"Le chat" or The Cat at the Window

about 1857–1858

Medium

Conté crayon and pastel with stumping and blending, fixed, on wove paper

Dimensions

49.8 × 39.4 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-215424

Moonlight shines through an open window, illuminating a bedroom. A black cat with glowing eyes enters and looks toward a startled man who pokes his head through the bed curtains. His shoes lie on the floor in front of the bed, and his clothes are on a chair where he left them. This drawing illustrates "The Cat Who Became a Woman," a fable by the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de La Fontaine. According to the story, a man becomes infatuated with his cat and convinces Destiny to change her into a woman. He marries her, but on their first night together she springs from the marriage bed to chase a mouse across the bedroom floor. The fable's moral is "The truth will out": no matter how much one's outward appearance changes, one's essential character remains. In a wealth of tones hidden in deep shadows, Jean-François Millet evoked the story's haunting mystery.