Consanguinity in the Cats of Castillon

No-one ever intends to end up working for the B.N.C.F. It is a fate that befalls people unexpectedly. In that respect at least Jules was not unusual. He didn't flatter himself in the belief that he had once been a promising young biologist and now he was an inspector for the B.N.C.F. It was a respectable enough position, secure, well paid and with good benefits; Jules was happy enough. Still, it was hardly following humpbacks across the Pacific, or trekking into the mountains of Central Africa in search of the last of the gorillas.
It hadn't taken much to get Jules sent to the south: a stray word here and a comment there. The Bureau had its habits and its unspoken rules formed over two long centuries of its existence; many a metropolitan inspector had spent time in the provinces for just such indiscretions as Jules'. “The Bureau requires you to undertake” the letter had said neutrally enough, “the vital task of monitoring provincial conformity.” And so it was that Jules became the latest official to take on, a long way indeed from their troublesome Parisian cousins, the never-ending task of studying the cats of rural France. Jules was well aware that his assignment was really all about him cooling his heels in the mountains; learning a lesson; finding out just how large France really is, and just how inconceivably complicated its feline problems.
In the footsteps of crusaders Jules headed towards the mountains of Occitanie, once the land of Cathars and always a province of stubbornly non-conformist cats. He drove his own car as far as Foix and then exchanged it for a Citroen with local plates from the regional B.N.C.F. pool.
He paused with his hand on the car door, looked up at the castle above the town. It had one square tower and one round. For a moment he found its oddity beautiful against the silky blue southern sky, but quickly shook himself free of these disturbing thoughts and, watched all the time by a tortoiseshell female, category 5, climbed into his discrete new vehicle and began the last portion of his voyage.
The mountains, so long visible on the horizon, were suddenly all around him now. He lost sight of the high peaks as he entered the tangle of steep-sided green valleys. Slate-roofed barns and dilapidated farmhouses sat prettily in the landscape of chaotic fields, neglected orchards and sleepy villages. As he drove the last few kilometres, fatigue of that profound and stealthy kind combined with the impossibly rich natural and man-made beauty all around to plunge Jules into a half-dream state of vivid imaginings. From the top of a round hay bale in a field by the roadside a ginger male, category 7, watched him pass.
Jules was still wondering how, driving at 80 kilometres an hour he could be so sure that that cat had had bright green eyes the colour of beech leaves in the spring sunshine, when he encountered the first speed bump in Castillon.
One man stood on a corner outside a resolutely closed shop; one car was parked outside a darkened post office. Castillon had the air of a place which had never recovered from the Twentieth Century. It was a town which people had been leaving for a long time. The cats had stayed.
A little later the sounds of a very modest resumption of afternoon business drifted through the open window of Jules' room in the auberge. He had slept for a while bathed in a shade-cooled breeze; dreamt of the road, his grandmother's kitchen and of cats in every room of a dusty old marie. The air carried the scents of a small town and the strong southern accents of pleasantries exchanged below. Jules allowed his limbs to rest still and heavy on the bed; this unfamiliar feeling coming over him, he realised, was relaxation. Somewhere out there, between the sounds of the human world, as if to confirm that the man from the B.N.C.F. could not possibly be any further from the organisation's august Paris headquarters, a buzzard cried.
His eyes wandering in the dark Eighteenth Century recesses of the high ceiling, something, no more than an inkling, made Jules start. The bedroom door was open. He raised himself up on to his elbows and looked around and blinked. The door was definitely open a narrow crack, and yet he had certainly closed it when he had come in and collapsed on the bed.
'Waow' the slim grey cat said as it watched the bemused human from its seat on the dark wooden blanket box at the foot of the bed.
Jules let out a truncated cry of surprise and jumped up into a sitting position. The cat reacted not at all. Jules immediately felt silly for having been startled quite so much. 'Cat' he said rubbing his face with tingling hands, 'Cat you made me jump.'
Female, category 4, she blinked slowly and purred. She seemed very much at home and only made a move when Jules reached out. 'Do you live here then?' he asked and gracefully the cat backed away, avoided his extended hand, jumped to the floor and passed in a swift fluid moment out of the door and away into the corridor beyond.
Jules had thought to get up and start work that very afternoon, but as he pushed the door to after the cat he knew that he was still too tired to think about anything very much. He felt as if he was still on the road, still in that surreal haze of the journey's end. He briefly wondered what the cat had been up to, but dismissed his nascent suspicions; it was just the auberge cat.
Experimentally Jules opened a shutter and stuck his head and shoulders out into the afternoon. Castillon was as slow as glass; heat enveloped Jules, pushed him back inside and towards the crinkled bed. The only solution was more sleep, perhaps, Jules decided, when he awoke he would feel more like himself.

