Louise Michel’s Moggie or:
Jig-a-Leg the Lollygagger and the Communard Cats

By Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

Illustrated by Patrica Bingham

At Le Chat Noir’s closing hour, the well-fed poets – men and women both – bought one last round of cognac, one for the other before they retired to their cozily heated homes. No day job awaited on the morn to wear soul and muse to shreds.

It was a far cry from the world just a decade earlier in 1871 before the Paris Commune’s crimson flag flew over the City of Light. That was the moment the populace carried the day over the Versaillais forces of order, turning from prey to the powerful few to citizens of a new dawn. The insurrection’s victory was still the subject of epics and villanelles at the Chat Noir. Ten years later, the authors of the poetry – sometimes the same as the authors of the insurrection– still toasted the triumph each night until the cabaret shut down.

As the latch clicked behind the proprietor, well beneath that same Boulevard Rochechouart, downstairs another cabaret continued uninterrupted by human rhythms of sleep and waking. Madame La Chatte looked up from the brass contraption where she kept track of the evening’s tips and nodded, inclined her head even, at the ginger tom crossing the threshold. With his three legs, he skipped his way to an empty armchair – threadbare from other customers using it as scratch post. In that far corner of the shadows, he took his seat. A lamp illuminated the cigarette haze that wrapped the other patrons. Sidling in, he lit up a pipe, his offering to the rheumy, dim atmosphere.

The haze clung to the feline stretched out over the piano cover, showing off her abundant white chest fur against her otherwise black markings. She sang a tune of pure nostalgia for a Paris now gone, the capital of art collectors and their wives encrinolined in satin Worth gowns. she sang of glamorous courtesans and the wildly rich rentiers that bought them, of top-hatted financiers at the café conc’, the happy few in the grand apartment blocks that had risen up not long before, of a Paris that had vanished when the Commune declared its miraculous victory over the massed armies besieging the city. That day might never have happened had it not been for the ginger tom who had just settled in and puffed at his tobacco.

A hiss and a howl greeted the singer.

“Yeah sure, but you forget how those courtesans started work before their teens.”

“–or the maids living in their tiny room above, that is if they were lucky enough to have that.”

The tuxedo mrowled, “I used to live in the first floor apartments and it was nothing like that–we had treats and cream every day.”

A calico screeched back, “You, maybe, but I was a mouser for one of those maids up under the attic, a chit of a thing she was and could only cuddle a minute late at night while she fell dead asleep, too tired even to play with me. Her little brothers out in the factories… ah, don’t even talk to me about treats.”

“You had bad taste in humans, that’s all.”

“You’ve forgotten how hard we fought to make it all happen!”

“Jig-a-Leg knows something of that,” miauled Madame La Chatte, cutting through the bickering, and turned her head around to the pipesmoker in the dark corner.

A buzz of murmured awe and disbelief rose up that turned to a hush until one brave cat asked, “Jig-a – you mean Jig-a-Leg the Lollygagger? He’s here?”

Jig, in the midst of grooming his back end, looked up from his butt and shook his head.

“Oh là là, Lucette! What’d you have to go and do that for?”

“High time someone knew something of what you were up to in those days.”

She continued polishing the glasses with her claws withdrawn.

“Nothing much to speak of, just mouser to a schoolmarm– “

“– Schoolmarm in uniform, name o’ Louise Michel. Come on here and tell the others afore I do it my own self–” Madame La Chatte interrupted.

“– and hungry, too, however that may be. There weren’t scarce no rats left to eat. Christmas day the humans had hit the zoo and even skinned up whatever they might have found over in the Jardin des Plantes. The ponies in the Luxembourg had long ago turned into an after-dinner belch. Lost a few of my nine lives dodging the famished. My best mate, Guy-Gaspard ShimmyShanks Gollievieux got rounded up and put in a cocotte, braised ShimmyShanks, nothin’ left of him but the muff on that bitch’s hands and a scent of rosemary in the air. That’s where I left my hind leg.”

He puffed his pipe. Not an ear twitched. The silence stretched so long, one wondered if he intended to go on. Finally he took up where he left off.

“Back before the siege, even poets never hassled me. Hell, they’d give me treats now and again, and then with the siege they were outright ready to swallow me down in a fricassee, and I don’t like to know what wine. After that winter – everyone, human, and a few surviving – and quick – cats, warn’t nothing but bones pokin’ through hides. T’least there weren’t no dogs no more –brochettes à la canine had done away with the packs o’ dirty scavengers, most of ‘em anyhow.

