The black cat

I neither expect nor want credence to be given to the most extraordinary, and yet most
familiar, story which I am about to relate. In a case in which my senses refuse to accept their
own testimony, I must be truly insane if I believed so. However, I am not crazy, and I am
certainly not dreaming. But tomorrow I may die and I would like to relieve my spirit today. My
immediate desire is to show the world, clearly, concretely, and without comment, a series of
simple domestic events that, by their consequences, have terrified, tortured, and stunned me.
In spite of everything, I will not try to clarify them. They have produced almost no other feeling
in me than that of horror; but to many people they will seem less terrible than unusual.

Perhaps later there will be an intelligence that will reduce my ghost to the status of a common
place. Some intelligence more serene, more logical and much less excitable than mine, will find
only in the circumstances that I recount with terror a normal series of very natural causes and
effects. The docility and humanity of my character surprised me from my childhood. So
remarkable was the tenderness of my heart, that it had made me the plaything of my friends. I
had a real passion for animals, and my parents allowed me to own a wide variety of favorites.
Almost all the time I spent with them, and I never considered myself so happy as when I fed or
caressed them. Over the years this peculiarity of my character increased, and when I was a
man I made it one of my main sources of enjoyment. Those who have professed affection for a
faithful and shrewd dog do not require an explanation of the nature or intensity of the
enjoyments it can produce. In the disinterested love of an animal, in the self-sacrifice, there is
something that goes straight to the heart of one who has often had occasion to experience the
petty friendship and fragile fidelity of the natural Man. I married young. I was fortunate to
discover in my wife a disposition similar to mine. Noticing my taste for these domestic
favourites, he lost no occasion of supplying me with the most agreeable species. We had birds,
a gold colored fish, a magnificent dog, rabbits, a small monkey and a cat. This last animal was
very strong and beautiful, completely black and of a wonderful sagacity. My wife, who was,
deep down, somewhat superstitious, speaking of her intelligence, frequently alluded to the old
popular belief that all black cats were sneaky witches. This does not mean that he was always
serious about this matter, and I record it simply because I remember it. Pluto — that was the
name of the cat — was my favorite friend. Only I fed him, and wherever I went he followed me
around the house. I even had trouble keeping him from following me through the streets. Our
friendship thus lasted for a few years, during which my character and temperament—it makes
me blush to confess it—because of the demon of intemperance, underwent a radically
disastrous alteration. From day to day I became more taciturn, more irritable, more indifferent
to the feelings of others. I used brutal language with my wife, and over time I even afflicted her
with personal violence. Naturally, my poor favorite must have noticed the change in my
character. Not only did he pay no attention to them, but he mistreated them. However, as far
as Pluto was concerned, I was still considerate enough not to hit him. On the other hand, I felt
no compunction about mistreating the rabbits, the monkey and even the dog, when, by chance
or affection, they crossed my path. But my evil was kidnapping me, because, what evil admits a
comparison with alcohol? As time went by, Pluto himself, who was growing old and, naturally,
a little sullen, began to know the effects of my perverse character. One night, on the occasion
of returning home completely drunk, returning from one of my frequent hideouts in the
neighborhood, it seemed to me that the cat avoided my presence. I took it, but he, horrified by
my violent attitude, made a slight wound on my hand with his teeth. A demonic fury suddenly
seized me. At that moment I stopped knowing myself. It seemed as if my original soul had
suddenly left my body, and a gin-saturated, super-demonic vileness seeped into every fiber of
 The black cat

my being. From the pocket of my waistcoat I took a penknife, opened it, seized the poor
animal by the throat and deliberately gouged out one of its eyes… My blush covers me, burns
me, I shudder as I write this abominable atrocity. When, at dawn, I had regained my reason,
when the vapors of my nocturnal debauchery had dissipated, I experienced a feeling half
horror, half remorse, for the crime I had committed. But, all the more, it was a weak and
equivocal feeling, and the soul did not suffer its attacks. I plunged back into excesses, and soon
drowned in the wine all the memory of my action. In the meantime he cured the cat slowly.
