Free 100 Cats Who Changed Civilization by Sam Stall Page A

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 asection 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