There were cats everywhere. The quiet streets may have lacked people, but the feline population exhibited no reluctance to be seen. First Jules walked the main streets through the town, then he allowed himself to follow the narrow alleyways, the medieval passages between leaning houses, the short cuts to whole rows of tumbledown ruins and barely started renovations. With every corner he turned Jules encountered at least one more cat; here the cats comprised the dominant species.
Some took flight, some sat and watched his progress. One or two came towards him at first, only, a cat's moment later, to allow caution to get the better of them as something told them that this man was no Castillonais.
Every category of felis catus it seemed, including some combinations of colour and body shape rare indeed even in the alleyways of the capital, was represented in Castillon,. At this stage Jules took no notes. He didn't want to draw undue attention to himself or his work. This morning's excursion was more about orientation and early impressions than scientific precision. At this stage it would be have been highly irresponsible to put too much faith in raw observation; cats are complex, defy straightforward surveillance and with their secret habits often surprise even seasoned field officers.
Jules established his routine for the early phase of his work. He tried to live and breath straight from the B.N.C.F manual. Long-standing officials, the mandarins knew well, did not need to be constantly checked in their work; theirs was a habit of mind, a feeling that the bureau was always with them no matter where they were or what they were doing; for them conformity was ingrained.
Few words were exchanged at breakfast time in the auberge. It seemed that the lady of the house wanted to know as little about Jules as Jules was happy to divulge. She did not question the good fortune that brought her this long stay guest and the gentleman confined himself to complimentary remarks about the coffee and the comforts of the auberge. They were each content with the arrangement. It soon became clear however, that the two of them were joined each morning by the category 4 female, pointed and grey. She watched proceedings from one of three vantage points; came in when the man took his first sip of coffee and left as he thanked Madame but just before he pushed his chair back from the table. From time to time Jules would glance across at the cat and she would be watching him. Once he caught her washing. She stopped in the instant his eyes came to rest on her and archly returned his gaze. Of course Jules did not remark once on the cat to his hostess.
After his breakfast Jules walked the town discreetly. He noted feline activity as he made his way along the quiet streets and alleyways, past the long closed shop fronts and the tower with the clock forever stuck at quarter past eight on some morning lost in the hazy memory of The Couserans.
For now Jules' methodology was simple: observe the major feline gathering areas, record the range of local types; establish a feel for the territorial struggles of the cat population and assign a preliminary conformity figure to the commune and its cats.
Only later would he need infra-red cameras and his night vision goggles. Such were the tools of the modern B.N.C.F officer, but as yet the ethos of the bureau dictated that they remained only a back-up to the traditional fieldwork, the fieldwork that ensured an officer's familiarity with his subjects. Short cuts led to easy reliance on technology; inaccuracies in spirit if not in actuality.
In the afternoons Jules made one rapid tour to take cognisance of favoured feline siesta spots and then he too took to the cool of his room. Whether the evening brought golden sunshine or warm rain, Jules would emerge then to monitor the cats' hunting and feeding habits both before nightfall, and later under the inky mountain skies. He did his utmost not to seem suspicious as he stealthily walked to the darkest of back streets; as he lurked at the corners of houses so long abandoned that even the oldest locals had forgotten the family names of the people who had closed their doors and gone to America, leaving at least one cat and probably more to search for new human benefactors.
Finally at bedtime, and the exact hour varied enormously, as would be expected of someone involved in a study of cats and a member of an office renowned for its lack of married staff, Jules would lay in the wide auberge bed and read, pausing only to note the feline calls that punctuated the Castillonais nights.
'Conformity in the Cats of France' by LeClerc; 'The Truth Concerning the Cats of Paris' by Durand and 'With the Coming of the Night' by Seguy. These sat by Jules' bedside. When at last he slept, he dreamed of cats. From the broad windowsill the category 4 female watched the man sleep and she wondered.
It took three weeks to establish the broad outlines of the feline community in Castillon and Jules could see already why word of disturbing irregularities and non-conformities had found its way along the wires to distant Paris. He also knew the epicentre of all cat activity in Castillon, he had pin-pointed the very house, and indeed the very person, where the focus of feline attention was fixed.
Here then were the three problems, interlinked in an intimate provincial web of secrecy and collaboration: the cats of Castillon were far too numerous; they enjoyed the benevolence of local people in general and of one person in particular to far too great a degree; and finally they were clearly highly inbred, the degree of their consanguinity, apparent in a dozen different phenotypes, put them, at Jules early estimate, seven point three beyond the upper limit of the Foch Scale.
'Now I find myself' Jules wrote, 'in the difficult situation of observing not just the cats of Castillon but the people who have aided and abetted their descent into non-conformity. I must be careful.'
