See also how this story appears, in slightly different form and with a decidedly US approach to commas, at Cat McMahon's Cat's Stories website: http://www.catsstories.com/from-monet-to-monette-the-art-of-being-a-globetrotting-cat.html
Had it all happened 80 years earlier, the generously bearded Claude Monet might have been standing there in his magnificent gardens at Giverny, 40 miles outside Paris, including Monette in one of the final works of his long life as an artist.
At the Royal Academy in London, however, there was no trace of this delightful creature of Giverny, the cat that lived there briefly at the start of an eventful life.
It felt a little as if visiting the old school of one of your children, but without the child. Giverny, and especially its waterlilies, weeping willows and Japanese footbridge, naturally feature a lot in Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse.
You do not need to be especially green-fingered by inclination to find it a beautiful exposition of art as created in the gardens owned or visited by these painters and several others - notably Renoir, Cezanne, Pissarro, Manet, Sargent and Van Gogh. There is not too much in journalism that I do not feel comfortable turning my hand to. Anything to do with science can be tricky, I suppose, and I was not terribly successful in one shot at writing travel for a particular newspaper. You can add art criticism to that short list; I am not even sure all the time that I know what I like, but I liked this. It's on until April 20. Just go.
Back to the cat.
This is how I wrote about the earliest days of a life that has taken Monette from the Giverny of her birth to Paris, the south of France, Abu Dhabi and London.
A few days into her life as one of a litter born at a restaurant at Giverny, where the house and gardens of Monet are on public view (and well worth the drive west of Paris), this scrap snapped at the heels of a table where two couples were rounding off their visit. One couple fell in love with the kitten and were promptly told they could take her. Since this was a girl, she couldn't be Monet, so she became Monette.
My wife remembers asking a waitress if the kitten was for sale. It turned out the owner was only too pleased to get one of the litter off her hands. The drive back to Paris, back then in the summer of 2004 our home, included a pause at Carrefour to stock up on food, litter, a basket and other basic feline needs.
Save for the occasional dart along the narrow balcony - it was a heck a job to retrieve her, involving a precarious crawl five floors up from the rue de Rivoli- and one downstairs several flights, a week in the Var and picnics in the Bois de Boulogne and Tuileries gardens, Monette became an apartment cat.
Then she took on a new life as an outdoor, lizard-murdering Provencal cat before it necessarily back indoors in Abu Dhabi, not so much because of the heat but because she would otherwise have been used as a football by local teenagers or rounded up by council workers with orders to capture and kill strays.
The photos of Monette above show her in Paris. The one below confirms that while she may be bigger and older, she hasn't changed that much. She may even be wondering whether her rather special status entitles her to family rates for the Monet exhibition.
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