Of Note: Cats in Clara’s Correspondence

Of Note is an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye.

Clara Barton loved cats. Evidence of her affection for felines can be found throughout her papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, but especially in her correspondence with fellow Red Cross volunteer and cat fancier, Antoinette Margot. Margot’s letters to Barton are peppered with imagery related to their furry friends, and Margot also used kitten expressions to refer to their friendship.

A CAT-astrophe first brought the two women together. In July 1870, while Barton was traveling in Switzerland, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Barton was in Europe to recuperate from an illness brought on by overwork from her relief efforts during the American Civil War, but she could not resist offering her services in this new conflict. She volunteered with an organization that she had only recently discovered, the International Red Cross. Another Red Cross volunteer, Antoinette Margot, encountered Barton en route to the war front and joined her. The challenges they faced in their relief work? FUR-midable. They first focused on assisting civilians, particularly women, along the French-German border in Strasbourg, France, and then aided the destitute in Paris after the war and the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.

When she met the forty-nine-year-old Barton, Margot was twenty-seven and an accomplished artist. She was originally from Lyons, France, but had also lived in Switzerland. Margot sought independence from her parents and new PAW-sibilities for her life. While living in Paris, Margot occasionally visited the Louvre to find inspiration, but she maintained an interest in painting everyday subjects, including cats. Barton encouraged her artistic efforts, and Margot painted at least one of their Paris house cats. Barton wrote, “Miss Antoinette Margot is with us. She is one of the best lady artists of Lyons, or of Switzerland. She sits a little way from me at this moment painting one of the most delightful cats one ever saw and laughing till she cries to see him getting ready to spring at me. She can change his tone and temper at every touch of her brush; his eyes grow greener and greener….”

Margot felt deep respect and great affection for Barton, who she saw as a mentor and dear friend. When they were apart, Margot included pet names in her letters to Barton, referring to herself as “Kitty”, “Kity,” or “Pussy.”  She frequently used feline phrases such as “Little loving puss Antoinette” and “Your little Pussy for ever loving, Antoinette Kity Pussy” at the end of her letters to Barton. She also drew baskets in at least two of the letters, which is where, one supposes, their fur babies often slept or played.

In 1885, Barton and Margot again lived together in Washington, D.C. There, Margot painted a portrait of Barton’s beloved cat Tommy, who lived to be seventeen years old. Barton mentioned Tommy in an 1888 letter to her niece, asking her to procure some PURR-fect catnip for him. She wrote, “I can’t get time to hunt over the house for the little seeds we want to plant…. I want a pinch of caraway seed and 12 great sage roots and I want some catnip seed for Tommy. There is not a stalk of catnip anywhere about, and I can’t get any seed. Have you some in your catnip herb bag?”

Although Margot and Barton eventually parted ways, their love of cats lives on in the Clara Barton Papers. Margot settled in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and became well-known for her charitable work with the Catholic Church. Barton later moved FUR-ther out to Glen Echo, Maryland, where she led the American Red Cross, which she had founded in 1881.

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“They first focused on assisting civilians…” Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 160-171.

“Miss Antoinette Margot…” Clara Barton to Sarah (Sally) Vassall, September 17, 1871, quoted in Percy Harold Epler, The Life of Clara Barton (New York: MacMillan, 1915), 170, 174.

“I can’t get time to hunt over the house…” Clara Barton to Mary Stafford, May 8, 1888, quoted in Epler, The Life of Clara Barton, 260.