“My old lady, the schoolmarm, were hungrier than most, but allus gave what she had to her little pupils and to me too. As for her own self, I could swear-like her beliefs kept body and soul together. Her stomach would rumble and there she’d talk to me about the rights of humans and cats to have no master, nor mistress either, but to be free of chains. She’d not even sleep but talk into the night about these things and her belly’d stop its moanin’. She started bringing in alley cats and strays, many of ‘em my friends and some of ‘em my enemies who got to bein’ comrades, all the felines she could find and some that found her too a’ that. It may have been too late for my mate ShimmyShanks but there was Persian Chéradame la Chiqueteuse, shorthair tabby Aimé Revenchard, Piètrequin Pixérécourt the Siamese, also Pellegrin Quidort and Aurelien Poilièvre both dark as an unlit rue du Chat Qui Pêche….even my little country cousin out from by the Bry-sur-Marne, smart li’l tortie Blondelue Guédamour found a roof there. The Schoolmarm rescued us all from the marmites and starving Communards. She’d even scrounge up something for us, even with her own hunger pains. That’s when we’d curl up right next to her and purr alongside her rumbling ol’ stomach. She seemed to feed on that, or at any rate it helped some and if nothing else kept her warm and us too. And I got to understanding that the concerns of cats and the concerns of humans were all caught up in each other.”

The tuxedo smoothed her whiskers, turned up her nose and sniffed. Jig-a-Leg didn’t notice, but continued his tale.

“Mind you, I mysel’ couldn’t just chew on that the way she could. I was ever so hungry. I had been prowling round – further afield, dunno how far I’d walked but I was hankering for some morsel, even some leather to gnaw on or just something to distract me from my stomach, though hoping for a vole or field mouse or something. So I walked as I could, limped to be precise, was getting used to m’ three legs, out past the old customs offices, then past the outposts, out as far as Meudon, my gut gnawing at me something fierce.

“Careful with my paw prints too, I dodged grasping hands, “pss psss puss!” though I’m a tom, I am, not wanting to end up in a camp skillet,”

His rapt audience nodded.

“I knew soldiers’ posts and their different beats and hours – and lo I saw there warn’t no one, not a single sentry. Then I looked into the fields beyond and saw the gobmint army, the Versaillais rolling in. Not hungry no more, I was off like a shot from their cannon – my old lady warn’t nowhere to be found, but Chéradame la Chiqueteuse, Aimé Revenchard, Piètrequin Pixérécourt, Aurelien Poilièvre, Blondelue Guédamour went north, south, east, and west, braving the bony fingers out to get them.

“Pellegrin Quidort got to my ol’ lady and somehow after all those nights purring against her hunger, she got to figuring out what he meant when he miauled. The marm, she sent up a flare, and soon the Communards were on it fighting like no one on a full stomach could, whatever that Corsican corporal once said.

“I dashed out alongside Chéradame la Chiqueteuse and Piètrequin and the others and got out to the Marne to find Blondelue who had drawn up all her vast relations. Our country kin have no end of litters and all the kittens eventually find work in the haystacks and barns and grow up hale and hearty. All of ‘em, the whole damn family, had the boisterous berserk on ‘em and soon on with Piètrequin leading the way, so too the Communard cats of Paris. Aurélien Poilièvre and Aimé Revanchard made their way out to Montretout and to Passy with the same idea.

“They brought in their humans, their ol’ men and ol’ ladies with ‘em, and their little ‘uns and marched on, they had only pitchforks and scythes. A wee girl, itty bitty thing, marmalade color, in homespun, she was and three apples high. But she walked up, carrying a kitten, barely opened his eyes.”

A tortie cut in, “That was me and my old lady! It was just like Jig-a-Leg says. First thing I ever saw was the soldiers.”

Jig-a-Leg nodded at the tortie and then picked up where he left off.

“‘Lay down your arms.’ she said.

“She said it all simple-like, a hint o’ baby lisp but it warn’t no request, that’s fer dam sure, tiny country bumpkin with heart as brave as anyone’s in the ol’ Grande Armée.

“The soldiers looked to their capn’s, they looked to each other, rifles at the ready and bayonettes pointier n’ my own teefs. I don’t know how long they stood there, coulda been the old statues in the Luxembourg for all they froze there.

“Then she stepped one foot further toward enemy, nothing but a kitten to perteck her tiny heart.”

The tortie preened, but said no more.

