agnotte became sad, troubled, and his
movements lost their freedom. He found it difficult to curl himself up,
lost his jolly agility, breathed hard and could not eat. One day, while
caressing him, I felt a seam that ran down his stomach, which was much
swelled and very tight. I called my nurse. She came, took a pair of
scissors cut the thread, and Cagnotte, freed of a sort of overcoat made
of curled lambskin, in which he had been tricked out by the Pont-Neuf
dealers to make him look like a poodle, appeared in all the wretched
guise and ugliness of a street cur, a worthless mongrel. He had grown
fat, and his scant garment was choking him. Once he was rid of his
carapace, he wagged his ears, stretched his limbs, and started romping
joyously round the room, caring nothing about being ugly so long as he
was comfortable. His appetite returned, and he made up by his moral
qualities for his lack of beauty. In Cagnotte's company I gradually
lost, for he was a genuine child of Paris, my remembrance of Tarbes and
of the high mountains visible from our windows; I learned French and I
also became a thorough-paced Parisian.

The reader is not to suppose that this is a story I have invented for
the sole purpose of entertaining him. It is literally true, and proves
that the dog-dealers of that day were quite as clever as horse-coupers
in the art of making up their animals and taking in purchasers.

After Cagnotte's death, my liking was rather for cats, on account of
their being more sedentary and fonder of the fireplace. I shall not
attempt to relate their history in detail. Dynasties of felines, as
numerous as the dynasties of Egyptian kings, succeeded each other in our
home. Accident, flight, or death accounted for them in turns. They were
all beloved and regretted; but life is made up of forgetfulness, and the
remembrance of cats passes away like the remembrance of men.

It is a sad thing that the life of these humble friends, of these
inferior brethren, should not be proportionate to that of their masters.

I shall do no more than mention an old gray cat that used to side with
me against my parents, and bit my mother's ankles when she scolded me or
seemed about to punish me, and come at once to Childebrand, a cat of the
Romanticist period. The name suffices to let my reader understand the
secret desire I felt to run counter to Boileau, whom I disliked then,
but with whom I have since made my peace. It will be remembered that
Ni