Alain Amparat
A young man of conservative, sensual tastes, bound to his childhood house and his cat — and unable to make room in either for a wife.
To keep his childhood house and his cat exactly as they were. He puts it to himself, over and over, as a practical problem: how do you stop your wife from living in your house?
The book
At a glance
- Twenty-four. Camille is nineteen when they marry
- An only child. His father is dead; his mother, Madame Amparat, keeps the house and garden at Neuilly, a suburb on the western edge of Paris
- The family silk firm on the rue des Petits-Champs, where an older employee, Monsieur Veuillet, overrules him politely and completely
- A friend's flat on the ninth floor of a new building, which he and Camille call the Quart-de-Brie — a wedge cut from a round of Brie, which is the shape of the building
- Saha, a pedigree Chartreux, bought at a cat show at five months old and three years old when the novel opens
- To Camille Malmert, a week after the book opens in May. In the last chapter, in August, he calls her a bride of three and a half months
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAlain Amparat is the young husband in The Cat, a short novel the French writer Colette published in 1933 under the title La Chatte. He is twenty-four, fair-haired, an only child, and the last of a Paris silk family whose business has quietly got away from it. The firm still trades under the family name on the rue des Petits-Champs, but his father is dead, his mother holds what is left of the family's stake, and the decisions are taken by an elderly employee called Monsieur Veuillet, who turns down Alain's proposals with enormous courtesy. A new accounting machine at seventeen thousand francs will not pay for itself inside a year, and that is the end of it. Alain goes in to the office and dislikes it.
What he loves is elsewhere. There is the house he grew up in at Neuilly, a suburb on the western edge of Paris, with a garden of old elms, a dead tree wrapped in creeper, and lawns he can name plant by plant. And there is Saha, the grey-blue pedigree cat he bought at a cat show when she was five months old and has had for three years. He talks to her all day, and the novel takes his side of the conversation seriously.
The book opens a week before his wedding to Camille Malmert, who is nineteen and whom he has known since they were both children. He is not against being married so much as against anything changing. While the family house is being remodelled for the couple, they move into a friend's flat on the ninth floor of a new building, and Alain finds himself sharing twenty-five square metres with a wife he watches the way a critic watches a performance. Her back is too broad. She has the shoulders of a cleaning woman. A single black hair stuck to the rim of a washbasin turns his stomach. None of this is said out loud. The thing he does put into words, first to himself and then to his mother, is the question of how to stop Camille from ever living in his house.
The marriage breaks over the cat. Camille, jealous and with nowhere to put it, pushes Saha off the ninth-floor balcony, and the cat survives the fall. Alain works out what his wife has done from the state of Saha's claws, and tells her she is a monster he cannot live with. Camille's answer is that wanting to kill what stands in your way is an ordinary jealous impulse, and that he is the strange one. Colette does not settle the argument.
How the book draws them
- Twenty-four, blond, and inspecting himselfThe night before his wedding he studies his face in the mirror and finds it a wreck: a slightly horsey nose, a long cheek, pale stubble already back a few hours after shaving. Then he smiles to check his teeth, pats down his thick fair hair and decides he is pleased with his eyes, which are grey going green between dark lashes. His settled verdict on his looks is that people only find him handsome because he is blond, and that dark he would be hideous.
- Breakfast the way he ate it at six years oldEating alone in the garden he can drop the pretence. Butter goes into every hole in the bread. A thick slice comes first and a thin one second. The coffee must not rise above a gold curl painted on the side of the cup, and the second cup takes an extra lump of sugar. At the end he licks the honey spoon clean on every side. It is an old ivory spoon, gone dark.
- The box of things he cannot throw outHis real secrets live in drawers: a gold dollar, a signet ring, an agate charm off his father's watch chain, red and black seeds from a tropical plant, a mother-of-pearl rosary from his first communion, and a thin broken bracelet left behind by a stormy young mistress who came and went fast and loudly. He turns them over, asks himself whether he actually cares about any of it, and puts it all back.
