Céline and Bébert, Part 2
L’Histoire de Bébert continues…
Read Part 1 here: Céline and Bébert: a cat Odyssey
In March 1945, Céline was finally free to leave Germany, but the most dangerous leg of the journey was still ahead. When the railway line to Hannover was bombed, Lucette was injured and Bébert’s knapsack blown aloft by an explosion. The cat emerged unscathed. Céline reminisced in 1961:
Lucette carried him in a knapsack: he didn’t eat or drink or so much as take a pee for 18 days. For 18 days and 18 nights he didn’t move, didn’t let out a single meow. He was aware of the tragedy. We changed trains 27 times. Everything was lost, burned on the way: everything but the cat. He did 35 kilometers on foot with us, from one army to another, under fire. It was worse than 1917.
On March 27, the Destouches family were safe in Copenhagen. It was the start of almost nine months of peace for Bébert, now living in a third floor apartment, sleeping the days away, working at getting fat again. On December 17, Céline and Lucette were arrested by the Danish police. Bébert, in a rare display of self-preservation over steadfast loyalty, fled out the window and onto the rooftops. Caught in his turn, the cat was imprisoned in a veterinary clinic until a friend of Céline’s bailed him out. A month later, Lucette was released and the two were reunited.
Bébert and Lucette languished in a smaller, airless apartment for a year and a half, waiting for Céline, visiting the prisoner regularly (the cat being smuggled into jail in a bag). Céline fell ill during this period, but as soon as the writer regained his freedom, the cat had to be operated on for a tumor. They shared the pain and comforted each other. At Copenhagen’s Rigshopital, Céline hid Bébert in his room for weeks, in the closet.
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.
From 19 May 1948 to June 1951, the Destouches family lived on the Baltic seashore, in a house without running water. Amnestied, they came home to France on July 1, to lead a quiet existence in the suburbs. Céline transformed his Meudon house in a shelter for abandoned animals: we have names for Thomine, a she-cat; Flùte, a gray cat; Billy Budd, a cat; Totom, a German Sheperd; Polka, a bulldog; Toto, a parrot.
Bébert had to be operated on again soon after arriving in Meudon. He died in 1952, perhaps at the age of 16. He studiously avoided the other animals: supremely uninterested in frolicking and hunting, he spent his days “stretched across Céline’s desk, among the manuscripts. With head languidly abandoned on the papers, he seems to want to fuse himself with the work.”
Céline shed tears.
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…
A cat is magic itself, tact by wavelength... it's all a "brrt-brrt" of words... Bébert talked in brrt’s, absolutely. He answered your questions... Now he brrt-brrt’s only to himself... he answers no more questions... he monologues about himself... like me... he is grown churlish, like me.
— Céline