The orbit of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightening aspect. But later, over time, he
didn't seem to realize it. According to his custom, he came and went through the house; but,
as I should have guessed, as soon as he saw me approaching him, he fled in terror. There was
still enough of my old heart left for me to be grieved by this open antipathy in a creature who
had once loved me so much. But this feeling was soon dislodged by irritation. As if for my final
and irrevocable fall, the spirit of perversity then arose, a spirit that philosophy does not take
care of either little or much. However, as sure as my soul exists, I believe that perversity is one
of the primitive impulses of the human heart, one of those indivisible first faculties or feelings
that direct the character of man... Who has not been surprised numerous times committing a
foolish or vile action, for the sole reason that he knew better than to commit it? Have we not a
constant inclination, despite the excellent of our judgment, to violate what is the law, simply
because we understand that it is the Law? I say that this spirit of perversity was to produce my
complete ruin. The lively and unfathomable desire of the soul to torment itself, to violate its
own nature, to do evil for the love of evil, impelled me to continue and ultimately to carry out
the torture I had inflicted on the harmless animal. One morning, in cold blood, I tied a noose
around his neck and hung him from a tree branch. I hanged him with my eyes full of tears, with
my heart overflowing with the bitterest remorse. I hanged him because I knew that he had
loved me, and because I recognized that he had given me no reason to be angry with him. I
hanged him because I knew that by doing so I committed a sin, a mortal sin that compromised
my immortal soul, to the point of placing it, if this were possible, far from even the infinite
mercy of the most terrible and merciful God. On the night following the day on which such a
cruel action was committed, I was awakened from sleep by the cry of "Fire!" The curtains of
my bed burned. The house was blazing. Not without great difficulty, my wife, a servant and I
managed to escape from the fire. The destruction was total. I was ruined and from then on I
gave myself over to despair. I do not attempt to establish any relationship between cause and
effect with respect to the atrocity and the disaster. I am above such weakness. But I limit
myself to giving an account of a chain of events and I do not want to omit the slightest link. I
visited the ruins the day after the fire. Except one, all the walls had collapsed. This one
exception was a thin interior partition, situated almost in the middle of the house, against
which the head of my bed rested. There the factory had largely resisted the action of the fire, a
fact that I attributed to having been recently renovated. Around this wall the crowd gathered,
and numerous people examined a part of the wall with keen and minute attention. My
curiosity was excited by the words: "strange", "unique", and other similar expressions. I
approached and saw, like a bas-relief carved on the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat.
The image was given with an accuracy truly marvelous. Around the animal's neck rope. As soon
as I had seen this apparition—because I could only regard it as an apparition—my
astonishment and my terror were extraordinary. At last reflection came to my aid. He
remembered that the cat had been hanged in a garden adjoining the house. At cries of alarm
the garden was immediately invaded by the mob, and the animal must have been snatched
from the tree by someone and thrown into my room through an open window. Undoubtedly it
was done to wake up me. The collapse of the remaining walls had compressed the victim of my
 The black cat

cruelty into the recently spread plaster. The lime from the wall, combined with the flames and
ammonia from the corpse, produced the image as I saw it. Although I promptly satisfied my
reason in this way, since my conscience did not completely, nevertheless, the surprising case
that I have just reported did not fail to impress a deep impression on my imagination. For
some months I could not free myself from the ghost of the cat, and in all this time a kind of
feeling was born in my soul that resembled, although it was not, remorse. I even came to
lament the loss of the animal and searched around me, in the miserable slums I frequented at
the time, for another favorite of the same species and with similar features who could replace
it. I was sitting one night, half dazed, in an infamous still life, when my attention was suddenly
attracted by a black object lying on top of one of the immense gin or rum barrels which made
up the most important furnishings in the room. I had been looking at the top of the barrel for
some moments now, and was surprised that I had not noticed the object placed on it. I walked
over to him and touched him. It was a huge black cat, as big as Pluto, which it resembled in all
but one detail: Pluto did not have a single white fur on its entire body, but it did have a broad
white mark, albeit indefinitely shaped, that it covered almost the entire chest region. As soon
as I put my hand on it, it suddenly stood up, purring loudly, rubbed itself against my hand and
seemed pleased with my attention. It was so, the animal I was looking for. I hastened to
propose its acquisition to the owner, but he had no interest in the animal. I neither knew nor
had seen him until then. I continued petting him, and when I was about to return to my house,
the animal was ready to follow me. I allowed him, and bending down from time to time, we
walked towards my house caressing him. When he got there, he found it his own, and he
quickly became my wife's best friend. For my part, a dislike for him soon formed in me. So it
was precisely the opposite of what I had expected. I don't know how or why this happened,
but her obvious tenderness made me angry and almost exhausted. Gradually, these feelings of
disgust and annoyance increased until they became the bitterness of hatred. I avoided his
presence. A kind of shame, and the memory of my first cruelty, prevented me from ill-treating
him. For a few weeks I refrained from hitting him or treating him violently; but gradually,
insensibly, I came to feel for him an inexpressible horror, and to silently evade, as if fleeing
from the plague, his odious presence. Without a doubt, what increased my hatred for the
animal was the discovery I made the morning of the day after I had brought it home. Like
Pluto, he too had been deprived of one of his eyes. This circumstance, however, contributed to
make him more pleasing to my wife, who, as I have already said, greatly possessed that
tenderness of sentiment which was once my characteristic trait, and the frequent source of my
simplest and purest pleasures. However, the affection that the cat showed me seemed to grow
in direct proportion to my hatred of him. With a tenacity impossible to make the reader
understand, he constantly followed my steps. As soon as I sat down, he would curl up under
my chair, or jump on my knees, covering me with his hideous caresses. If I got up to walk, it
would get between my legs and almost knock me over, or else, digging its long, sharp claws
into my clothes, it would climb up them to my chest. In those moments, even if I wanted to kill
him with one blow, the memory of my first crime prevented me in part; but, above all, I hasten
to confess, the true terror of the animal. This terror was not positively that of a physical evil,
and yet it would be very difficult for me to define it otherwise. I'm almost ashamed to admit it.
Even in this rogue's cell, I am almost ashamed to confess that my horror and panic about the
animal had been heightened by one of the most perfect fantasies imaginable. My wife, not
infrequently, had called my attention to the character of the white spot of which I have
spoken, and which constituted the only perceptible difference between the strange animal and
the one which I had killed. The reader will doubtless remember that this sign, though large,
originally had an indefinite shape. But slowly, gradually, by imperceptible phases and that my
 The black cat

reason strove for a long time to consider as imaginary, I had ended up acquiring a rigorous
sharpness of contours. At that time it was the image of an object that makes me tremble to
name it. It was, above all, what made me look at him like a monster of horror and loathing,
and what, if I had dared, would have prompted me to get rid of him. It was now, I say, the
image of an abominable and sinister thing: the image of the gallows! Oh gloomy and terrible
machine, machine of horror and crime, of death and agony! I was then, in truth, a wretch,
beyond the possible misery of Humanity. A brute beast, whose brother was annihilated by me
with contempt; a brute beast engendered in me, in me, a man formed in the image of the
Most High, such a great and intolerable misfortune. Oh! Neither by day nor by night did I know
the peace of rest. Not for a single moment, during the day, did the animal leave me. And at
night, every moment, when I came out of my dreams full of indefinable anguish, it was only to
feel the warm breath of the thing on my face, and its enormous weight, the incarnation of a
nightmare that I could not separate from myself and that seemed eternally perched on my
heart. Under such torments succumbed the little that was good in me. Infamous thoughts
became my intimates; the darkest, the most infamous of all thoughts. The sadness of my usual
mood increased to the point of making me abhor all things and the whole of humanity. My
wife, however, never complained. Oh! It was my cloth tears forever. The most patient victim of
the sudden, frequent and indomitable expansions of a fury to which I have blindly abandoned
myself ever since. For a housework, he accompanied me one day to the basement of an old
building where he forced us to live our poverty. Up the sharp steps of the stairs the cat
followed me, and, having tripped me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Seizing an ax and
forgetting in my fury the puerile horror that had hitherto stopped my hand, I directed a blow at
the animal, which would have been fatal if it had hit it as I wanted. But my wife's hand stopped
the blow. A diabolical rage that gave me this intervention. I freed my arm from the snag that
was holding him back and plunged the ax into her skull. My wife fell dead instantly, without so
much as a moan. The horrible murder accomplished, I immediately and resolutely sought to
hide the body. I realized that I couldn't make him disappear from the house, day or night,
without running the risk of the neighbors finding out. They assailed my mind several projects. I
thought for a moment about breaking up the corpse and throwing the pieces on the ground. I
then resolved to dig a pit in the floor of the cave. Then I thought well throw it into the garden. I