- The dreams he keeps to himselfHe sleeps in stages and refuses to describe any of it in the morning, because his dreams are the one part of his life nobody else has been in. In the first stage he passes through a crowd of swelling faces, each with one large eye that turns black just as it is about to explain something. Deeper down, in the town where his dreams settle, he walks about naked carrying a cane, reasoning that if he knots his tie a certain way and whistles, nobody will notice. He tries to whistle and finds that what he is doing is purring.
- How he came to have the catHe went to a cat show and came out carrying a five-month-old kitten, chosen for the exactness of her face and for the way she sat in her cage, dignified and past hoping. It was not the kind of purchase his family made. The clerks at the silk firm were astonished, Monsieur Veuillet enquired after the little creature, and Alain became, in his small world, the young man who bought a cat.
- How he looks at his wifeIn bed behind Camille he examines the shaved hairs on the back of her neck, lined up like sea-urchin spines, blue under the skin before each one comes through its blackened pore. He is amazed by how dark she is, holds up his own arm to compare, and decides the maker who designed her did an adequate job without allowing anything to fantasy or extravagance. He wishes silently for a fuller backside to make up for the meanness of her breasts. He never says any of this to her.
- He does not allow his face to be touchedGetting out of bed during a thunderstorm, he is stopped by Camille, who calls him a little man and pulls his nose. He knocks her hand down hard enough to leave it numb, and does not regret it. She tells him, twice and slowly, that he is a brute. He agrees that he may be, and gives her the rule: Ne me touche jamais la figure, which means never touch my face.
- Listening at the basement windowWalking through his mother's garden one hot afternoon, he hears the old servants below discussing his wife. Her scent is overpowering. Her clothes are not couture; more artistic, they decide, because of the nerve. He stays flat against the warm wall and listens to the end. He is not shocked, because their verdict on Camille is close to his own, and he comes away breathing like a man the murderers have let go.
- Moving out of the bedroomA few weeks in, he starts taking his sleep on a narrow divan in a glass-walled passage the couple call the waiting room. He pulls the oiled-cloth curtains across on both sides, lies with one arm out and one folded on his chest, and works at recovering the dreams that married life had broken up. Camille never opens the door, and never mentions it in the morning.
- Asking his mother for a way outHe takes his mother's hands through her bedroom window and asks whether there is a way — a nice one, that would suit everybody — to stop Camille from living in the house. Madame Amparat does not pretend to misunderstand. Questions like that, she tells him, only have answers in divorce, or moving house, or God knows what.
Saha survives the fall. Alain carries her back up alive, checks her heart, and only later notices what she has left on a sheet of drawing paper spread across the table: damp prints, four small marks around a larger one. Cats sweat through their paws when they are frightened, and he says so out loud. Then he turns back the sheaths that hold her claws and finds every claw broken. She had caught at the wall on the way down. He puts it together without a word, takes her to the bathroom, feeds her and comes back into the room.
He waits while Camille sings a little and a firework display goes up over the park opposite, then asks her directly whether she threw the cat. She does not deny it. He asks how she did it, whether she had planned it, whether they fought first. Then he tells her he is going. He packs Saha into the cook's round marketing basket, and at the door he corrects himself: he had said je m’en vais, meaning I am going, and now he lifts the basket and makes it « Nous nous en allons. » We are going. He finds a taxi, arrives at his mother's gate near two in the morning, lets Saha out into the dark garden and sleeps in his old bed.
Camille comes the next morning in a new suit, carefully made up, with her gloves on, and brings his suitcase. He tells her he is not coming back — not now, and he will not discuss never. He accuses her of regretting only that she missed. He tells her she held a small blameless creature over a drop and opened her hands, and that he will not live with a monster. Camille answers that killing what hurts you is the first idea a jealous woman has and is perfectly normal, and that the rare and monstrous thing is him; she says she cannot explain it properly but is certain she is right. He does not defend himself. He lies in order to end the conversation, says it is too early to decide anything, lends her the car for a swimming holiday, and lets her go.
The last paragraph of the novel is Camille's view from the path. Through a gap in the leaves she sees Saha watching her leave, and Alain lying back in a wicker chair, batting at the first green chestnuts of August with his hand cupped like a paw. She stops as if to turn round, then walks away faster.