Les Chats, the book before us, and the portrait is that of the author, the amiable and amusing Augustin Paradis de Moncrif.  He was the son of English, or more probably of Scotch parents settled in Paris, where he was born in 1687.  All we know of his earlier years is to be found in a single sparkling page of d’Alembert, who makes Moncrif float out of obscurity like the most elegant of iridescent bubbles.  He was handsome and seductive, turned a copy of verses with the best of gentlemen, but was particularly distinguished by the art with which he purveyed little dramas for the amateur stage, then so much in fashion in France.  Somebody said of him, when he was famous as the laureate of the cats, that he had risen in life by never scratching, by always having velvet paws, and by never putting up his back, even when he was startled.  Voltaire called him “my very dear Sylph,” and he was the ideal of all that was noiseless, graceful, good-humoured, and well-bred.  He slipped unobtrusively into the French Academy, and lived to be eighty-three, dying at last, like Anacreon, in the midst of music and dances and fair nymphs of the Opera, affecting to be a sad old rogue to the very last.

This book on Cats, the only one by which he is now remembered, was the sole production of his lifetime which cost him any annoyance.  He was forty years of age when it appeared, and the subject was considered a little frivolous, even for such a petit conteur as Moncrif.  People continued to tease him about it, and the only rough thing he ever did was the result of one such twitting.  The poet Roy made an epigram about “cats” and “rats,” in execrable taste, no doubt; this stung our Sylph to such an excess that he waited outside the Palais Royal and beat Roy with a stick when he came out.  The poet was, perhaps, not much hurt; at all events, he had the presence of mind to retort, “Patte de velours, patte de velours, Minon-minet!” It was six years after this that Moncrif was elected into the French Academy, and then the shower of epigrams broke out again.  He wished to be made historiographer; “Oh, nonsense,” the wits cried, “he must mean historiogriffe” and they invited him, on nights when the Academy met, to climb on to the roof and miau from the chimneypots.  He had the weakness to apologise for his charming book, and to withdraw it from circulation.  His pastoral tales and heroic ballets, his Zelindors and Zeloides and Erosines, which to us seem utterly vapid and frivolous, never gave him a moment’s uneasiness.  His crumpled rose-leaf was the book by which his name lives in literature.