CASANOVA’S PARROT

Factoids of varying quality—some a page long, others a sentence (“Toulouse-Lautrec kept a male canary called Lolo”)—best consumed as a literary snack over a few days.

Of the categories of owners (literary, royal, political, military, etc.), writers are the ones—perhaps because they wrote about them—whose pets are the most fully realized. There’s Taki, the cat Raymond Chandler called his secretary because she was always there, sitting on his papers. Alexander Dumas’s cat, Mysouff, once ate all the rare birds in the house with the help of the family’s three tame monkeys (each named after a literary critic). Dumas wrote: “Mysouff was declared guilty, but with extenuating circumstances—merely condemned to five years of incarceration with the apes.” Mark Twain, whose daughter once observed, “the difference between Mamma and Papa is that Mamma loves morals and Papa loves cats,” described a kitten that liked to sit in a corner pocket of the billiard table and “[watch] the game.” The poet William Cowper, who wrote “An Epitaph on a Hare,” had three of those animals, which he brought into his parlor after supper to play. Royalty mostly favored dogs—George VI was responsible for introducing the now ubiquitous Welsh corgi, although Queen Victoria also had favorite horses and cats, and Frederick the Great of Prussia so loved his dogs that he wished to be buried with them, a wish granted only in 1991, after Germany’s reunification. American presidents have tended to prefer a range of pets: James Garfield had a mare called Kit and a dog named Veto; Benjamin Harrison, a billy goat called Old Whiskers; and Calvin Coolidge two raccoons, Rebecca and Horace. The parrot of the title was taught by Casanova to make slanderous comments in public about a former mistress of his master.

Bryant (ed., Sins of the Fathers, 1997, etc.) comes up with a few standouts, but this is mostly thin fare. Players of Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, etc., will enjoy.