Domestic cat

The domestic cat in Berenger the First’s recollection is at once a particular, vividly remembered pet and one of the few creatures through which the dying King gives sustained voice to affection. Found as a vulnerable kitten and raised within the household, the ginger cat comes to trust its human family while remaining fearful of the outside world. Its violent death and later appearance in a dream make that remembered intimacy a poignant counterpoint to the King’s failing memory and approaching death.

Identity and Early Life

Berenger the First remembers a little ginger cat he found in a field, separated from its mother. The kitten was about two weeks old, perhaps slightly older, but already able to scratch and bite; he describes it as fierce before care changed its manner. He fed and stroked the animal, brought it home, and watched it grow into what he calls the gentlest of cats. The recollection gives the cat an individual history rather than treating it as a generic pet: its early wildness, domestication, and habits remain distinct in the King’s account.

The cat’s politeness becomes one of the memory’s defining traits. Berenger the First compares it to a prince, recalling that it once crept into the coat sleeve of a lady visitor. When the household returned in the middle of the night, the cat would greet them sleepily before stumbling back to its box; in the morning, it would wake them and crawl into their bed. These repeated domestic rituals describe affection through ordinary proximity, as the animal moves between its own resting place and the family’s shared space.

A Protected World and Its Limits

The cat’s home is a refuge, but its security depends on the family’s access to it. When a bedroom door was shut, the cat tried to force it open by pushing its hindquarters against it. Unable to get through, it grew angry, made a great noise, and sulked for a week. The incident shows how sharply a barrier could disturb an animal accustomed to moving freely among its people.

Outside the household, the cat was easily frightened. It feared the vacuum cleaner and retreated beneath a wardrobe from a clockwork mouse: first sniffing the toy anxiously, then spitting when it moved and running away. An attempt to introduce it to the pavement brought another encounter with a world it did not understand. Surrounded by hopping pigeons, it pressed against a wall and cried desperately to Berenger the First. The account stresses not mastery or hunting instinct, but vulnerability and mistrust.

The cat was comfortable with people, even though other animals seemed strange or threatening to it. Berenger the First remembers that it was not afraid of men and might suddenly jump onto their shoulders and lick their hair. The contrast is striking: human company was familiar enough to invite unguarded closeness, while animals and the open street remained alien. In the King’s recollection, the cat seemed to regard its human companions as cats and actual cats as something else. Its place in the household was therefore intimate but bounded: it belonged with its people, not with the wider animal world.

Death and the King’s Grief

That protected life ends when the cat ventures out alone. A neighbor’s large dog kills it. Berenger the First recalls the body in an unflinching image, comparing the injured animal to a toy or marionette, with one eye gone and a paw torn off, as if it were a doll destroyed by a cruel child. The abrupt violence reverses the domestic scenes that precede it: the animal once welcomed into bed and greeted at the door is now helpless outside the home.

The other characters respond differently to the loss. Queen Marie blames the open door and says she had warned Queen Marguerite; Queen Marguerite says she hated the sentimental, timid animal. Against those remarks, Berenger the First’s grief is unequivocal. He says he missed the cat and remembers it as good, beautiful, and wise, insisting on the force of its love for him and calling it his one and only cat. The contrast makes the recollection more than a fond anecdote: it reveals a tenderness that the King can still reach even as other memories and capacities fail.

The Dream and the Recollection’s Form

The cat returns not as a recovered living pet but in a dream Berenger the First says he used to have. It lies in a fireplace on glowing embers, while Queen Marie is surprised that it does not burn. The King explains its survival by saying that cats are fireproof. It then emerges from the fireplace amid thick smoke, but the returning animal is no longer the same: it has become a different, fat and ugly cat, an enormous female resembling its mother, the wildcat, and, in the King’s comparison, Queen Marguerite.

This dream preserves the cat while altering it beyond recognition. The animal’s impossible survival offers a momentary reversal of death, but the transformation unsettles rather than restores the familiar pet. The contrast between the gentle ginger cat and the enormous she-cat also returns the memory to its beginning, when the kitten had been stolen from its mother, while bringing Queen Marguerite into the dream’s chain of resemblance. The dream does not undo the dog’s attack; it shows the remembered animal changing form in the King’s imagination.

The play’s performance direction specifies that the cat’s story should be delivered with as little emotion as possible, as though Berenger the First were dazed and in a dreamy stupor, except for the final speech, which carries sorrow. That instruction gives the memory a broken, suspended quality: the accumulation of precise habits and injuries does not become a conventional outburst of grief. The final expression of loss nevertheless breaks through. As the King’s recollection moves from the kitten’s trust to its ruined body and altered dream-image, the cat becomes a measure of what remains emotionally legible to him: a particular creature he loved, and the pain of having lost it.