“Seein’ her stand right up, not shakin’ nor nothin,’ right lick in the face of the armed troops melted the enlisted who mostwise defected to the farmers on the country side and the insurrectionists on the city side, leaving the Versaillais commanders without commandees.

“The rank and file that were left, themselves not long out of the fields, kept their weapons but turned them on the higher ups. On the sly, they slipped their bayonets by tragic accident, n’est-ce pas, between the ribs of captains and colonels whose blue blood dripped down their backs and fronts.

“Meanwhile, as the officers were distracted by the turn of events, a line of us made off with the Versaillais provisions, relaying them to the insurrection.

“The officers gave as good as they got and things were looking mighty grim for both Communards and the country folk.

“But we cats had not had our say, not as yet.

“‘Away we go!’ Piètrequin hollered out his Siamese battle cry.”

At this the calicos whooped in chorus.

“We joined in the mayhem with the glorious masses of country felines and swarmed the Versaillais army. We tore apart tents, the better to sharpen our claws for shredding maps of strategies and notes of tactics. Any table held anything? We knocked it over first and asked questions later. We clumb and crawled and clawed all over the officers, up to their medals, batting at the tassels and ripping their ribbons to tatters, till none of ‘em knew no more who to obey. Even the Persians, Chéradame la Chiqueteuse and her ilk, joined in and with their sure-fire hunches as to who was allergic to all that fur, jumped up on épaulettes. They didn’t give out orders, the officers, no, they just sneezed and sneezed. One ended up going off half-cocked and taking himself out.

“Cannoneers tried as they might to fire, but could not; we had chewed open the wadding of the grapeshot. We spilled it all over, we batted it through the air à coeur joie. All the while we moggies scattered the artillery’s ammunition like schoolboy marbles. Fact is, we ran amok amongst their big black boots, tripping them into ditches or leading them right in the line of grapeshot and gunfire.

“All the battlefield over, we waylaid and laid waste to the Versaillais. Frenzied from famine, us felines gave ‘em hell – and moren’one officer bears arm scars to this day for going after us. And then the straight up chaos, the outright number of us and the havoc we wrought, left them with their mouths hangin’ open.

“Maréchal MacMahon his own self headed the Versaillais. What no one knew, not even the moggies, is that this veteran of Crimea, Algeria, and Italy had a horror of cats. Black cats above all, he thought the fiend. Black-furred Poilièvre had no idea of this, but took an instant disliking to the general’s moustachios, almost as long and white as his own, and managed to latch onto them, lip underneath included, with his teeth. In a shriek right startling from a man of arms and war, he flailed his arms like a windmill and then spasms overtook him.

“After he absconded, his next in command tendered his surrender with no conditions, or at least that’s what the Communards understood between his stuffed up nose and wheezing sniffles. The remaining men abandoned post and the scarlet flag of the Commune unfurled over the battlefield that became once more the City of Light.

“To think it was ten years ago. Everything might have turned out different.”

Jig-a-Leg put his pipe out and slipped it into his breast pocket. As he rose the cats all fell back and made way for him. All but the tuxedo. She turned her tail his way and swished it high. Before he could notice, however, Jig had skipped back upstairs to the Boulevard Rochechouart. The tom spared a thought for the towering barricades that had once stood between the schoolmarm and her comrades the cats, and disaster, now vanished like the cholera of another time. He did not miss the swells who in the old days, before the makeshift battlements went up, never failed to kick him to the curb with the shiny leather shoes, nor the ragged kids who once shivered amongst the other beggars and the roofless, selling what little they had to those same swells, the little they owned, their bodies mainly.

No, he slid his staccato way past the corner, where a few straggling poets advised the mixed-accent revolutionaries on the council’s rulings over rent and debt forgiveness. He passed by workers arranging their shifts schedules amongst themselves, and some of the nurses returning home from their duties at the free clinics. As daylight peeked over the gray-roofed skyline of Paris, the cat lifted his nose to sniff the early air scented with baguettes for all. Some citizen soldiers of the Garde Nationale made a show of keeping the peace, but the peace largely kept itself.

He limped up the Sacré Coeur hillside, up farther to the Montmartre schoolhouse filled to the rafters with books and children, laughing in the courtyard before their day began. An eight year old in a snug, thick coat offered him a bit of the goûter from her knapsack. But it had been a long time since Jig-a-Leg needed to eat. Instead, he settled in for a scritch before he made his way to his schoolmarm. Louise smoothed the rough hair of his head and he purred. After a slow blink into her loving gaze, eyes drowsing, he fell asleep on her plump lap.