Roosevelt liked this yarn so much that he named a White House cat, Tom Quartz.

Thomas A. Janvier's narrative reveals the cat in his luxurious capacity as a treasured pet, and Mr. Alden's story is a good example of the kind of tale in which a friendless human being depends upon an animal for affection. There are, of course, many such, but in most cases dogs are the heroes. The Queen's Cat is a story about an ailurophobe, or a cat-fearer, and his cure. Mr. Hudson's contribution is fact rather than fiction. I have included it because it is delightful and because it is the only good example available of that sort of story in which a cat becomes friendly with a member of an enemy race, although in life the thing is common. Mr. Warner's Calvin, too, certainly is not fiction, but as it shares with Pierre Loti's Vies de deux chattes the distinction of being one of the two best cat biographies that have yet been written I could not omit it.

There remains The Afflictions of an English Cat which, it will be perceived by even a careless reader, is certainly a good deal more than a cat story. It is, indeed, a satire on British respectability, but we Americans of today need not snicker at the English while reading it, for the point is equally applicable to us. When I first run across this tale while preparing material for my long cat book, The Tiger in the House, I was immensely amused, and to my great astonishment I have not been able to find an English translation of it. The story, the original title of which is Peines de cœur d'une chatte anglaise, first appeared in a volume of satires called Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, issued by Hetzel in Paris in 1846, and to which George Sand, Alfred de Musset, and others contributed. The main purpose of the collaboration was doubtless to furnish a text to the extraordinary drawings of Grandville, who had an uncanny talent for merging human and animal characteristics. The volume was translated into English by J. Thompson and published in London in 1877, but for obvious reasons The Afflictions of an English Cat was not included in the translation, although Balzac's name would have added lustre to the collection. But in the Victorian age such a rough satire would scarcely have been tolerated. Even in French the story is not easily accessible. Aside from its original setting I have found it in but one edition of Balzac, the Œuvres Complètes issued in de luxe form by Calmann-Levy in 1879, where it is buried in the twenty-first volume, Œuvres Diverses.

Therefore I make no excuse for translating and offering it to my readers, for although perhaps it was not intended for a picture of cat life, the observation on the whole is true enough, and the story itself is too delicious to pass by. I should state that the opening and closing paragraphs refer to earlier chapters in the Vie privée et publique des animaux. I have, I may add, omitted one or two brief passages out of consideration for what is called American taste.

Carl Van Vechten.

April 6, 1920.
New York.

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