Cardinal Richelieu and his fourteen cats: the feline court of the Palais Cardinal

How many heads of government can you name who put it in writing, in their will, that money be set aside to care for their fourteen cats after they were gone? The list is short. On it, in 1642, sits the man who steered French foreign policy for eighteen years, wrote the rules of the modern state, and left behind a portrait by Philippe de Champaigne that still hangs in the Louvre.

Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal and Duke of Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII from 1624 until his death, kept a feline colony in his private apartments at the Palais Cardinal: identified by name, assigned servants, diet supervised. The detail has circulated in French biographies since the 19th century, but the primary documentation, preserved in the post-mortem inventories and cited by Joseph Bergin in The Rise of Richelieu (1991), leaves no room for romantic legend. There were accounting records. There were fourteen names. Some of those names survive.

Who were the cardinal's fourteen cats?

The list that reached us comes from several complementary sources: the cardinal's private correspondence with his grandniece, the notebooks of the Palais Cardinal's steward, and the Vie du Cardinal de Richelieu published posthumously. The names that appear most often:

• Soumise, a gray female, described as the cardinal's favorite in his final years.
• Felimare, a tabby, noted for a very dark, almost black coat.
• Lucifer, jet black, reportedly a gift from the ambassador of Savoy.
• Ludovic le Cruel, white and gray, named for hunting kitchen mice without mercy.
• Mounard le Fougueux, a young and especially active cat.
• Pyrame and Thisbé, a pair named after Ovid, both tabbies.
• Racan, possibly a tribute to the poet Honorat de Bueil, Lord of Racan, a contemporary of the cardinal.
• Perruque, so called because, in an anecdote recorded by Bergin, the cat was born in the folds of a guest's wig and discovered there when the wig was shaken out.

The remaining six surface intermittently in letters and administrative notes, without as defined an identity in the surviving record. What is clear is that the total number of named animals living with Richelieu at the same time hovered around that figure in his last years.

The cats' room at the Palais Cardinal

The Palais Cardinal, built on Richelieu's orders between 1633 and 1639 to plans by the architect Jacques Lemercier, would be renamed the Palais-Royal after passing to the crown in 1642. The building, much altered over the centuries, still stands across from the Louvre and today houses the French Council of State and the Constitutional Council.

In the original layout, next to the cardinal's private apartments, a room was set aside for the animals (contemporary documents call it the chambre des chats). It was not a cage or an adapted kennel. It was a room with a window onto the garden, carpets, several baskets, and low furniture. Bergin reconstructs the detail from the 1642 post-mortem inventory, which lists entries such as "wicker baskets for the lord cardinal's cats" and "silk cloth to line the baskets of the cabinet des chats".

Two servants were charged with their daily care. One was named Abel and the other Teyssandier, according to the payment records. Their work included cleaning, feeding, and likely bringing some of the animals out to the common rooms in the cardinal's presence.

The diet was varied and unusual for 17th-century urban cats. Payments to the household steward record specific purchases of chicken, milk, organ meats, and occasionally chicken pâté, all destined for that part of the house. For scale: the combined wage of the two cat keepers came to roughly that of a junior secretary on the cardinal's staff.

On origin, breed, and morphology

Early-17th-century France knew nothing of cat breeds in the modern sense. The codification of breeds with written standards arrived in the last quarter of the 19th century, first in England. Richelieu's cats were therefore what we would today call common European cats: short-haired animals of robust build, typically green or amber eyes, adult weight between 9 and 13 lb (4 to 6 kg). Some, though, must have carried traces of the two feline populations then leaving their mark on France.

One was the Chartreux, a blue-gray cat with a dense coat, traditionally bred in the Carthusian monasteries of southeastern France and very present at court in the 16th and 17th centuries. Soumise, the favorite gray female, could easily have matched that morphology, though no document labels her as such because the label did not yet exist.

