Something strange is happening to Paris’s cats.
They are not napping.
Normally, you would see them curled up in café chairs or lounging in windowsills, buttering their bellies with the afternoon sun. But lately the cane chairs sit empty. Sunbeams slant into nothing. Instead, you see streaks of fur in the corner of your eye—slipping into one alleyway and out the next. There are paw prints scattered all across the city’s mansard roofs, patrolling forgotten attic eaves. Similar trails wind through cellars, circling around long-corked bottles of wine and passing holes fit for rats. None of the cats’ steps seem to pause here, not the way they do in the cool crypts underneath Paris’s chapels, where tabbies and tortoiseshells hop onto the stone likenesses of the bodies entombed beneath, their paws placed straight on the upper left part of the chest. Where the corpse’s heart should have long since rotted…
It is this they are hunting for, you see.
They do not blink at the gray blur of a church mouse.
They do not bother the bats that roost in the bell towers.
They do not pause by the Seine to watch its fish or its even deeper eels.
Some cats do stop to exchange stories of the places they’ve searched. The gardens and the graves, the quais stacked with strangely stamped crates, the museum basements filled with much of the same. Treasures abound in such places. So do curses. A black cat by the name of Nix lost one of his seven lives sniffing around boxes stored in the bowels of the Louvre. If you’ve been studying your cat-speak, you might hear the hair-raising tale from the young animal himself—I could taste the sands of time, but then they started to taste me. His tail curls in an urgent tone. Steer clear of the Sully Wing, oh hunters mine. Some things are meant to stay buried.