A city where it's a cats' and dogs life

WHEN ambassadors call at the foreign ministry on the Quai d'Orsay, they sit with a long-haired grey and white cat in the waiting room. Her name is Marianne - after the bare-breasted woman who symbolises the French Revolution - and she spends most of the day sleeping on the window ledge or leather sofas.

Marianne has been at the Quai longer than the receptionists or security guards can remember. She is one of the luckiest cats in Paris; the foreign minister's chef cooks for her each day.

The cats of Chaillot - the 1930s complex across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower - are slightly less pampered. The old ladies of the neighbourhood know their names: Diane, L'Ecaille, Tout-Noir and Hercule are just a few of the more than 20 feline denizens of the bushes along the esplanade. Their human neighbours supply a steady diet of, sardines, sausage, meat and cat food.

Hercule, he of the green eyes and white paws, is a film lover and haunts the Cinematheque de Chaillot.

Parisians are rude to one another, but they are mad about their animals. France is home to 16 million cats and dogs. A 1995 ministry of agriculture report counted goldfish, birds, rabbits, and other rodents, for a total of 42 million pets - the world record. A million puppies are born in France every year, compared to 750,000 babies, and profits from pet food are double those of baby food. French people spend £3.5 billion each year on their pets, and that figure grows 6 per cent annually. Movies about animals are box office hits.

A popular Sunday evening TV, programme, 30 Million Friends, covers every aspect of tooth and claw news. There are 40 animal clinics in Paris, some equipped with hi-tech scanners There are animal ambulances and canine taxis, kinesthesia centres for obese dogs and even animal matrimonial agencies.

The sociologist Francois Heran divides French society into dog lovers and cat lovers. Dog lovers tend to be "protectors of economic capital" such as shop keepers and policemen, Heran says. Cats, the symbol of freedom and independence, are favoured by intellectuals.

My concierge is a dog lover. Her collie Poney is locked up in her little loge all day and barks plaintively every time I walk by. I don't know my neighbours on the other side of the bedroom wall - they use a different staircase - but their pet cat likes to wander perilously along the sixth floor rains gutter, We can't read the tattoo in the grey cat's ear so we call him Chat-gris. He sits at the window when I am writing and insists on coming in for a saucer of milk and to sharpen his claws on our armchair and carpets.

Pets show up everywhere in France. The other day I watched a poodle and terrier cavorting in the departure lounge of Marseille Airport. A few hours later, I went to interview a lawyer in a very fashionable, very expensive law firm near the Arc de Triomphe. The interior was all mirrors, frescoes, chandeliers and wood panelling. Amid this splendour, a spaniel puppy bounded out to see me offering up the wet Gauloise packets he held in his muzzle.

In a country often strait-jacketed by formality, animals are perfect ice-breakers. The severe receptionist softened when I asked the dog's name - Max - and one of the highly-paid law partners walked out to tell me how "Mad Max" likes to frolic with the other partner's old Breton spaniel Vidocq, named after a 19th century criminal who became an excellent police chief when he got out of prison.

Alas, animal friendship has a price. An estimated 10 tonnes of dog excrement land on the sidewalks of Paris each year, and 600 people are, hospitalised, after slipping in it. The municipality owns 80 "pooper scoopers" which seem to smear the mess around as much as they remove it. These machines cost nearly £5 million a year to operate. I once dared suggest that Parisians - like New Yorkers - might be required to clean up after their dogs. No politician would dream of it, I was told; to anger the pet lobby would be political suicide.

"The more I see of men, the more I like my dog," the 17th century genius Blaise Pascal wrote. Or at least our newspaper says he wrote that. Some sociologists claim the French affection for animals is rooted in France's rural history.

Others, like the ethnologist Jean-Pierre Digard, believe it is a form of neurosis. This irrational love of animals, Digard says, "is based on an incapacity to have normal social relations with one's fellows, the warning sign of a grave crisis of civilisation."