her confidence or devotion. He neither demanded the loyalty he knew she would not give, nor ignored the friendship she was sometimes ready to bestow. Therefore there was a peculiar fitness in his inheriting from Leo the Twelfth the superb cat who had been for several years the Pontiff's most intimate companion, and who had aroused the ambassador's admiration by his beauty, his dignified demeanour, and a certain ascetic charm, derived from contact with the papacy. The Pope was abstemious, after the admirable fashion of Italians; the cat, Micetto, was abstemious too, living on a little polenta, and wholly weaned from the carnivorous habits of his race. Chateaubriand, in a well-known passage of his "Memoires," has left us a pretty description of the pontifical pet, who lived in France to a serene old age, bearing his weight of honours with graceful propriety, and hardening into arrogance only when forced to repel the undue familiarity of visitors.
"My companion," he writes, "is a large grey and red cat, banded with black. He was born in the Vatican, in the loggia of Raphael. Leo the Twelfth reared him on a fold of his white robe, where I used to look at him with envy when, as ambassador, I received my audiences. The successor of Saint Peter being dead, I inherited the bereaved animal. He is called Micetto, and surnamed 'the Pope's cat,' enjoying, in that regard, much consideration
