Colette published La Chatte in 1933, a short novel in which a young husband finds himself more emotionally entangled with his Chartreux cat than with his new wife. The line about ordinary cats is not the sentimental one-liner it looks like on a mug. It is closer to a warning.

Colette spent her life refusing to see cats as decorative. She treated them as full characters with contradictions, moods, and agendas, sometimes unkind ones. When she says no cat is ordinary, she means each one is a specific, irreducible animal with a private interior life that does not answer to the category "cat." The generic label is a kind of editorial laziness, and Colette, who was a working editor before she was a novelist, recognized laziness on sight.

We do the same thing to people we have not met yet, and to colleagues we have met too many times. We file them under a type and stop paying attention. Cats punish this within ten minutes. Every cat arrives as a specific individual with a non-negotiable list of preferences about laps, doorways, and the correct tone of voice for 7 AM. Pay close attention and the generic dissolves. That, quietly, was always the point.