THE CAT : FASCINATING VICE. 
127 
Certainly tlie feline race Las been richly endowed by the Crea- 
tor, and powerfully titled in favoritism. Manon Lescaut belongs 
to this race, and also Cleopatra, the ardent Egyptian, with golden 
hair, the irresistible enchantress, who owned no rival in the art of 
bewitching mortals — the fatal Cleopatra, under whose fascination 
the slave chose an hour of bliss and death ; and who took him at 
his word, and who finds her supreme enjoyment in the sight of 
her lover’s agony, sporting with her victims as the cat plays with 
the mouse. And because I recognize the power of fascination 
with which these beings are endowed ; I conceive, and I excuse the 
sympathy of persons of taste for the beast with rosy mouth, with 
perfidious caresses, and insinuating tones, I conceive and excuse 
the maddening love of the Anthonys for the Cleopatras ; but I 
cannot yield to the general enchantment, for it costs me much to 
say it ; but the passion for cats is a vice — a vice of spiritual peo- 
ple it is true, but of those who have been seared by disgust. 
'No man of subtle taste and smell will be in sympathetic relations 
with a beast impassioned for asparagus, that speaking emblem of 
venal love. I had often asked myself why I liked cats so little be- 
fore asparagus had told me all. 
The domestication of the cat is quite modern, and was only ef- 
fected in France at the invasion of the JSTorman rat (brown rat). 
Until this day, the epoch of the first crusade, the care of rid- 
ding us of mice had been intrusted to the ferret, which acquitted 
himself but poorly. The ferret had come to us from Mauritania, in 
company with the rabbit and the Arab horseman, by way of the 
Iberian Peninsula. The establishment of the Norman rat in France 
induced the necessity of confiding the care of its lares to a stronger 
auxiliary than the ferret. Thence the introduction of the cat in 
our dwellings. Its domestication had been successfully tried 
among most populations of the south of Europe. I shall explain 
farther on, in a luminous development of the rat question, how the 
Muscovite rat, surmulot, has since absorbed the Norman rat. The 
invasion of the Russian rat now places us in a position analogous 
to that of our forefathers against the Norman rat. The domestic 
cat having turned tail like a coward before the rat of the sinks, we 
must deprive this inefficient guard of her honorable functions, then 
