the battle of
Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an
aide-de-camp of Napoleon, who at the time occupied, together with his
suite, the Palace of Schoenbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an unusually
late hour, when, on passing the door of Napoleon's bedroom, he was
surprised by a most singular noise, and repeated calls from the Emperor
for assistance. Opening the door hastily, and rushing into the room, a
singular spectacle presented itself--the great soldier of the age, half
undressed, his countenance agitated, the beaded drops of perspiration
standing on his brow, in his hand his victorious sword, with which he
was making frequent and convulsive lunges at some invisible enemy
through the tapestry that lined the walls. It was a cat that had
secreted herself in this place; and Napoleon held cats not so much in
abhorrence as in terror. "A feather," says the poet, "daunts the brave;"
and a greater poet, through the mouth of his Shylock, remarks that
"there are some that are mad if they behold a cat--a harmless, necessary
cat." Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable
aversion. When "Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had the
whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the
shape of his dagger," was convicted of mendacity and cowardice, Bertram
exclaimed, "I could endure any thing before this but a cat, and now he's
a cat to me." The fores of censure could no further go.

If Napoleon, however, held cats, as has been averred, in positive fear,
there have been others, and some of them illustrious captains, that have
regarded them with other feelings. Marshall Turenne could amuse himself
for hours in playing with his kittens; and the great general, Lord
Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar, at the time of
the famous siege, attended by his favorite cat. Cardinal Richelieu was
also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and
Dr. Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the
tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete
of those who have bestowed on the feline race some portion of their
affections.

Butler, in his _Hudibras_, observes in an oft-quoted passage, that

"Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass."

And the annotator on this passage, in explanation, adds, that "Montaigne
in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool f