Chats

In April 1936, following a tragic news story, Léautaud wrote this to a grieving father: “Sir, I read in the newspapers of the accident that has just befallen you. In trying to kill a cat, you killed your child. I am delighted. I am overjoyed. I find this perfect. This will teach you to be so cruel toward a poor animal. My compliments once again.” The father, a farmer near Saint-Brieuc, had fired at a cat about to enter his garden, but mortally wounded his eighteen-month-old son instead, who was rushed to hospital and soon died. The man often called a misanthrope showed toward cats an exemplary, astonishing and disinterested devotion. Whoever loves cats will love Paul Léautaud, and do him justice.

Camilla Koffler (1911–1955) was an Austrian artist known as Ylla. She emigrated to Paris in 1930 to continue studies in sculpture begun in Belgrade, where she met Ergy Landau, who introduced her to photography. She soon opened her own studio and specialized in animal photography, working equally with wild cats, elephants, ducks and dogs. She produced this beautiful album for Léautaud at only twenty-four years old, before publishing, thirteen years later, another book on the subject, with a text by Marie Dormoy, Le Chat Miton, prefaced by Paul Léautaud.

After the war she was considered the greatest animal photographer of her time and regularly made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. In March 1955, at only forty-three, while photographing bullock-cart races in India, she fell from the hood of her Jeep and was fatally injured. Her last photographs, along with personal notes from this trip never intended for publication, were published in Animaux des Indes (Lausanne, Guilde du livre, 1958), six years after her last album, 85 chats, appeared there.

The front cover is illustrated with an original mounted photograph (“portrait of Ernest, no pedigree”).