The Legend of Angeline's Cats

In the early 1990s, Maurice Serreau created stone cat statues to revive the legend. You can discover them on the facades of the houses in the village.

In the year of grace 1338, in a village in Gascony called La Romieu, famous for its beautiful collegiate church built 20 years ago, Vincent and Mariette lived happily.
He was a lumberjack and his wife often accompanied him into the forest to make fagots. They worked hard but with poultry, pigs, vegetables and fruits from the garden, the table was filled.
They had been married for three years when Mariette gave birth to a little girl whom they named Angéline.
Unfortunately Vincent was crushed by a tree that he was felling.
Mariette, inconsolable, allowed herself to waste away and two months later, she was found dead holding Angéline in her arms.
The little one was taken in by a neighbor and grew up with her children like their sister. Angéline showed a great attraction to cats. There were always two or three around her who, at night, slept in her bed. She often shared her bowl with them.
Angéline, over the years, became a strong young girl who helped her adoptive parents with the work in the fields, always accompanied by her cats.
In the year 1342 and the two following years, the winter was harsh and the spring and summer so rainy that it was not possible to sow the fields.
A great famine followed and despite the distribution, by Lord Arnaud d'Aux, of the collegiate church's reserves, the inhabitants of La Romieu soon had nothing to eat. They then thought of the cats, so numerous in the village, and made them into gibelottes.
Angeline's parents, knowing how much she loved her family, accepted that she keep a cat and a cat on the condition that she hide them well because the neighbors only wanted to wring their necks. Angeline therefore locked the two kitties in the attic during the day and let them out to hunt at night.
But the famine was getting worse and many villagers were dying. Angéline and her parents barely subsisted by harvesting roots in the woods and sometimes mushrooms, but it was a pittance. Very emaciated, they were nevertheless able to overcome this period and warmer times finally allowed them to harvest enough to live on.
But in La Romieu where the cats had disappeared, the rats had proliferated to the point of threatening the crops. Angéline, with infinite precautions, had been able to hide her cats who had had several litters.
There were about twenty clerks frolicking in the attic. Fortunately, the house was isolated. The villagers lamented the damage caused by the rats.
It was then that Angéline announced that she was going to release around twenty kittens that the residents could adopt.
The rats quickly disappeared and this is how Angeline saved La Romieu from further misfortune.
Legend also says that Angeline's face, over the years, looked more and more like a cat and that her ears transformed into cat ears.
It was while listening to a grandmother tell her grandchildren the legend of Angéline's cats that a sculptor from Orléans, Maurice Serreau, had the idea of ​​bringing it back to life by placing sculptures of cats around the square. .

Theme(s) : historical heritage, sculpture.