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10 of History's Craziest Cat People

BY LIVIUS DRUSUS

Many illustrious historical personages had a beloved cat or two, but some of them were full-on crazy cat people, filling their homes with felines and far preferring their companionship to that of humans. Here are 10 famous historical figures who were unabashed crazy about cats.

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2. POPE PAUL II


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Pope Paul II (1417-1471) loved jewels, luxurious ecclesiastical garments, collecting antiquities, and forcing the Jews of Rome to run naked in the streets during Carnival. He also loved animals. So tenderhearted was he toward non-bipeds that if he happened upon an animal on its way to be butchered, he would rescue it. Cats were his particular favorites. He treated them as well as he treated himself. When his cats fell ill, he summoned his personal physician, Giacomo Gottifredi, to tend to them. When whatever leechcraft and wortcunning Gottifredi possessed was not sufficient to save one of the pope's beloved cats, he was grief-stricken. His emotional reaction to the loss of his cat was roundly mocked in Rome, where epigrams were written deriding the Pope's soft-hearted mourning for an animal—and one with a reputation for consorting with the Devil at that.

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4. ROBERT SOUTHEY


Portrait of Robert Southey by John James Masquerier, 1800. Image credit: The History Blog

Poet Laureate Robert Southey (1774-1843) was an out and proud cat lover. His felines made frequent appearances in his correspondence, often relaying messages through Southey to his friends' cats "from the Cattery of Cat's Eden." He too enjoyed picking arcane names for his pets. In 1826, when he was away from home in Leyden, he wrote this in a letter to his 7-year-old son Cuthbert:

I hope Rumpelstiltzchen has recovered his health, and that Miss Cat is well; and I should like to know whether Miss Fitzrumpel has been given away, and if there is another kitten. The Dutch cats do not speak exactly the same language as the English ones. I will tell you how they talk when I come home.

Seven years later, Rumpelstiltzchen's health finally gave out. Southey shared the news with his old friend Grosvenor G. Bedford, a cat lover in his own right.

Alas! Grosvenor, this day poor old Rumpel was found dead, after as long and happy a life as cat could wish for, if cats form wishes on that subject. His full titles were : "The Most Noble the Archduke Rumpelstiltzchen, Marquis M'Bum, Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waowhler, and Skaratch." There should be a court mourning in Catland, and if the Dragon [i.e., Bedford's cat] wear a black ribbon round his neck, or a band of crape a la militaire round one of the fore paws, it will be but a becoming mark of respect.

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6. THÉOPHILE GAUTIER


Theophile Gautier's grave in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Image credit: Nico Paix, Flickr // CC BY 2.0

French author Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) adored cats and talked about them all the time. Any collection of quotes about cats can't help but feature at least a half dozen from Gautier. He literally wrote the book, Ménagerie Intime, about his domestic life with his cats.

He started off with Childebrand, a black-and-tan tabby whose name gave Gautier a much-needed rhyme for "Rembrandt." As his pets were not neutered, there were soon more cats. The white Angora Don Pierrot de Navarre and the equally white feline enchantress Marquesa Dona Séraphita had a litter of three black kittens: Enjolras, Eponine, and Gavroche. (Victor Hugo's Les Miserables was the latest literary sensation shortly before they were born.) Eponine had at least one kitten of her own, Cléopatre, who enjoyed standing on three legs. Then there was Madame Théophile, an orange-and-white cat who enjoyed eating food from Gautier's fork, and Zizi, an accomplished musician who did her best work walking across the piano at night.

His love for cats followed him to the grave, where a carved cat peers out from the top of his headstone at the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

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8. CALVIN COOLIDGE


Calvin Coolidge with one of his cats. Image credit: The History Blog

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), 30th President of the United States, had at least four cats in the White House—Tiger, Blackie, Timmy, and Smokey. Tiger was an orange tomcat Coolidge had moved into the White House from his farm in Vermont. He would come when the President called him by the nickname "Tige" and was often seen draped around his neck when Coolidge walked around the White House.

On the night of March 20, 1924, Tiger slipped out an open door and into the wilds of Washington, D.C. The next morning, Coolidge called for Tiger, but he didn't appear. Alarmed, the President dispatched the staff to search the executive mansion and grounds, but to no avail. Next he enlisted the city police, who were put on alert to look for the orange-and-black cat. Again, no Tiger.

Desperate, Coolidge turned to a medium with a wider reach. He sent Secret Service agent James Haley to WCAP radio where, on the night of March 24, he broadcast an appeal to listeners, asking them to call the White House phone if they had any information about the president's missing cat. Hundreds of people called the White House, either with tips or with offers to give Coolidge a whole new cat.

In the end, the radio appeal did the trick. One of the listeners was Captain Edward Bryant, who the next morning found a sleeping cat in the Navy Building just half a mile from the White House. Bryant tried the president's usual greeting, "Here, Tige!" and the cat ran over to him. A short cab ride later, Tiger was back in President Coolidge's everloving arms. To keep him that way, Coolidge got Tiger a new collar that declared, "My Name is Tiger. I live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

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10. MARK TWAIN


Mark Twain with kitten in Tuxedo Park, New York, 1907. Image credit:Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley via The History Blog

Mark Twain (1835-1910) may well out-crazy even the craziest of cat people. He had up to 19 cats at one time, all of whom he loved and respected far beyond whatever he may have felt about people. "If man could be crossed with the cat," he said, "it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." When he was away from home, he would rent cats, paying their owners a large enough sum to see to their needs for a lifetime.

In keeping with the tradition established by Richelieu, Southey, and Gautier, Twain gave his cats most excellent names, among them Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash, Tammany, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal, Pestilence, and Bambino. To be fair, the credit for the last of these goes to Twain's daughter Clara, who took in Bambino during a sanatorium stay. She gave the kitten to her father after one of the other patients ratted her out.

When Bambino escaped one day, Twain was frantic. He put ads in New York newspapers describing the cat as "large and intensely black" and offering a $5 reward for his return. As Calvin Coolidge would find out 20 years later, a famous person asking for aid in the return of a lost cat was subject to an enormous quantity of doppelgangers and would-be changelings from people who just wanted to make contact with the celebrity. Even after Bambino turned up on his own a few days later and Twain sent notice to all the papers, people still turned up at his Fifth Avenue home with cats for him.

This story originally ran in 2016.

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