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"The place of historiographer to the king was but an empty title," he says himself; "I wanted to make it a reality by working at the history of the war of 1741; but, in spite of my work, Moncrif had admittance to his Majesty, and I had not."
Fearing that he might fall ill some day, and wishing to inform herself concerning the maladies to which cats are liable, she procured various books on that important subject; she even went so far in her devotion as to read the "History of Cats," by François-Auguste Paradis de Moncrif, a member of the French Academy. The conduct of Mother Michel had no low motive of personal interest.
He refers to the fact that Moncrif says not a word about the celebrated cardinal's passion for those creatures; but he does say, "Everybody knows that one of the greatest ministers France ever possessed, M. Colbert, always had a number of kittens playing about that same cabinet in which so many institutions, both honorable and useful to the nation, had their origin."
He was forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a little frivolous, even for such a petit conteur as Moncrif. People continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did was the result of one such twitting.
Moncrif has no difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats, and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his favourite pussy was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising. From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes to the "harmless, necessary cat."
Voltaire, d'Argental, Moncrif, Hénault, Madame d'Egmont, Madame du Deffand herself all were born within a few years of each other, and all lived to be well over eighty, with the full zest of their activities unimpaired. Pont-de-Veyle, it is true, died young at the age of seventy-seven.
To live a simple pussy by her side Was nobler far than to be deified. To these and other tributes Moncrif adds idyls and romances of his own, while regretting that it never occurred to Theocritus to write a bergerie de chats. He tells stories of blameless pussies beloved by Fontanelle and La Fontaine, and quotes Marot in praise of "the green-eyed Venus."
People who collect prints of the eighteenth century know an engraving which represents a tom-cat, rampant, holding up an oval portrait of a gentleman and standing, in order to do so, on a volume. The volume is Les Chats, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif.
He was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687. All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d'Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles.
It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and then the shower of epigrams broke out again. He wished to be made historiographer; "Oh, nonsense," the wits cried, "he must mean historiogriffe" and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots.
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