Minou (France)

The cats and dogs on the French farm are not allowed into the house at all, yet on one of my earlier visits some 15 years ago, I found this rule flouted by a black and white cat — either a young adult or an old kitten, I couldn’t tell, as it was small in size and young in appearance.  I’ve never been good at telling the age of humans anyway, so it’s even harder with animals.  I see the soul, not the shell.

Soon, I could see why this cat was granted special dispensation: he had very winning ways.  He wasn’t just good-looking (it’s so unfair, isn’t it?!?), he was also very obliging: lying on his side, he’d allow le patron Serge or Colette to twirl him round and round on the spot, without the slightest protest or indignation, happily basking in the attention.  He was always handed bits of food from the dining table as he would beg most charmingly. 

Colette would coo “Minou, Minou, Minou!” to him whenever she saw him, so I assumed that was his name.  Then one day, I heard Jeanette call him “Mimi”.  Mimi?!?  I thought his name was Minou?  And Mimi for a tom??  Ah well, it’s a foreign language to me, so maybe Mimi is all right as a name for a boy in French.  Rather like Michel, which sounds just like Michelle to me.  The French do things differently anyway.

Some ten years later, we were invited round to the house of relatives of theirs, for a pre-Tour de France meal before going out to cheer them on as they whizzed through the village street.  This was a couple in their 60s, if not 70s.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard the wife address the husband as “Minou”.  I guess if Felix works as a name for both male cat and male human in English, why not Minou in French?  When I commented on it, she explained that Minou sort of meant “darling”. 

Ah, the penny then dropped: Mimi is an abbreviation of Minou, reduplicated.  

From that minute on, I started calling him Monsieur Minou, which amused them heaps (how these foreigners mangle their language in a way that would never occur to them), but it has stuck ever since, with everyone knowing him as Monsieur Minou. Lucky for him I didn’t choose to use the abbreviated version…

I have since looked it up in the dictionary.  Minou means pussycat in child language, and an informal term of affection “my sweetie”.

(Gers, S.W. France, 1990s)