In fact, far from observing the people of Castillon equally, Jules found himself spending increasing amounts of time watching one house. He would plot cat activity on his tables and maps and, meticulously following the data, he would find himself led in ever decreasing circles around the home of one Madame Meureuse. This was no good: the cats knew he was there; the people saw his attention more focused by the day, and now Madame Meureuse herself had wished him good day three times in a week. The third time she had smiled in a manner Jules took to be knowing; she appeared not at all surprised to meet him in the narrow passageway that led from her house down the hill towards the main street.
Madame Meureuse's house was a once grand affair, very large for a person who lived alone. It did not so much have one roof as an accumulated collection of roofs with numerous little windows and tiny balconies that led off towards the adjoining buildings. The lower storeys were in stone, thick patches of render missing in places; the upper walls, underneath the eaves were in the local colombage style, charming, medieval. Jules realised that he had begun to like the quirky house. He was unsettled by that and tried to dismiss it from his mind, just as, moments earlier he had dismissed the realisation that when Madame Meureuse smiled at him his heart had raced and his face had flushed.
He paced in his room at the auberge. He knew that he would go again and patrol the alleyways around Madame Meureuse's home. He just needed to overcome his mounting anxieties. He had only a few more links to make in his comprehensive plan of Castillon's cats and all of the clues led to the same place. For some reason Madame Meureuse was feeding and probably sheltering all of the big cats of this small town: the males who sired the most kittens and the females whose territories no other cats could afford to ignore; the mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers of the most powerful cat clans of Castillon. The hub of the Castillonais feline wheel was emerging; what worried him though, reluctant as he was to admit it, was that as much as he feared the moment and the risk of embarrassment, he actually wanted to meet Madame Meureuse again, to be caught at work outside of her house.

'Good day Monsieur.'
Madame Meureuse smiled a warm and open smile. Jules gasped just a little for breath. She must have been a little older than he was, long and slim in the body with just a little silver in the hair that framed her face. He had been less than stealthy and less than efficient in his recordings, in fact he had dawdled. He knew that she would know he was there, and he felt sure that she could tell that he had meant it to be that way. He might as well have knocked on her door.
'Madame' he stumbled and coughed, 'Good day.' He thought perhaps he was smiling, but his face did not feel like it was his own.
'Excuse me for remarking Monsieur,' Madame Meureuse came close enough now for Jules to smell her perfume; woodsmoke and musk mixed with the flowers of mountain pastures. He was falling. He knew that although he had never fallen before; he had never even smelled the flowers of mountain pastures. 'But you seem to be very interested in the cats of this part of the world.'
'I.... I am a scientist' Jules managed. Madame Meureuse's lips were rounded, they looked soft; dangerous.
And then she touched him. It was just a brush of the hand on the elbow, but perhaps a little too slow, a little too deliberate not to carry a great deal of significance; at least that was Jules' fervent hope. 'Well that is interesting. I am greatly interested in cats myself. I would like very much to hear about your work.'
Now Jules could have declined, should have declined. He should have maintained his professional detachment. 'Well' he found himself saying. He felt like an adulterer and wondered whether he would ever mention Madame Meureuse to his colleagues at the B.N.C.F. He knew that he would not.
'Good then' she said and touched his arm again, 'I will make you a cup of coffee. Please call me Madaleine.'
'I am Jules'.
Madaleine moved away towards her house, but it seemed to Jules almost as if she had slipped around him and brushed against him as she moved. He thought of cats, of the body language of cats. Several were watching him as he went, but for the first time in a long time he did not notice them.
One coffee on that day led to a second on the next day. Coffee and conversation led to a lunch in Madaleine's garden and soon Jules' reasons for being in Castillon were no longer entirely clear. He told himself that he was discovering more about the cats of Castillon thanks to Madaleine than he would ever have otherwise, and that was certainly true; but it was her face he watched as she spoke, not the category 2 male who sat on the garden wall regarding them somewhat imperiously.
The next time they kissed to say hello, her lips did not miss his cheeks and his hands rested momentarily on her waist. He was falling no longer. He had fallen.
Madaleine talked about cats in a manner that was completely unorthodox. She saw them as her friends, not as a potential threat to the tidiness of The Republic. They were a kind of extended family to her. By the time Jules felt confident enough to gently joke about Madaleine's feline affinity, he was not even surprised that she made no denials at all. 'The cats are my lifelong companions' she said, 'but also Jules, they are my eyes and my ears.'
The flood of stories about the cats of Castillon threatened to overwhelm now the carefully collected data of Jules' first few weeks in the town. It was an odd emotional stream of recollections and anecdotes interwoven with incredibly detailed feline genealogy, it was rich with cat lore and unlike anything Jules had ever heard. The heresy captivated him and the mindset of the B.N.C.F. fell away as he luxuriated in Madaleine's narratives, the warm southern evenings and the ever closer company of cats.