changed my mind and decided to pack it in a crate, like merchandise, in the usual way, and
have an errand boy take it from home. But, finally, I stopped before a project that I considered
the most feasible. I decided to wall him off in the cellar, as they say monks did with their
victims in the Middle Ages. The cave seemed to be built on purpose for such a project. The
walls were not raised with the usual care, and not long ago they had been covered in their
entirety by a layer of plaster that did not allow the humidity to harden. On the other hand,
there was a protrusion in one of the walls, produced by an artificial chimney or a kind of hearth
that was later covered and arranged in the same way as the rest of the basement. I did not
doubt that it would be easy for me to remove the bricks from that place, place the corpse and
sandwich it in the same way, so that no glance could discover anything suspicious. I was not
fooled by my calculation. Aided by a crowbar, I easily separated the bricks, and, having then
carefully applied the body against the inner wall, held it in this position until I could easily
restore the whole masonry to its original state. With all imaginable precautions, I procured a
mortar of lime and sand, prepared a layer that could not be distinguished from the original
one, and scrupulously covered the new partition with it. When I finished, I saw that everything
had turned out perfect. The wall did not show the slightest sign of repair. With the greatest
care I swept the floor and picked up the rubble, looked triumphantly about me and said to
myself: "At least here, my work has not been in vain." My first idea, then, was to look for the
 The black cat

animal that had been the cause of such tremendous misfortune, because, at last, I had decided
to kill it. If he had been able to find him at that moment, nothing would have prevented his
fate. But it seemed that the cunning animal, faced with the violence of my anger, had become
alarmed and tried not to appear before me, defying my bad humor. Impossible to describe or
imagine the intense, the gentle sensation of relief that the absence of the detestable creature
brought to my heart. He didn't show up all night, and this was the first I enjoyed since he
entered the house, sleeping peacefully and soundly. Yes; I slept with the weight of that murder
on my soul. They passed the second and third day. My executioner did not come, however.
Like a free man, I breathed once more. In its terror, the monster had left those places forever. I
would never see him again. My happiness was infinite. I was very little disturbed by the
criminality of my dark action. A kind of summary was initiated that did not rush the
investigations. A reconnaissance was also arranged, but of course nothing could be discovered.
I took my future happiness for granted. On the fourth day after the murder was committed, a
group of police officers unexpectedly showed up at my house and again carried out a rigorous
search of the premises. However, confident in the impenetrability of the hiding place, I
experienced no embarrassment. The agents wanted me to accompany them in their
investigations. It was explored every nook and cranny. For the third or fourth time they finally
went down into the cave. Do not disturb me in the slightest. Like that of a man resting in
innocence, my heart beat peacefully. I walked through the basement from end to end, crossed
my arms over my chest and paced nonchalantly from one side to the other. Fully satisfied, the
police prepared to leave the house. The joy in my heart was too intense for me to suppress it.
He felt the urge to say a word, just one word, by way of triumph, and make his conviction of
my innocence doubly evident. "Gentlemen," I said finally, as the officers were coming up the
stairs, "it gives me great satisfaction to have dispelled your suspicions." I wish all of you good
health and a little more courtesy. By the way, gentlemen, you have a very well built house
here.” I hardly knew what I was talking about, in my furious desire to say something
deliberately. I can assure you that this is a superbly built home. These walls… Are you leaving,
gentlemen? These walls are built with great solidity. Then, by frantic bragging, I struck hard,
with a cane which I had in my hand at the time, precisely on the wall of the partition behind
which lay the wife of my heart. oh! May God at least protect me and free me from the clutches
of the archdemon. As soon as the echo of my blows had sunk into silence, a voice answered
me from the depths of the tomb. It was first a complaint, veiled and broken like the sobbing of
a child. Then, immediately, it swelled into a long, loud, continuous scream, completely
abnormal and inhuman. A howl, a howl half horror, half triumph, such as can only spring from
hell, horrible harmony that emerged in unison from the throats of the damned in their torture
and the demons who reveled in damnation. It would be crazy to express my thoughts to you. I
felt faint and, staggering, fell against the opposite wall. For a moment the agents paused on
the steps. Terror and of awe. A moment later, twelve stout arms slammed into the wall,
sending it crashing to the ground. The corpse, already very disfigured and covered with
congealed blood, appeared, rigid, in the eyes of bystanders. On his head, with its red jaws
dilated and its one eye blazing, sat the hateful animal whose cunning led me to murder and
whose revealing voice delivered me to the executioner. I had sandwiched the monster in the
grave