloth, placed in a biscuit tin, and set aside for transport.

According to one version of the story, the next day the undertaker charged with carrying the heart to Stinsford discovered the box was empty and Cobby was nowhere to be found—the assumption being, of course, that the cat ran off with his owner’s heart. But there’s an even more horrifying telling of the tale. Some contend that, on the fateful day, authorities found the box empty save for a few scraps of flesh—and that Cobby sat nearby, washing the blood off his muzzle.

In this version of the story, the undertaker came up with a rough-and-ready solution. He had to bury the heart. The heart was inside Cobby. So he throttled the poor cat and secretly interred him at Stinsford. How much of the story is true? Only an inspection of the grave’s contents could answer that question. But what is known for sure is that poor Cobby was never seen again.

POLAR BEAR ^{THE CAT WHO CHARMED A CURMUDGEON}

Cleveland Amory was a well-known literary figure throughout his life. He was the youngest-ever editor at the Saturday Evening Post, chief critic for TV Guide, and the author of such bestsellers as The Proper Bostonians and Who Killed Society? But it took a New York City tomcat to turn him into a household name.

It happened on Christmas Eve 1977, when Amory, an avowed dog person, helped rescue an injured stray cat lurking in an alley near his apartment. The cat rewarded his effort by slashing him across both hands. Nevertheless, Amory adopted him. He discovered, while bathing the extraordinarily dirty creature, that it was snow white. Accordingly, he named him Polar Bear.

The two became fast friends, and the cat became an invaluable partner in Amory’s long-running crusade for animal rights. Over the years Amory had done everything from cofounding the Humane Society of the United States to launching the Fund for Animals, dedicated to protecting rare and endangered wildlife. Those causes received an enormous boost in 1988, when he published a book about his life with Polar Bear called The Cat Who Came for Christmas. It rocketed to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, as did its two sequels, The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever.

The works turned Polar Bear into a celebrity among cat fans and animal rights activists. He was even invited to become ship’s cat aboard the Greenpeace vessel Sea Shepherd (an offer that Amory, on his pet’s behalf, respectfully declined). Perhaps most importantly, he cast light on his owner’s animal rights work, including a scheme to airlift burros out of the Grand Canyon to save them from government culling and an effort to paint seal pups with harmless dyes to make their pelts worthless to trappers.

The two parted ways in 1991, when Polar Bear passed away. He was buried at Black Beauty Ranch, a Texas refuge established by the Fund for Animals to care for abused and abandoned creatures. His memorial reads, “Beneath these stones lie the mortal remains of The Cat Who Came for Christmas, Beloved Polar Bear. ’Til we meet again.” They met again when Amory, who died in 1998, was laid to rest beside him.

MYSOUFF II ^{THE CAT WHO ATE THE CANARIES}

French novelist Alexandre Dumas, the author of such classics as The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of Monte Cristo, was famous for his high living and bizarre exploits. So when his cat, Mysouff II, displeased him, he was given a punishment perfectly in keeping with his owner’s imaginative nature. Luckily for him, it was too imaginative to execute.

Mysouff II was actually the second cat in this feline dynasty. The original Mysouff had been at Dumas’ side when he was just starting out as a writer. Every day the feline would see his master off to work, and every evening he met Dumas at the corner to escort him home. The cat would unerringly meet him at the same spot, even if he arrived before or after his usual time.

After the passing of this faithful original came Mysouff II, a black and white shorthaired feline who was discovered in the basement of Dumas’ home by a cook. By then the author had become rich and famous, and he lived in luxury. Mysouff II also enjoyed plenty of pampering—until he found a way to mess up a good thing. Among Dumas’ many, many indulgences was a collection of monkeys and another of exotic birds that lived on the property. One day the cat found his way into the aviary and proceeded to consume the entire flock.

Dumas was horrified, but also somewhat amused. He decided to put the offending feline on trial for the crime. The next Sunday he argued the case before a handpicked “jury” of friends. During the trial someone pointed out an extenuating circumstance: The aviary door had been opened by one of the monkeys, and the feline had simply taken advantage of the situation.

Since the simians were clearly implicated as accomplices, Dumas decided that poor Mysouff II should spend the next five years imprisoned with them. But fate spared him from incarceration. Shortly after the cat started serving his sentence, the author suffered a huge financial setback. A round of belt tightening followed, and the expensive monkeys and their cage were put on the auction block. Mysouff II not only got to stay, but also won early parole.

JEOFFREY ^{THE WORLD’S MOST GODLY CAT}

Pity poor Christopher Smart. An English poet born in 1722, Smart began writing award-winning verses during his years as a student at Cambridge University. Sadly, he was also drinking excessively, running up debts, and hiding from creditors. After graduating, he edited and wrote for various London publications, sometimes adopting bizarre pseudonyms such as Mary Midnight. Around 1751, he experienced a religious conversion, which coincided more or less with a descent into madness. He began accosting passersby in London’s Hyde Park, demanding that they immediately get down on their knees and pray with him. His odd behavior landed him in a mental asylum from 1756 to 1758.

But perhaps Smart wasn’t as irrational as he seemed. While confined at the asylum, he produced some of his best work, including a collection of poems called A Song of David. He also authored the exceedingly strange Jubilante Agno, a collection of free verse celebrating and cataloging the world’s divine architecture. In it he praises—often in excruciating detail—every single blessing he feels God has bestowed upon him. Not surprisingly, the massive work includes a loving tribute to Smart’s cat. He lists the feline’s attributes in a section appropriately called For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey, stating that he is a wonder of creation: “For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.”

Though Smart emerged from the asylum with his poetic reputation enhanced, the same couldn’t be said of his financial or personal affairs. His wife and children were forced to abandon him to avoid poverty, and he died penniless in 1771. Interestingly, his idiosyncratic Jubilante Agno wasn’t published until 1939. But when it was, his ode to Jeoffrey became an instant favorite with cat lovers worldwide. Apparently more than a few readers saw their own felines in Smart’s loving description of his pet.

OTHER FELINES OF DISTINCTION

MINOU: Pet of famous French writer and iconoclast George Sand. They were so close that Sand and the cat supposedly shared breakfast from the same bowl.

TAKI: Pet of Raymond Chandler, father of the hard-boiled detective novel genre and creator of the archetypical gumshoe Philip Marlowe. Chandler read the first drafts of his mysteries to the cat, whom he referred to as his “feline secretary.”

PUDLENKA: The pet of Czech playwright Karel Capek. He felt that the female, who arrived on his doorstep shortly after the poisoning death of his previous cat, had been sent to avenge the loss. The female bore twenty-six kittens in her lifetime. Her successor, Pudlenka 2, had twenty-one.

BOSCH AND TOMMY: Two cats, always fighting, who helped keep Anne Frank company while she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Bosch is an ethnic slur applied to Germans; Tommy is slang for a British soldier.

HINSE: A particularly bad-tempered pet of novelist Sir Walter Scott who regularly attacked his master’s many hunting dogs. This pastime proved his undoing in 1826, when he was killed by a bloodhound named Nimrod.