Julia’s Cats Read online

  The snug kitchen was the trio’s favorite hub. To make it her own, Julia hung some favorite cooking tools—a Magnagrip knife holder and a Dazey can opener. Back home, her beginner’s batterie de cuisine seemed adequate, but here she began to covet the balloon whisks, wooden paddles, and tortoiseshell scrapers she saw in the shops. Were these the magic wands that transformed ordinary ingredients into sublime dishes? She was determined to find out.

  Breakfast was still very American: eggs and toast, and coffee brewed in the battered tin percolator. Coffee remained a hot item on the black market, but Julia could get hers from the American commissary. Like most old Parisian apartments, theirs had no refrigerator, and on winter mornings when the air was colder outside, they kept a bottle of milk on the window ledge. The cream rose to the top overnight, a special treat Paul and Julia indulgently scooped into Minette’s dish, until they discovered it gave her crise de foie (digestive troubles).

  Julia went off to Berlitz classes three mornings a week, then rushed home to make lunch for Paul and maybe steal a little snuggling time. Afternoons she wandered the streets of the quartier, map and French phrase book in hand. Minette was content to sit by the large windows in the curved hallway that joined the wings of the L-shaped apartment. There she stared out over the green slate rooftops of Paris shrouded in fog. On damp winter days, pigeons cooing under the dripping eaves set her teeth to chattering.

  When Julia returned from her afternoon jaunts, she often found Minette in the kitchen sitting next to her preferred toy, a long piece of string with a gnawed brussels sprout tied to its end, patiently waiting for a playmate. Sometimes she seemed spellbound by something, anything, even dust bunnies beneath the cold stove. Nothing could break her Zen-like concentration—unless Julia dangled a fat sausage from her market basket and was willing to share. On rare occasions Minette pranced into the kitchen, head high in the air, to deposit a hapless and no doubt very slow mouse. Paul figured this display of hunting prowess was an attempt to prove she was earning her keep. But all three of them knew Minette’s place was secure—she had them at “Meow.”

  Ready to play

  NO ORDINARY CATS

  EVENINGS, JULIA, PAUL, and Minette huddled around a potbellied stove in the drafty salon. Julia, swaddled in a long woolen scarf and tweed coat buttoned to the collar, fumbled the pages of her Berlitz with gloved hands. A shivering Paul leafed through stacks of photographs and maps for an exhibition on the Berlin airlift, his first major project for the US Information Service. Minette, lost in pussycat dreams, curled in her regular spot on the threadbare Persian carpet, close to the stove that barely glowed despite being stoked all day.

  When Julia tired of memorizing irregular French verbs, she daydreamed, mostly about food since she was always hungry. She couldn’t stop thinking about that fish lunch in Rouen. The thought of sole meunière swimming in brown butter was like Proust’s madeleines, releasing a flood of mouthwatering memories of her first meal in la belle France and the start of her new life.

  When the memory grew too tantalizing, she and Paul would kiss the cat goodnight and head for a neighborhood bistro, a loud and bustling place that served simple, hearty fare. Bistro regulars were once assigned a drawer to keep their napkins, and poodles sat on their own chairs.

  Paul and Julia, not yet regulars but well on their way, were amazed to discover there were five thousand restaurants in Paris alone. The French practically invented the idea of dining out and even gave restaurants their name—the first ones served “fortified” dishes they claimed could restore (restaurer) digestive health. For Julia and Paul the healing power of good food, for both body and soul, made perfect sense. They began to set aside Julia’s monthly income from a small inheritance for their gustatory adventures.

  Trois amis

  Paul wrote home that Julia was positively obsessed with tasting sole every place they went, and since the legendary chef Escoffier catalogued 185 ways to prepare it, he figured it might take a while—and a bundle of cash. They would skimp on taxis and cleaning supplies, but never on food for themselves or Minette. With American currency propping up the French economy, one dollar would buy a bistro meal with a small carafe of table wine. A splurge at a temple of cuisine like Maxim’s cost a princely sixteen dollars, but the taste sensations—priceless.

