BARKS AND PURRS BY COLETTE WILLY TRANSLATED BY MAIRE KELLY CONTENTS PREFACE SENTIMENTALITIES ON THE TRAIN DINNER IS LATE SHE IS ILL THE FIRST FIRE THE STORM A CALLER PREFACE _Madame_: _There are moments when one seems to come to life. One looks about and distinguishes a creature whose foot-print closely resembles the ace of spades. The thing says: bow-wow. It is a dog. One looks again. The ace of spades is now an ace of clubs. The thing says: pffffffff--and it is a cat._ _This is the history of the visible world and in particular, that of my god-children, Toby-Dog and Kiki-the-Demure. They are so natural--I use the word in the sense in which it is applicable to the savages of Oceania--that all their acts conspire to make of life, a very simple proposition. These are animals in the fullest sense of the word--animos--if I may employ the original orthography, capable of exclaiming with those of Faust_: "The fool knows it not! He knows not the pot, He knows not the kettle." * * * * * _And as such, Madame, you have placed them exactly where they should be: their earthly Paradise is the apartment of Monsieur Willy. In your salon, the probable palm and rubber-plant give the impression of luxuriant Edenic flora, relatively speaking, and illustrate the transmogrification which is to allow M. Gaston Deschamps--critic of a_ "Temps" _plus-que-passé--to announce to the wilderness (where he speaks familiarly of Chateaubriand), and to the Collège de France, how well he can admire and understand a true poet_. * * * * * _For you are a true poet and I will declare it freely, not concerning myself more with the legends Parisians have the habit of weaving about every celebrity. They admire Gauguin and Verlaine, not so much for their originality, as for their eccentricities. And so it happens that certain persons, unacquainted with the nameless sentiment, the order and purity, the thousand interior virtues which guide you, persist in saying that you wear your hair short and that Willy is bald._ _Must I then--living at Orthez--tell_ Tout-Paris _who you are, present you to all who know you--I who have never seen you_? * * * * *