Balzac's Cat: The Grey Feline Who Walked with the Human Comedy

Honoré de Balzac, one of the nineteenth century's greatest French novelists, was a famous workaholic. He rose at one in the morning, wrote straight through to eight, pot after pot of coffee. By his side through these long nights was a grey British Shorthair he called Chat-briqué — 'Caramel Cat'. According to his own accounts, the cat would leap onto his desk and pad across his manuscripts, 'telling me with the weight of his paw which paragraph is no good.' The cat was also his comfort against the physical toll of constant writing. 'The only reason I can still write,' he once said, 'is that there is still a warm cat by my side at night.' Behind all ninety-one novels of La Comédie humaine, there was a purring.