  Once, while strolling the arcades of the Palais Royal, they came upon a Parisian food shrine, the elegant, two-hundred-year-old Grand Véfour, and couldn’t resist. During their meal, they spied a short woman with a bird’s nest of hennaed hair, tucked into a banquette at the far end of the dining room. She seemed oblivious to fawning waiters and diners’ stares. Their waiter silently mouthed, “Colette”—the grande dame of French letters, now almost eighty. Like the other patrons, they were awestruck. The first woman elected to the venerable Académie française lived in the hotel and, when she didn’t dine upstairs with her cats, presided at her regular table.

  Colette and her chats

  If she and Julia had a chance to chat, they could have swapped stories about their pussycats. Colette was the most famous “cat lady” in France. In her chorus-girl days, she starred in the pantomime La chatte amoureuse in full cat suit, and her wildly popular novel La chatte featured her kitty, Saha, as the romantic heroine. It was Colette who once famously pronounced, “There are no ordinary cats.” Julia and Paul, already crazy for Minette, totally agreed.

  POUSSIEQUETTES EVERYWHERE

  JULIA HAD BECOME a flâneuse—a stroller, a saunterer, and (she happily admitted) a loafer. As she soaked up the two-thousand-year-old city’s history, art, and culture, she began to see cats everywhere. And no wonder—since Roman times, the City of Light has been a haven for pussycats. In museums and cathedrals, she noticed cats hiding in plain sight—chasing rats in carvings on wooden choir stalls, romping on the pages of richly illuminated prayer books, and adorning the crests of fierce medieval knights.

  Cats fired the imagination of writers from Montaigne to Victor Hugo to Cocteau. Some say French cats changed the course of history when they drove the plague-bearing rats from Europe. Parisians have always prized the practical cats that patrol rooftops, elusive cats that lurk in alleyways, beautiful cats that sun themselves on park benches, and regal cats that take their owners out for strolls and stop traffic on the Champs-Élysées. Pussycats accompany Parisians from birth to their final resting place—feral cats still prowl the Père Lachaise Cemetery, comforting mourners and begging for handouts.

  Everywhere she went, Julia began to listen for the high-pitched “Minouminouminouminou” of housewives calling “Herekittykittykitty”—an invitation to a meal or just a doting pat. The sound triggered a ripple of delight, and she greeted every kitty that crossed her path, especially the black ones, like a long-lost friend. To celebrate their unique je ne sais quoi, she coined a Julia-ism, poussiequette, her favorite term of endearment for pussycats from then on.

  When her feet gave out after an afternoon window-shopping on the fashionable avenue Montaigne or ducking into tiny galleries in the Marais, she liked to plop down at a sidewalk table among all the tourists, expats, and colorful locals. Every café seemed to have at least one resident pussycat wandering among the marble-topped tables.

  Julia’s favorite hangout became Café des Deux Magots, at one of the busiest corners on the boulevard Saint-Germain. It was a good place to linger over a café complet and study her map, sort out impressions, or just watch the afternoon light fade on the ancient stones of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés across the street.

  Everyone there seemed to be Somebody. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, had her own regular table where she nursed a cassis and watched le tout Paris pass by. Albert Camus, wreathed in smoke from a stubby Gauloise, often sat scribbling in a back corner, while Paris’s power couple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, preferred the Café de Flore just down the street. Spotting someone famous required a certain Gallic nonchalance that didn’t come naturally to the effusive J
ulia, but she learned to suppress her excitement until she got home and could regale Paul and Minette over an aperitif.

  Celebrity spotting was a pastime she shared with columnist Art Buchwald, whom she met at an embassy party. He was in love with Paris too, and so enamored of felines he made his cat the hero of a detective novel. Buchwald gossiped about the characters who filled his “Paris After Dark” column and confided that many famous Parisians were fellow cat people. Camus, for one, doted on his cats, Cali and Gula, and called them “a necessary element” in his life. Paris cats fascinated Chagall too. Floating through several of his paintings is a mysterious cat with a haunting, human face.

  Picasso adored his Minou, an elegant Siamese who often posed for him. Because he painted cats so often, some say it’s a shame Pablo’s oeuvre doesn’t include his “Pussycat Period.”

