Parisian Cats

Twenty cats in their purr-furred Parisian locales—from cafes and bistros, to bookstores and art studios, to museums and palace hotels—invite readers on a feline tour of the City of Lights. In Paris, cafes and cats go hand in paw. Far away from the famous runways in the world capital of fashion, the biggest divas in town can be found strutting their stuff down the zinc bar of many a local hot spot. This book introduces twenty of Paris’s most beloved cats as they take us for a stroll past the city’s monuments and inside the charming and quintessentially Parisian spots they call home. From her perch in an upstairs window at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Kitty surveys the comings and goings of boats along the Seine and visitors at Notre-Dame. Swiffer at Le Cafe Zephyr lures customers in from the bustle of the boulevard Hausmann to enjoy a cafe or glass of wine in the colonial interior. The exotic pedigreed Fa-raon at the Bristol enjoys pampering worthy of the palace hotel’s paying clientele. The feline inhabitant of the Montmartre museum not only looks like the iconic black cat from the ever-popular poster for the Chat Noir cabaret, but he was named after the nightclub’s founder Rodolphe Salis. These twenty unforgettable cats offer a unique and irresistible Parisian tour.

Olivia Snaije is a journalist for The New York Times, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller, Harper’s Bazaar Art, and The Global Post, and has been a major contributor to several guidebooks on Paris. Nadia Benchallal, an award-winning French photographer, has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Times, Marie Claire, Le Monde, Die Zeit, and Geo, and her photographs have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and at photography festivals internationally.