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"Now I considered Childebrand a very fine name indeed, Merovingian, mediaeval, and Gothic, and vastly preferable to Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, or any Greek name whatsoever. Romanticism was the fashion of my early days: I have no doubt the people of classical times called their cats Hector, Ajax, or Patroclus.
All were loved and regretted: but life is made up of oblivion, and the memory of cats dies out like the memory of men." After making mention of an old gray cat who always took his part against his parents, and used to bite Madame Gautier's legs when she presumed to reprove her son, he passes on at once to the romantic period, and the commemoration of Childebrand.
This child it was whom Pepin, either from a grandfather's blind fondness, or through the influence of his wife Plectrude, appointed to succeed him, to the detriment of his two sons by Alpaide, Charles and Childebrand. Charles, at that time twenty-five years of age, had already a name for capacity and valor.
Childebrand was a splendid cat of common kind, tawny and striped with black, like the hose of Saltabadil in 'Le Rois' Amuse. With his large, green, almond-shaped eyes, and his symmetrical stripes, there was something tigerlike about him that pleased me. Childebrand had the honor of figuring in some verses that I wrote to 'flout' Boileau:
"Puis je te decrirai ce tableau de Rembrandt Que me fait tant plaisir: et mon chat Childebrand, Sur mes genoux pose selon son habitude, Levant sur moi la tete avec inquietude, Suivra les mouvements de mon doigt qui dans l'air Esquisse mon recit pour le rendre plus clair.
"Childebrand was brought in there to make a good rhyme for Rembrandt, the piece being a kind of confession of the romantic faith made to a friend, who was then as enthusiastic as myself about Victor Hugo, Sainte Beuve, and Alfred de Musset.... I come next to Madame Theophile, a 'red' cat, with a white breast, a pink nose, and blue eyes, whom I called by that name because we were on terms of the closest intimacy.
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