  Poussiequettes around every corner intensified Julia’s passion for all things French. In a letter home, she gushed, “I cannot tell you how much I adore this France and this Paris, these people, their language, their pace, their food, their apartments, their streets.… We have found nothing but exquisite friendliness, charm, politeness, warmth, gaiety, downright pleasure.… The cats here are, for the most part, big, sleek and wonderful.… I am never coming home, so you will just have to come here.”

  Enchanté, Madame!

  PARIS, PICTURE-PURRFECT

  ON WEEKENDS, PAUL joined Julia on her sojourns, toting a tripod and a bag stuffed with a sketchbook, cameras, film, and filters. Every so often he’d drop to his knees and peer down a cobbled street to frame a man on a bicycle with a baguette tucked under his arm, or chemises billowing in the breeze from a balcony.

  While Paul studied the scene, Julia studied Paul as he squinted through his viewfinder. Over time, she began to see what he saw—the poetry in a curlicued lamppost, a fog-shrouded steeple, or cats’ eyes staring out from shadowy doorways and lace-curtained windows. Like Julia, he began to see cats everywhere. As he fiddled with his light meter, she couldn’t resist making friends with his feline subjects. Even the most skittish tomcat answered her falsetto siren song.

  High on the sights and sounds of Paris, Julia and Paul thought nothing of walking to the far edges of the Right Bank, through the red-light district of Pigalle, then climbing to the top of Montmartre for one more glimpse of the city below, wreathed in the amber glow of sunset. When the light was just right, they’d scramble to set up his gear before it faded.

  Exhausted at the end of a day, they settled into a tiny bistro where a resident bird chirped in one corner and a fat white puss lay fast asleep on a pile of ledgers in another. A dog sporting a green turtleneck sweater watched as two “furiously animated monkeys ate peanuts … filling the place with clatter and squeals.” It struck them both as “wonderfully Parisian.”

  They set out to explore a new quartier almost every week and kept track of their mission to make the city their own on a wall map that soon bristled with pushpins marking favorite spots. Paul’s portfolio showcased his growing photo artistry and preferred subjects—his wife, the treelined boulevards of Paris, and pussycats at play or in repose.

  LOVE, JUPAULSKI

  LETTER-WRITING WAS still a vital art for Parisians, who sent pneumatiques, messages stuffed into vacuum tubes that whooshed underground to the nearest bureau de poste. Telephones were scarce, service erratic, and calls overseas too expensive. When Roo de Loo finally got a phone, Julia and Paul used it sparingly, preferring their ritual of quietly recording impressions in letters and daybooks, even when the salon was so frosty they had to huddle in bed and write with gloved hands.

  Throughout his life Paul craved contact with his twin brother, Charlie, his sounding board and alter ego. He composed an almost daily journal, suffused with wit and intimacy, in an elegant longhand. His nimble mind ranged far and wide—his State Department exhibits, Cold War intrigues and prickly office politics, his search for creative fulfillment, and of course, his Julie, “this darling, sensitive, outgoing, appreciative, characterful & interesting woman.”

  She preferred to pound her typewriter keys, cramming every inch of the tissue-thin blue airmail paper with single-spaced tales of people they met, food they ate, and the escapades of their new love, Minette: “This pussy of ours is just a darling. I have never seen a cat I liked so much; she gallops all over the house, lies in wait for us, sits in her own chair in the dining room, just loves to be right with us all the time … and just couldn’t be more fun or nicer.”

  Letters to Charlie and his wife, Fredericka (“Freddie”), began “Dearest Chafred,” an affectionate blend of their two names, and were signed jointly “JuPaul,” “JuPaulski,” or “Pulia,” a symbol of Julia and Paul’s deepening bond—two hearts had become one.

  When Julia had no time for a letter of her own, she added chatty updates to Paul’s wherever she could squeeze in a few lines around the edges of the page, often asking about the animal kingdom in Pennsylvania: “Send more photos of cats & nephews, as well as selves.” She complained when no news arrived—“Mimi [Chafred’s cat] hasn’t written us a word and we are a little hurt”—and she made sure that Minette kept up her end of the correspondence: “Minette wants everyone to know she caught a bird on the roof.”