'Will you stay here with me tonight?' Madaleine asked in a tone hushed and softened from the moment, seconds before, when she had come to the end of her latest tale of the ancient cats of The Couserans.
Jules did not think, he did not allow himself to think. 'Yes' he said and gazed at the woman who had in such a short space of time brought tumbling down the certainties of his life to date. 'But Madaleine, tell me please, how do you come to know the cats and their ways so well?'
Madaleine smiled and reached out for his hand. 'I told you that they are my eyes and my ears Jules. There is a link that I cannot explain. My father was like it before me; he used to say that there are certain people in certain places who are part human and part cat.' She laughed, 'I don't know about that, but there are lots of things that I do understand and lots of stories that I know. I have already told you many of them.' She paused and sat back regarding the man carefully, 'You are perhaps part cat yourself Jules, you never know.'
Jules was suddenly excited, aroused. At the same time he was more than a little scared. His fear didn't exactly leave him in the weeks that followed. But he put it away. He put it away along with his notes and his books. He hid it out of sight with all of the things that made him an officer at the B.N.C.F.
At first it was Madaleine who made love to him. She was possessed of a passion and a fury that transfixed the man. He was completely in her sway and he simply surrendered to that. This he could live with; his life became, for that brief time, like a trance, like a period of sensual and sexual exploration. What ended that first enchantment was the sudden shattering release of what he had hitherto held pent up within himself.
Madaleine rejoiced as Jules became free, as his inhibitions fell away. He lost himself utterly in their love-making, and in the silver moonlight streaming through the windows of her bedroom he could almost of dreamed himself a cat, not only free of the responsibilities of human life, but unable even to imagine the weight of them.
Afterwards he ran from the house. He was still hot, still smelling of his lover and of how close they had been. He wondered whether it was shame he felt, but it was more profound than that. He had stared into the abyss and, as they say, the abyss had stared back into him. Something, the last threads of what kept him attached to the self he had been in his old life, had pulled him back.
In the room at the auberge everything seemed oddly mundane. It was late and only the sounds of the bar at the other end of the town disturbed the quiet of the night. Jules began to pack. He had resolved to leave without delay. He had more than enough data to present in Paris and he would claim that some family bereavement had forced him to come back from the south. If the bureau sent him back in a few weeks then he'd decide what to do about that at the time. Right now he needed space and sanity. He needed distance from the cats of Castillon.
He left the auberge behind him, a cheque and a letter left for the hostess to find in the morning. But somehow he had known that leaving would not be easy. He saw his car across the road; it was covered with cats. The roof was covered and the bonnet too; there were cats underneath and cats all along the pavement as well. They had made themselves at home and didn't so much watch the man with the suitcase as nonchalantly take in his approach and then ignore him.
'Get off the car' Jules said as loudly as he dared, 'get off the car!' Not known for their obedience at the best of times, the cats did not move. Jules took to lifting them off one at a time and then sweeping them off with great scything arm movements. He wasn't quick enough, or at least the cats were quicker. They were too numerous and too determined, and yet quite calm in their defiance. He stood back and breathed hard, he could feel sobs welling up from deep within him. He kicked his case and swore under his breath. Now all of the cats, categories 1 through 15, and all too closely related for comfort, seemed to be looking directly at him; no, past him.
'They don't want you to go Jules.' Madaleine's voice came gently from behind him. 'And neither do I.'
'I would have come back' Jules spoke without turning around and knew that he was telling the truth.
'Why go only to come back? And why take that report to those idiots in Paris? Stay here, they won't miss you.'
'I'll have to send them something. If I don't they'll just send someone else here later.' As he spoke Jules could feel his old life evaporating. Madaleine was close behind him now, her voice a purr.
'Send them something then, and a letter of resignation. Tell them we're all conforming perfectly to national norms down here. Tell them you've found a new place to live and a new family to live with.'
She touched him and he shivered. 'Well I'll tell them something. Yes I'll think of something.'

Dupre knocked on the door and entered the plush office, 'Good day Monsieur' he said to the severe looking man behind the huge desk. 'I have here the provisional documents relating to the case of Officer Jules Dafis.' He placed the brown folder down on the otherwise clear desktop and stood back to see if the senior bureaucrat had something else for him to attend to.
'Thank you Dupre. The defector eh? Well some of us always said that it was far too dangerous a place for a field assignment.'
'Yes Monsieur, I for one was always in agreement with you.'
The well dressed bureaucrat smiled with self-satisfaction, he liked Dupre, Dupre was loyal.