The other was what was then called the Angora cat, long-haired animals from Turkey beginning to circulate as diplomatic gifts among European courts. Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a contemporary of Richelieu and frequent correspondent, was among the first to document that population in France. There is no firm record that an Angora cat lived at the Palais Cardinal, though the possibility fits the profile of gifts a chief minister received.

What is documented is the cardinal's taste for varied colors and patterns. The colony included black cats, tabbies (mackerel or blotched, in current terms), solid grays, and white-and-gray bicolors. No red cats are identified in the record, which is statistically consistent with any 17th-century European litter, where red males run about 20 percent of the population.

Why would a cardinal and prime minister keep cats?

Aldous Huxley, in Grey Eminence (1941), his book on Richelieu's confessor Father François Leclerc du Tremblay, paints the cardinal as a man of fragile health and extreme discipline: chronic migraines, documented hemorrhoids that kept him from riding, and a workload his contemporaries called inhuman. He carried French foreign policy, the rivalry with the Habsburgs, the Thirty Years' War, internal revolts, and the administration of a cardinalate.

The cats served several functions at once in that daily grind. Practical: mouse control in a residence full of irreplaceable paper archives, in an age when rodents devoured manuscripts without discrimination. Social: feline gifts arrived from ambassadors and nobles, and keeping a visible colony was an indirect way to display prestige. And personal: Richelieu, a man without descendants and with tense court relationships, seems to have found in the animals a kind of company free of politics. Bergin notes that in the few intimate scenes described by witnesses, the cardinal appears reading or dictating with one of the cats on his lap.

There was a cultural motive too. The black cat carried, in 17th-century European folklore, the taint of witchcraft, and keeping a colony with several black animals (Lucifer, Felimare) was in a sense a statement of enlightened modernity against popular superstition. The cardinal was a cultivated man, a reader of the French moralists, the founder of the Académie française in 1635, and open cohabitation with black cats fits that profile of institutional rationality.

The clause in the will

Richelieu died on December 4, 1642, at the age of 57. His will, drafted and revised several times during his final illness, included detailed provisions for paintings, books, buildings, and servants. One clause, cited by François Bluche in his biography of the cardinal (Richelieu, Perrin, 1990), granted a lifetime pension to Abel and Teyssandier "so that they may continue caring for the lord cardinal's cats until the last of them".

The clause was only partly honored. The cats passed to the care of the cardinal's grandniece, the Duchess d'Aiguillon, his principal heir. Some of the younger animals ended up in other houses of the family. The most curious account, undocumented but repeated in several 19th-century biographies, holds that two or three descendants of the colony reached Versailles in later years, when Louis XIV moved the court there. Whether that is fact or constructed legend, there is no way to know with certainty.

What is known is that the testamentary provision was unusual even for the period. Later biographers document that the provision for Jock at Churchill's Chartwell, three centuries later, was probably the only comparable feline clause in European political history. Richelieu set the precedent.

What survives today

Of the cardinal's Palais Cardinal, the much-altered structure of today's Palais-Royal in Paris remains. The chambre des chats disappeared with the 18th-century renovations, when Philippe II of Orléans (the regent) reworked the interior plan. In Champaigne's portrait at the Louvre, the cardinal stares out at the viewer with a severe expression, and no animals appear in the frame. The feline memory survives in the archives of the National Library of France and in academic biographies like Bergin's, not in official iconography.

The paradox is worth pausing on. The statesman history remembers for raison d'État, secret prisons, and the execution of Henri de Montmorency kept, in private, a room full of named cats and left money for their keepers. Anyone who wants to understand the full man has to hold both sides of the portrait.

The verifiable, in one line

Fact	Confirmation
Number of cats identified by name	Fourteen, by agreeing sources
Principal residence	Palais Cardinal (today Palais-Royal), Paris
Servants assigned	Two, Abel and Teyssandier, in payment records
Testamentary clause	Yes, dated 1642
Morphology	Common European cats, no pedigree
Some surviving names	Soumise, Lucifer, Pyrame, Thisbé, Perruque, Racan