Page:The fireside sphinx.djvu/234

 206 a vigorous and elastic spring she leaped upon the perch. The parrot, seeing the imminence of his danger, cried in a voice as deep as M. Prudhomme's: 'As-tu déjeuné, Jacquot?'

"This utterance so terrified the cat that she fell backwards. The blare of a trumpet, the report of a pistol, could not have frightened her more thoroughly. All her ornithological ideas were overthrown.

"'Et de quoi?—Du rôti du roi?' continued the parrot.

"Then might we, the observers, read in the countenance of Madame Théophile: 'This is not a bird; it speaks; it is a gentleman.'"

The cat so loved and honoured by her master had other tastes less carnal, other instincts less murderous. She delighted in perfumes and in music. India shawls, lifted from their boxes of sandalwood, and exhaling faint aromatic odours of the East, intoxicated her voluptuously. She stretched her delicate limbs on their soft folds, and dreamed vague dreams of caravans, and of fair Persian pussies carried over the red sands of Arabia. The vibrations of the piano or of the human voice thrilled her with pleasure and with pain. She would listen drowsily while the music was faint and low; but high notes irritated her nerves, and if a soprano grew too piercingly sweet, she would leap up and