Celine's cat Bebert,

Celine's cat Bebert, "surely the most famous cat in twentieth-century letters," leaping from a train as Celine goes bounding after him, the entire horizon burning hellfire.

Bebert was a Montparnasse tabby, born probably in 1935. He met his second master in occupied Paris in late 1942. "Magic itself, tact by wavelength," as his master described him, Bebert was to be left behind when the master and his wife, Lucette, decamped for Germany in the dread spring of '44. Bebert refused separation. He was carried in the travelling sack. The voyage led through lunar bomb craters, strafed rail lines, and cities burning like mad torches. Under bombardment, Bebert, almost starving, became lost, but rediscovered his master and Madame. The trio crossed and recrossed the collapsing Reich. In a last, despairing lunch, they reached Copenhagen. When the Danish police came to arrest the unwelcome guests, Bebert slipped out across a roof. Caught, the legendary beast was caged in a pound at a veterinary clinic.

When his master was released from jail and was recuperating, Bebert had to be operated on for a cancerous tumor. "But the Montmartre tom had been around the block. He withstood the trauma and made a speedy recovery, with the slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent, and enigmatic." ...Sphinxlike in years, Bebert, the secret sharer, died in a suburb of Paris at the end of 1952.

"After many an adventure, jail, bivouac, ashes, all of Europe...he died agile and graceful, impeccably, he had jumped out the window that very morning..."

"It is Berbert I want to write about--Bebert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning,"