  Charlie topped that achievement by claiming that his Mimi was the superior feline because she had invented several cat games. The brotherly competition escalated when Paul bragged that Minette had personally informed him that she—not Mimi—was the gaming genius nonpareil. To prove it, he described her biggest crowd-pleasers, helpfully translating from Minette’s native tongue:

  • “Tu te souviens de moi?” (“Do You Remember Me?”) Minette, perched on a dining room chair, bestows a gentle paw pat on the arm of a tablemate every ten seconds to remind them of her undying affection—and appetite.

  • “Où est cette Minou?” (“Where’s the Cat?”) When Julie makes the bed, Minette burrows under the sheets and rolls on her back, wriggling and clawing furiously. This game has a championship round, “J’irai à la blanchisserie” (“I’m going off to the laundry”). When it’s time to gather up the dirty linen, Minette wraps herself in the bedclothes and gets buried in the hamper as JuPaul enact a mock funeral.

  • “La Cavallerie vient au secours!” (“The Calvary to the Rescue”) In a quiet salon, with her roommates absorbed in their books, Minette hides in a corner until they forget all about her. She suddenly streaks through the room, thudding like a herd of buffalo, and vanishes out the opposite door.

  • The most challenging game, “La chute de la nourriture” (“The Falling Food”), starts with careful selection of le football, a small potato from a bag under the kitchen table. Minette noses it to the middle of the floor, stalks it, then pounces and rolls it to the edge of the stairs. With one swat it thump-thump-thumps down to the salon, with Minette scampering after. She retrieves the ballon and, Sisyphus-like, hauls it back up. Multiple rounds ensue. If no pomme de terre is available, substitutes may include onions, walnuts, or chicken gizzards.

  Paul delivered the coup de grâce when he informed Charlie of a painful truth—Minette, not their Mimi, gave the world “la Morsure,” known as “Love Bites,” the ultimate kitty pastime.

  Julia’s high spirits often bubbled onto the page too. She embellished her letters with playful drawings of hearts and arrows and, if Paul was the recipient, lipstick kisses. Though they were rarely apart, when Julia traveled with her father and stepmother to Italy in the spring of 1950, she yearned to return to her Paulski.

  If a letter cried out for an extra-special dose of Julia joie de vivre, she rummaged through her cat stamp collection and squished one onto the paper. A pussycat chasing her tail or curled fast asleep suddenly materialized. To Paul her stamps were “like a bank of organ-stops ready to be interpretively used by Mme l’Artiste. They provide one of the outlets for a quality of Julie’s which I particularly cherish.” The impish images of pussycats that adorned her letters were a nod to Minette and a sign of
the indelible imprint kitties would leave on her heart from now on.

  JULIA GOES TO MARKET

  JULIA’S LETTERS HOME hinted that her passion for French food had moved beyond the simple act of eating. She sent fewer descriptions of restaurant meals and more ecstatic accounts of her daily trips to local markets. She was beginning to see that a good meal begins with the best ingredients, and to get them you need to make friends in the right places. She later said that discovery changed her life. It certainly improved Minette’s.

  Marketing meant visiting dozens of shops, each with its own specialty—the crémerie for cheese and butter, the boucherie for veal chops and venison, the pâtisserie for apple tarts and gâteaux au chocolat, the charcuterie for country hams and sausage, and of course a stop at the boulangerie, often twice a day, for a crusty baguette or bâtard, fragrant and warm from the oven. Yesterday’s loaves became pain perdu, “lost” bread suitable only for stuffing or croutons. If there was no time for the daily trip to les Halles, the sprawling food market in the heart of Paris, open-air produce stalls closer to home offered whatever local farmers picked that morning—tender artichokes, sweet baby peas, or pale pink radishes.

  Julia loved feasting her eyes on the shop displays. How perfect to learn that the French call window-shopping lèche-vitrine (licking the glass), as if mere looking was like savoring an ice-cream cone. Once inside she could sample to her heart’s and tummy’s content.