The Cardinal and His Cats?

 Charles Édouard Delort (1841-1895) The Cardinal's Leisure

It is something of a commonplace to imagine the detestable Cardinal Richelieu, whom we all loved to hate while reading The Three Musketeers, as a cat enthusiast. It is said that he had not one, two, or three of the delightful beasts, but fourteen. They say he dedicated an entire room of what is now the Palais Royal to his feline companions. He gave them staff and named them in his will. And what names they were, again so they say :


Félimare

Gavroche

Gazette

Lucifer

Ludovic le Cruel

Ludoviska

Mimi-Paillon

Mounard le Fougueux

Perruque

Pyrame

Thisbé

Racan

Rubis sur l’ongle

Serpolet

Soumise

I too would like to imagine a glaring of cats whose litterboxes were gilded, with stuccoed caryatids on the corners and baldaquins of crimson velvet and frescoed grottesques.

And certainly he must be the archetype behind all of the master villains in the collective unconscious who go about hatching plots and ill doings while slowly stroking a feline companion. The image was already ingrained in the popular imagination in the 19th century. 20th and 21st century evil geniuses most likely owe their feline fancies to the image that the Cardinal trailed after him.


If, however I am to trust Françoise Hildesheimer’s 2004 biography, on her very first page she decries the lack of evidence, of documents, of proof of these fourteen cats, or any cats at that. That he did have an affection for the creatures is at least suggested by an anecdote that he endowed an old maid Marie de Jars, demoiselle de Gournay, her cat Pioillon, as well as its kittens with funds for their upkeep, again according to Hildesheimer. But of Lucifer (of course), Soumise and company, there seems to be no trace.

We can only imagine the history of Absolutism and the modern nation state had the feline friends been there to lie on his papers and otherwise distract him.