Camille Amparat
Alain's modern, impatient wife, who expected to be the center of the marriage and finds herself second to a cat.
To be the only creature her husband loves. On the first morning of the marriage she tells him to admit that he is going out to see her rival, and she means the cat.
The book
At a glance
- Nineteen
- The Malmerts, whose money is new and comes from washing machines and wringers
- To Alain Amparat, the only son of a Paris silk family that has come down in the world
- The ninth floor of a friend's new building — three rooms, three terraces, and a triangular bedroom with two walls of glass
- A roadster, the small open two-seater she wanted, and drives herself
- The sacred cat, the taboo animal, and — on the first morning of the marriage — her rival
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeCamille Amparat is the wife in The Cat, the short novel Colette published in French in 1933 as La Chatte. Until the wedding the book calls her Camille Malmert. Her family's money is new and comes from washing machines and wringers, which the mother of her fiancé, Alain Amparat, considers not quite their sort of thing — while the Malmerts point out among themselves that the Amparats are no longer really in silk and that the son is not the master of the family firm. Camille is nineteen. She is dark, smokes one cigarette after another, tells fortunes with a pack of cards, drives fast and well, and swears at taxis in a way her mother would rather she did not.
She marries Alain expecting to be the whole of his life, and discovers that she is sharing him with a cat. Saha is three years old, a pedigree Chartreux, grey-blue, and has been Alain's since she was five months old. Camille sees the shape of the problem on the first morning of the marriage: her husband says he is going over to look at the building work at his mother's house, and she folds her arms and tells him to admit he is off to see her rival.
Colette gives her a large appetite and no embarrassment about it. She walks round the borrowed flat naked and cannot see what her husband is upset about. In the evenings she pulls off his jacket and tie and looks for bare skin. She plans the rest of their life out loud — his old bedroom repainted for a child, a tennis court where the useless lawn is, the kitchen rebuilt — while he sits across the table working out how to keep her out of the house altogether.
What she does about the cat is the crisis of the book. One evening in July, alone with Saha on the balcony nine floors up, she walks the length of it and back without appearing to look at the animal, driving her off the parapet and away from the closed door, until she can put both arms out and push her over the edge. Saha survives. Camille goes inside, turns on every light in the flat, changes into a white dress and waits for her husband to come home.
How the book draws them
- The week before the weddingShe is introduced at a family poker game at ten at night, fighting off sleep the way you can at nineteen — bright in bursts, then yawning behind her joined hands with two small tears in the corners of her eyes. Told to go to bed, she asks who on earth goes to bed at ten. She throws her cigarette into the garden, lights another, and lays the abandoned cards out to find whether the little roadster will arrive before the ceremony. The jack of spades, she explains, is a quick dark messenger who brings the news of the next twenty-four hours.
- She drives, and he does notShe has already ruled that Alain will not take the wheel while they cross Switzerland: he is too easily distracted, and underneath it all he does not really like driving. She knows him, she says. On an evening run out to the forest at Rambouillet she folds the windscreen flat and calls out the rabbits and a pheasant as they go past.
- Naked the morning after the weddingAlain half opens his eyes and finds her walking about the strange bedroom with a comb in one hand and a cigarette in her lips, humming, white in the strip of sun and pale blue when she steps out of it. He is scandalised and asks what she thinks she is doing with no clothes on. She widens her eyes and asks what about him, then. He throws her a crumpled pyjama.
- Her plan for the borrowed flatThe flat belongs to Patrick, a friend away on a long cruise; three rooms and three terraces, high over the city. Camille likes it and proposes they simply keep it: when he comes back they explain that they want to stay, and throw him out. She says it cheerfully, as an obvious solution. Alain, who is never going to say a thing like that out loud, is a little shocked and asks whether she really would.
- The house she is already furnishingAt an inn after a long drive, loosened by a wine she does not much like, she lays out the future: Alain's old bedroom repainted as a nursery, though he is not to insist on a frieze of ducklings and fir trees; a tennis court where the big pointless lawn is; the kitchen and pantry rebuilt, because he has never noticed how inconvenient they are. Nothing, she adds, to be done without his mother's approval. Alain thinks he has never seen her look better, and says nothing.
- What the kitchen says about herThe old servants at Neuilly, who have been there since Alain was a child, deliver their verdict below stairs: the scent she wears is too much, her clothes are not proper couture, she told the gardener that the bed of catchfly and forget-me-nots looked twee, and she has the sort of nerve that passes for artistic. Old Émile predicts she will be sent packing more often than she expects.
- The line her husband overhearsComing home earlier than expected, he hears her through the front door: « C’est cette sacrée cochonnerie de bête ! Et qu’elle crève, bon Dieu ! » — that damned filthy animal, and let it drop dead. Asked what that was about, she says it was the dog downstairs, the one that barks morning and night, and holds up a finger for him to listen. Alain has time to notice that the gloved finger is shaking.
- She bites the inside of her cheekShe did it as a small girl, on the day she would not say hello to Alain in a garden full of relatives, and she still does it when she is angry or humiliated. Alain, who notices everything about her, has decided she is not ugly at those moments.
- What she saw at dawnOnce her husband started sleeping alone on the divan, she got up early and found the two of them on the terrace with their cheeks pressed together, watching the sky go pale. They did not hear her. She brings it out later, with her arm flung towards the terrace, as her reason for hating the cat, and asks him to say honestly whether she is wrong to mind.
The scene on the balcony is given in full, from outside her. She and the cat are alone, waiting for Alain. Camille leans on the parapet until Saha gives up her place, then paces from one wall to the other, forcing the cat down off the parapet and then off the floor again, never once appearing to look at her. Saha understands, lets out one long wretched cry, and after that makes no sound at all; she retreats methodically, keeps her eyes on Camille and refuses either to rage or to plead. Camille nearly loses her nerve — she notices the sun going, checks her watch, hears glasses chime indoors — and then puts both arms out and pushes. She hears the claws scrape the render and sees the blue body twist in the air. She does not look down.
Afterwards she goes in, puts her hands over her ears, takes them away, sits down and nearly falls asleep. Then she switches on every light in the flat, changes into white, says out loud that she feels as though she has lost weight, and imitates her husband's voice calling her his fly in milk. When the doorbell rings instead of a key in the lock, she does not look surprised. Alain comes in carrying Saha alive. He examines the cat, then remembers Camille, tells her she looks pretty in white and asks for a kiss; she cries in his arms, and he says he had not known she was kind.
What convicts her is the cat. Alain asks her to feel Saha's head for a bump, and Saha erupts at her — the fur up, the mouth open, standing on the drawing paper accusing her. Alain finds the damp paw prints and the broken claws, works out what they mean, and asks her outright whether she threw the cat. She does not deny it. She tells him she had wanted to get rid of Saha and that it is not a fine thing to have done, but that killing what gets in your way is the first idea a jealous woman has, and normal. What is rare, she says, is him. When he calls her a monster she gives him the answer the novel ends up resting on: « C’est toi, le monstre. » You are the monster. She admits she cannot explain why, and says she is sure of it anyway.
She spends the night alone in the flat and arrives at Neuilly the next morning in a new suit, carefully made up, with her gloves on and his suitcase in the car. The old valet runs away rather than take the case from her hand, and she bites the inside of her cheek. Alain tells her he is not coming back and accuses her of regretting nothing but the failure. She asks what is going to happen to them, and he lies and says it is too early to decide. Her plan is to go and swim at Ploumanac'h in Brittany, at the house of Patrick's brother, in Alain's car. On the way down the path she looks back through the leaves at her husband and the cat, stops for a second as if to return, and then walks away faster.