... I come next to Madame Theophile, a 'red'
cat, with a white breast, a pink nose, and blue eyes, whom I called by
that name because we were on terms of the closest intimacy. She slept at
the foot of my bed: she sat on the arm of my chair while I wrote: she
came down into the garden and gravely walked about with me: she was
present at all my meals, and frequently intercepted a choice morsel on
its way from my plate to my mouth. One day a friend who was going away
for a short time, brought me his parrot, to be taken care of during his
absence. The bird, finding itself in a strange place, climbed up to the
top of its perch by the aid of its beak, and rolled its eyes (as yellow
as the nails in my arm-chair) in a rather frightened manner, also moving
the white membranes that formed its eyelids. Madame Theophile had never
seen a parrot, and she regarded the creature with manifest surprise.
While remaining as motionless as a cat mummy from Egypt in its swathing
bands, she fixed her eyes upon the bird with a look of profound
meditation, summoning up all the notions of natural history that she had
picked up in the yard, in the garden, and on the roof. The shadow of her
thoughts passed over her changing eyes, and we could plainly read in
them the conclusion to which her scrutiny led, 'Decidedly this is a
green chicken.'
"This result attained, the next proceeding of Madame Theophile was to
jump off the table from which she had made her observations, and lay
herself flat on the ground in a corner of the room, exactly in the
attitude of the panther in Gerome's picture watching the gazelles as
they come down to drink at a lake.
Pages:
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89