The Joys of Owning a Cat
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
Jean Cocteau once observed that his cats were like the “visible soul” of his home. As he put it, “I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
One of history’s most notorious cat-lovers was the Cardinal Richelieu.1 He shared his home with no less than 14 cats, and even had a separate wing of his residences converted into what he dubbed a chatterie. Upon his death he left a kingly sum to his cats, and installed a permanent caretaker for them.
In this painting by Charles Edouard Delort (mid 19th century), we see Richelieu leaning over to enjoy watching his cats as they play with a map that is spread out on the floor. One of the cats is upside down rolling against the hem of his cassock.
In the 19th century it became more common for affluent members of society to keep cats as pets. In the middle ages they had often been depicted as symbols of the occult. Whereas in this painting the suggestion is that a cat is a worthy companion of a scholar and serious-minded individual. In this sense, it’s not just a pretty painting, but also a slightly radical one. It shows cats as companions, not as allegoric symbols.
As Albert Schweitzer once put it, cats are a “refuge from the miseries of life”. And in this painting we see a gentle and sweet depiction of this sentiment: a moment of joy and distraction amidst the weighty considerations of state and church.
Julian
Thank you for reading my substack My goal is to make learning about Art & Culture easy and accessible for anyone. If you’d like to support this project, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It makes a big difference. Thank you.
If you’ve read Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Three Musketeers’, you may recognize him as one of the main villains of the story. It’s somewhat ironic that today he is largely known as a supervillain of sorts.
Correction: the painting is from the mid nineteenth century, not the mid 1900s.
Correction 2: the sentence in the 4th paragraph should read: “in this sense it is not just a pretty painting..” (the original email was missing the word “just”)
Thank you for this ~ I am saddened by the thought that cats were caught up and tied to ‘witches’ (women) and then cast into occult by the church and state because of the lack of understanding (or willingness to understand) one another
My cat has taught me so much, and not just about my home as a house for my body (shelter), but also my home as a house for my soul (body)