Under Cupcake's tutelage, Kibble Kat soon became an experienced time traveler. He was soon dashing here and there. breakfasting on Baltic cod in 16th Century Rostock, lunching in the 12th Century Baghdad on a buffet of shabbut pulled from the muddy Tigris, only to plop down along the Nile to watch the sunset on some ancient evening, as he munched briskly away on fresh river perch. His cat's whiskers guided him unerringly through the narrows of time, where a single misstep might drop you into the vortex of eternity.
Kibble Kat was in his element. There was no doubt about it. What cat didn't like endless choice? And we know that Kibble Kat was all cat. Decades of boredom dropped off like a second skin as he zoomed around the globe through the centuries.
He soon started coming back time and again to a single point in time and place. Kibble Kat loved comfort and who appreciated comfort and ease like the French. Are we forgetting the Court of Versailles?. For a cat who styled himself the Sun Kibble, what better place to be than 17th or 18th Century France, lolling around on a hand embroidered pillow as your mistress lazily scratched behind your ears? ( In the meantime, the scullery maids three floors below were chopping up a little whitefish in a Limoges bowl for your brunch.)
And no one knew the places to scratch better than Madame Pompadour, mistress to Louis XV and patron to the great Voltaire. So, it was that Kibble Kat found himself in the chateau of Armac somewhere in the region of France known as the Limousin, ensconced in the lap of luxury as the Marquise's favorite feline. No one quite understood, however, why the court favorite would disappear for long periods of time while liveried staff would search high and low through every dungeon and every tower to find 'Le Gris."
There was nothing that the Marquise would not do for Le Gris. After she was bored and depressed, exiled as she was for the time being from the court of his paramour, Louis XV, in Versailles, having to content hersld with the company of the few members of the minor nobility who visited her. She had a smaller version of her own richly canopied bed build for him next to her bed. He was treated to 15 course meals on silver and porcelain service consisting of delicious morsels of fish from every part of the Mediterranean. On occasion, Voltaire would visit his beloved patron, the Marquise, at which times he would read from the last European best seller while Madame gently stroked under Le Gris' soft chin.
One of Madame's other visitors was Comte Louis d'Artingac. Madame Pompadour called him Louis the Crumpet as he was famously addicted to the English pastry imported from abroad at great cost to to his crumbling, nearly bankrupt fiefdom.
Comte Louis was too poor and too far down the nobility to ever be invited to Versailles but that didn't stop him for lording it over every one a notch below his own perilous station in life. And he was insanely jealous over the attention that Kibble Kat received from Madame, a state of mind you could pretty much translate into pure hatred. Whenever Madame would turn her back, the Comte would scowl and made horrible faces at Kibble Kat, drawing the blade of a mock knife across his neck to symbolize his precise feelings at the moment.
But our her, the brave and mildly vindictive Kibble Kat, would never let some puffed up cartoon character like Louis the Crumpet come out unscathed from a contest of wills. There came a day when Kibble Kat found himself in the Comte's bed chambers. And what did he find on the Comte's dresser but the that hideous noble's very own wig. And what did Kibble Kat do to that slightly moth eaten hairpiece? Brave readers, we will leave it to your imagination. But, please bear in mind, whatever it was, well, it wasn't pretty.
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