supper.  But though he had neither seen nor heard it, yet after some time that he had sucked in the air infected by the cat’s breath, that quality of his temperament that had antipathy to that creature being provoked, he sweat, and, of a sudden, paleness came over his face, and, to the wonder of us all that were present, he cried out that in some corner of the room there was a cat that lay hid.’  Not long after the battle of Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an aide-de-camp of Napoleon, who at the time occupied, together with his suite, the Palace of Schoenbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an unusually late hour, when, on passing the door of Napoleon’s bedroom, he was surprised by a most singular noise, and repeated calls from the Emperor for assistance.  Opening the door hastily, and rushing into the room, a singular spectacle presented itself—­the great soldier of the age, half undressed, his countenance agitated, the beaded drops of perspiration standing on his brow, in his hand his victorious sword, with which he was making frequent and convulsive lunges at some invisible enemy through the tapestry that lined the walls.  It was a cat that had secreted herself in this place; and Napoleon held cats not so much in abhorrence as in terror.  ‘A feather,’ says the poet, ‘daunts the brave;’ and a greater poet, through the mouth of his Shylock, remarks that ’there are some that are mad if they behold a cat—­a harmless, necessary cat.’  Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable aversion.  When ’Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had the whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape of his dagger,’ was convicted of mendacity and cowardice, Bertram exclaimed, ’I could endure anything before this but a cat, and now he’s a cat to me.’  The force of censure could no further go.

If Napoleon, however, held cats, as has been averred, in positive fear, there have been others, and some of them illustrious captains, that have regarded them with other feelings.  Marshal Turenne could amuse himself for hours in playing with his kittens; and the great general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar, at the time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats.  Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who have bestowed on the feline race some portion of their affections.

Butler, in his Hudibras, observes, in an oft-quoted passage, that

  ’Montaigne, playing with his cat,
  Complains she thought him but an ass.’