Something was making a racket among the old teddy bears. I had placed about five of the stuffed animals in a black garbage bag, after having removed about a dozen from another cardboard box that held them and a crawling spider.
The box was under a table in a side room of the auction house, where cold from the cement floors seeped through shoes and jackets on a day that was warm outside. Crawly spiders and minute carcasses of small bugs are common in some box lots of long-stored items. I was at an auction house once when a staffer warned me to be careful around some old books. Bugs, he said.
I saw the box of teddy bears when I first walked into the room. I jostled a few of the bears near the top, saw nothing that interested me, and headed for the tables. Later, as I stood waiting for the auctioneer to come to items I actually wanted, I dug deeper into the box.
That’s when I saw the small spider, crawling frantically to find cover, and two teddy bears – their cloth bodies devoid of fur, one with a button in its ear. Vintage Steiff, I thought, and kept it to myself.
Then I knew I wanted the box of bears, and I got them – putting them into another box that I knew had no spiders.
I started hearing the noise after I tranferred them into two garbage bags for safe storage. Every time I moved one of the bags, the clattering erupted. Finally, I found the source, a toy I had subsequently placed in the bag with them: A white cat with a pink nose and glass eyes. With the slightest touch, its right arm moved up and down simultaneously with its head. Handling it caused fur to fly; the cat was shedding as if it were real.
There was no maker’s mark on it, only a metal key with the initials R&D. The cat stood on a wooden board with a prong protruding from the base and the word “France” stamped on the bottom.
The animal’s movement indicated that it may have been beating a drum, but the drum and the stick were missing. A remnant of a small stick of wood was in its hand, the rest having broken off.
I was curious about who made the cat and what was missing from its display. So I Googled.
It was an automaton clockwork cat, a wind-up toy made by a French company named Roullet and Decamps, apparently around the end of the 19th century. The clockwork mechanism inside the cat’s body accounted for its movement and the sound I kept hearing. (Remember the writing automaton in the 2011 movie “Hugo,” about silent filmmaker Georges Melies. It was cool.)
Roullet and Decamps was said to be one of the most famous of French automaton makers, surviving for nearly 130 years (it closed in 1995).
It was founded by Jean Roullet who opened his first workshop in 1866, producing tools and parts for companies. One day a customer showed him a gardener pushing a wheelbarrow toy that he wanted to market. The customer had already created the mechanism, and Roullet went about mass-producing the toy. The two became partners but parted a few years later.
Roullet won a bronze medal at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair for his peacock with spreading tail feathers, a hen that laid eggs and several other toys.
The company got its name after Roullet’s daughter married Jean Ernest Decamps, the foreman in her father’s shop. The two men formed Roullet and Decamps in the late 1880s.
Roullet and Decamps continued to produce automaton and wind-up toys, its workers an array of dressmakers, sculptors, machinists and clock makers. At the turn of the 20th century, the company began making mechanical window displays for commercial customers such as department stores.
During the 1920s, it produced a life-size black jazz band for a store window. Here’s the band playing in a YouTube video from a display at the Souillac museum in France.
Most of the store-window displays did not survive. But many of the mechanical dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys and other animals apparently did, along with the tricks they were built to do. Some of the rare ones include the peacock and a giraffe that moves its head and neck.
The museum in Souillac has a collection of the company’s automatons and electrically operated displays, along with its manufacturing tools, molds, parts and machinery. A museum in Falaise, France, has some of its re-created displays.
When I went searching for my cat on the web, I found lots of Roullet and Decamps’ automatons. Several of its animals (in complete form) were sold on eBay for prices reaching up to $700. An automaton of “Little Tich,” the stage name for English comedian Henry Relph during the early 1900s, sold for $94,000 at auction in 2007.
I came across a Puss ‘n Boots whose mouth opens and closes, a cat that irons (with its own ironing board), a cat that flicks its tail and meows as it walks (or rolls on wheels), a knitting cat, a coffee-grinding cat, a barking dog, a pouncing lion, a bear playing a violin, a rabbit playing drums and mechanical walking dolls.
But I could not find a Roullet and Decamps cat that matched the one I bought – until I got a little help. Here’s what my cat should look like:
