Comme chien et chat: Like cats and dogs

Last evening at twilight I was sitting at a table next to one of the high windows in my new apartment. Through the branches of the linden trees on the village green, I could see a strip of orange stretching across the plain beyond the wooded hills of Nointel, the Parisian suburb where I now live.

It was one of those peaceful, perfect evenings and I was breathing easy after a break in another brutal heatwave that brought days of relentless sun with temperatures hovering around 100°. A breeze floated in through the open but unscreened windows (few people here have screens to keep out the bugs and you have to get used to sharing your home with mosquitos, flies, spiders and other winged and crawling creatures). Almost dozing, I was enjoying the wind’s invisible caress when I detected a faint clinking sound, as if one of the flowerpots on the windowsill was being moved.

I turned my head and saw my neighbor’s cat about to descend from the window ledge to the top of a wooden chest just below. Night had almost fallen. The silent incursion of a big, bushy black cat frightened me. I cried out and the animal ran away.

Where I now live—though not in my apartment—at least a dozen cats have the run of the place. They lounge in the entrance hall, atop the mailboxes, and in the parking lot beneath the cars. To get them back inside at night, their owners run around the garden rattling containers of cat food. For those who spend the night outside, they leap about 7 feet to the nearest windowsill where their owner puts out bowls of food. They’re the first up in the morning, the last to bed at night, and it would not be an exaggeration to say, at “le Domaine,” as this place is called, cats rule.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Cats are a mystery to me. My parents gave my sister and me one when I was 4 years old. This black-and-white kitten was like a bomb. We touched it. The cute little kitten set off an explosion of allergies. We had to get rid of it. My parents discovered that neither of their daughters could breathe in the presence of a tiny cat.

And that’s how it’s been ever since: scratchy, swollen eyes, trouble breathing, a sense of general itchiness, and a profound ignorance of what these animals are all about.

At “le Domaine,” there’s also a dog named Lolita. She is a “barbet,” an ancient French breed related to the poodle and the terrier. In fact, Lolita looks like a mixture of both. She has black curly locks, a white star on her chest, and the gentle jaw of her cousin the poodle. Lolita also has a gentle character and when she looks up at me, I know I’m staring into the eyes of man’s best friend.

 

No one has ever said that about cats.

“Le Domaine” is a perfect setting for nature-loving humans, dogs and cats. The forest descends from the surrounding hills almost to my front door. I can hear woodpeckers; at night I hear the cry of screech owls. I often climb the hill and walk the woodland paths with my friend Camille. She lives in the town next to mine and I can reach her house through woods and fields. She is a cat lover and when I’m perplexed, I turn to her for information and advice.

 

Concerning the bushy black cat that jumped 7 feet to my windowsill, she may be expressing a desire to move in with me. Her mistress often abandons her on the weekends and she is away at work in Paris every weekday. The cat, named Luna, knows I’m inside living a quiet life, and, according to Camille, she may want to share it companionably with me. Cats don’t like long days alone (as all you cat owners and lovers out there know much better than me) and they prefer quiet sorts to my noisy neighbor, who plays loud music in her garden and invites too many friends over for “l’apéritif.”

As Camille has told me, cats choose their masters and aren’t afraid to change when they don’t feel loved. They also like exploring and expanding their territory. Luna might simply want a bigger place to roam.

Thanks to Camille, I’ve also learned that I must teach this cohort of cats that I too have territory and there are places where they are not welcome—like in my vegetable patch or the flowerbeds outside my living room windows. I’ve been at it for months and the boundaries are pretty well in place though I get the feeling that with cats, nothing is definitive.

Only a week ago, we (Camille and I, not me with the cats) admired the drawings of a great cat lover, the Swiss-born artist Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, best known for his posters for “Le Chat noir,” the famous late 19^th century cabaret of Montmartre, where artists, poets and slumming aristocrats met. 

  

His more intimate work is currently on display at the chateau-museum of the town of Auvers sur Oise, where Van Gogh lived for a while (you can find my article devoted to him and the town that appeared in the Republican Herald in July 2013 at https://pottsville-paris-express.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-vacation-for-price-of-metro-ride.html). There are sketches and engravings of Paris and of Steinlen’s country home near where I live, including his garden, flowers, birds and lots of cats. Here was a true cat lover. For his monogram, Steinlen wove together his initials and the elegant curve of a cat’s back.

 

More than sixty years after my first contact with a cat, I’m still allergic to those cute furry creatures who, here in France, have replaced dogs as the preferred pet, which is not to say dogs are much on the decline. From my living room window I observe the local dogs with their masters from morning till night. For your information—and this says a lot about the French character, few owners stoop to scoop. The village green, so cool and lovely in the shade of the tall linden trees, is in fact a minefield of what the French call “crottes,” which I’ll elegantly translate as “dog turds.”

Americans still prefer dogs and in that, I’m true to national character, but if ever I get a dog, it will be a French barbet, as much like my neighbor’s as possible.

 

Pro-Life, the French Way

Imagine you are a young French woman. You’re a nurse, a doctor, a cashier, a teacher, a banker, an engineer, an employee of Amazon. Perhaps you’re unemployed. No matter what your situation, if you discover you are pregnant with your first child, you know you are entitled to a 16-week paid maternity leave, 6 weeks before, 10 weeks after, the birth. If you find out you’re carrying twins, the leave jumps to 34 weeks; triplets, 46.

As for the father, he is entitled to a 24-day paid paternity leave of which 4 days are required at the time of birth.

Daily indemnities for a maternity leave are based on total earnings—or unemployment benefits—during the 3 months that precede it and cannot exceed a cap of 3,377 euros a month. These indemnities are paid by the French Sécurité sociale, the national health insurance system to which all French employees and employers contribute.

When the leave comes to an end, by law, the woman returns to the same position she held before her pregnancy.

If a second child arrives, there will be a second maternity leave, longer than the first, taking into account the mother already has a toddler on her hands. If she or her husband wish to spend more time at home with children of 2-and-a-half years or younger, they can request a “PreParE,” a parental leave that enables them to reduce their time at work to either a 4-day week or half-time while receiving a monthly stipend, capped at 406 euros, to replace income lost.

If you are a low-income family, you are entitled to rental assistance and “energy checks” to help pay heating bills. Single parents receive aid for housing and food. Many families receive “back-to-school” benefits to help pay for books, new shoes, clothes and school supplies.

 For babies and younger children, working parents have access to a wide network of public and private daycare—though it can be very difficult to find a place. Required public schooling begins when a child is 3 and all children must stay in school till age 16. For low-income families, scholarships for junior high and high school students are available.

Of course, what I am describing here on paper may not always run smoothly in practice and such services depend on enormous bureaucracies that have never been easy to navigate. Since government personnel has been reduced, beneficiaries of such aids are required to do more of the administrative work themselves, and without a computer or a smartphone, some are left behind.

That said, French government policy is solidly pro-children and pro-life, the reflection of a society that takes seriously its collective responsibilities.

Once they’ve finished high school, young people can move on to a basically free university education (there are yearly enrollment fees of a few hundred euros). Low-income students are entitled to scholarships to help pay living costs. Housing in state-owned dormitories is reasonably priced, though scarce.

Upon entering the adult world of work, a young Frenchman or woman has been nurtured by a society whose government taxes its citizens heavily and invests heavily in life. It is also a society that believes guns have no place in public space. Semiautomatic weapons are outlawed in France, except for some very rare exceptions. In the streets, no one but the police or the military openly displays a holster and gun.

When it comes to climate control and the sacrifices it entails for all of society, it’s an uphill battle. As I write, France is experiencing a record-breaking heatwave, but government policy, at the municipal and state level, is moving forwards, not backwards, recognizing the climate crisis is real. Slowly, much too slowly, we’re recognizing our lives and the lives of future generations depend on making changes now.

Finally, in France, a country where “post-birth babies” and children are well cared for thanks to nationwide solidarity, abortion has been legal since 1975. The law was written by Simone Veil, minister of health under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At age 16, this woman was deported to Auschwitz because she was Jewish. She lost her father, her mother and her brother in the death camps. In 1952, she lost her beloved elder sister Madeleine who, like Simone, survived Auschwitz, but was killed with her husband and child in a car accident.

 

No one can accuse Simone Veil of not knowing the value of life.

 Another French woman, Françoise Héritier, anthropologist and a near contemporary of Simone Veil, wrote two groundbreaking books called Masculin/Féminin I and II. In them she argues that men’s domination of women is deeply rooted in the earliest observations of humanity. From the first, men observed women could do more than reproduce themselves. They could also reproduce members of the opposite sex. From the start, men knew they could not do that. It thus became imperative to control women’s reproductive functions.

Things have not changed much since then.

In the American press, I read that anti-abortion proponents consider the overturn of Wade Vs Roe by the Supreme Court as a victory for “pre-born babies.” It is surely not a victory for the “post-born.” Even in Pottsville, gun owners with permits can walk through the street and past schools with holster and gun around their waists. This is the result of another recent Supreme Court ruling where the safety of children is sacrificed to the demands of the NRA, and freedom is construed in the narrow terms of every man for himself.

I love my country. I love and miss the United States and would consider spending more time there were I eligible for Medicare. Despite having worked several years in the country, I am not. A French person in my situation would remain eligible for such benefits in France.

At the same time, the current situation of the United States deeply worries me: climate controls have been scrapped by government decree; the middle class remains heavily taxed while the wealthy can easily escape their fiscal responsibility; universal health care for children and mothers remains an impossible dream. And it almost goes without saying, guns are everywhere.

As for those who are anti-abortion, I’ll believe they are “pro-life” the day they’re ready to fight with the same zeal for the rights and care of “post-born” babies, making the life and well-being of each and every child a national priority.