Twentieth-century writers continue to celebrate the cat while moving beyond romanticism and seeking to better understand and discover the cat.
Pierre Loti attempts to penetrate the "strange window" of the cat's eyes to reach the "unknown" inside its little brain. The cat often appears to be dictatorial in contemporary literature. Cats do not stray; they exercise their freedom. The author thus feels he is chosen anew each day.
Robert Sabatier feels as though he lives in his cat's home. Graf Bouby (Jean Blot) calls his owners his "slaves." In L'homme presse [The Man in a Hurry], Paul Morand admits, "I had a hundred cats, or rather, a hundred cats had me."
People who believe that cats love them are opposed by those who are convinced that cats love only the advantages that humans give them i.e. essentially domestic comforts. This does not bother Cocteau, who sees the cat as the visible soul of the home, or Baudelaire, who sees cats as familiar spirits in the house that give life to objects.
Michel Tournier coined the term "suradaptation" to illustrate the cat's ability to disappear, blend in, and reappear in the house. According to Renee Massip, "some houses need a cat" like Maurice Genevoix's Rou, a superb cat torn between the delights of freedom and the pleasures of domestic life, and Remo Forlani's Finette.
Other authors believe that cats like both their owner and their home and are prepared to follow their owner even into uncomfortable situations (for example, Christopher Simon and Anne Frank).
Colette describes the world of animals realistically. Yet, she lapses into anthropomorphism with regard to cats named One and Only, Derniere, Kapok, Mini-Mini, etc. Colette illustrates the cat's lack of modesty in La maison de Claudine [Claudine's House].
While cats were reputed to bring luck in love in the fifteenth century, they are now a symbol of pleasure, sensuality, and sexuality (Chat beaute by Paul Guth, Graf Bouby by Jean Blot, Blues for a Black Cat by Boris Vian, and A Cat's Life by Yves Navarre).
Authors link women and cats closely, sometimes making them one and the same ("La femme et la chatte" ["The Woman and the Cat"] by Paul Verlaine, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, La femme du boulanger [The Baker's Wife] by Maurice Pagnol). While cats sometimes turn into women, they also become rivals of women (The Cat by Simenon and La chatte [The Female Cat] by Colette).
In Particularly Cats, Doris Lessing describes a woman who must get rid of a female Siamese cat in order to keep her husband.
While the Egyptians already called the cat a "sorrow swallower" Paul Leautaud describes the cat as a refuge and a true friend in his Journal litteraire [Literary Journal] peppered with thoughts and anecdotes about cats.
Today, cats inspire and play a role in the author's meditations (A Cat's Life by Yves Navarre and Graf Bouby by Jean Blot). Boris Simon believes that cats can make man better: The cruel leader of the pack in his Passage de l'homme-chat [Passage of the Man-cat] discovers a love for cats and recognizes their loving nature and vulnerability. As a result, he becomes able to communicate respectfully with others.
The cat can act as the writer's mirror. In Louis-Ferdinand Celine's German trilogy (North, Castle to Castle, Rigodon), there is an obvious parallel between the personality and behavior of the author and that of the cat Bebert.
The cat's death is thus experienced as a double trauma, often accompanied by feelings of guilt (Le chat des Briarres [The Cat of Les Briarres] by Renee Massip, The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre).
Jules Laforgue and Francois Maynard composed funeral prayers for their cats (in the manner of Du Bellay's epitaph).
Jean Cocteau illustrated the cat's enigmatic nature in Beauty and the Beast (with the Beast in the film appearing as a frightening and loving monster-cat).
However, in contemporary literature, cats (black, of course) are still often linked to witches and the devil. In The Curse, a story from The Mutilated, Tennessee Williams portrays a cat and a man linked by a ruthless fate.
Still, the cat can have a positive effect: In his story La patte du chat [The Cat's Paw], Marcel Ayme revisits the ancient belief in the power of cats to bring rain by swiping their paw behind their ear.
Rene Barjavel is one of many writers who believe in metempsychosis. For him, cats are reincarnations of human beings.
Over the ages, some constant themes emerge in the way writers see cats: cats and writing, cats and pleasure or sexuality, cats and women, cats and the absurd, the sacred or diabolical cat, and always the eternal mystery of the cat.
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