Timotina Musettini is the name of one of our cats, and she is identical to the one that the German painter Johann Wilhelm Schütze depicted in this work dating back to the 1860s. Unlike the polite little kitten in the painting, our Timotina is quite the rascal.
We named her after a humorous prose piece that Arthur Rimbaud wrote in 1870 when he was just fifteen: "Un cœur sous une soutane" where Miss Timotina is the object of desire - unattainable and unconfessed - of the seminarian Leonardo, a young man as shy and dreamy as he is awkward, naive, and simple.
"Perhaps one day, returning to that city, I will have the joy of confessing my dear Timotina... And then I have a sweet memory of her: for a year I haven't taken off the stockings she gave me... Those stockings, oh my God! I will keep them on my feet even in your holy paradise!..."
(A. Rimbaud, "A Heart Beneath a Cassock. Intimacies of a Seminarian," in Works, edited by Ivos Margoni, Milan 1964).
