The house by the Zen Center marked a rising tide of good fortune for Bart, but even good love comes with bad.  Chaucer was still alive.  He had no use for antiquated theories of being a gentleman.  Bart sauntered one day into Chaucey’s room, then took it into her pretty head to jump onto Chaucey’s bed.  When I spoke to her later about it, she told me she never took Chaucer as a serious threat.  He was, even in senescence, a pretty boy.  Bart figured she could roll him.  Instead, once she was on the bed and began to move across Mr C’s line of sight, he hurled himself forward biting her hard on her flank.  I will never forget her anguished screams.  As Bart put it to me, Chaucer was a wolf in pansy’s clothing.  He had cleaned her clock before she knew what hit her.  After that, she kept her distance.  The pretty boy was a brute. Whatever the excellences of her new house, Bart learnt to keep a respectful distance from its ruler.   

Chaucer’s pretty-boy looks and academic demeanor often fooled people.  Chaucey liked to remind people that when you start life sleeping on a battered copy of The Canterbury Tales, the rabble without doors tends to underestimate you.  Again and again, Chaucer reminded staff and wannabe peers that once upon a time, everyone knew it was the nobility, not scheming peasants, that knew how to fight.  Somebody with fine clothes had enough money for fine weapons and lessons on how to use them.  Mr C yearned for the days when a gentlecat would treat his inferiors as he saw fit.  It consoled him that those halcyon days still existed in his own house.  Bart learnt that the hard way.  Chaucey was not going to let a saucy wench saunter across his path without consequences.  Let her lick her wounds and beware.  Being that I am not so grand a cat as Chaucey, I just could not think of Bart as a peasant.  In my book, she was at least a Haut Bourgeois, more likely a princess.  Chaucey laughed and laughed when I mentioned it, telling me, “Prole cats have no conception of quality. You all mistake zirconium for diamonds and think college profs have good jobs.”  He had a point about profs.  Aside from naïve coeds whose hormones distort their perceptions, who else imagines profs are somebodies?  The Kissingers, the Rices, and the Janet Yellens are freaks of nature.  You see even more reputation inflation when college students refer to grubby rock musicians as “artists.”