Stéphanie de Saint Simon, Yto & Kiking
ph. Amedeo Abello
Stephanie grew up on her grandparents' farm in the 1970s. It was home to all sorts of exotic animals, even a lion. Now Stephanie owns an Indian restaurant in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and has two beautiful Maicoons.
I named my first son Leo, my second son is called Joseph, his zodiac sign is Leo ascending. My third son, Balthazar, is a Gemini with lion ascendant. My cat, who is my fourth son, is a Korean lion cub. All the male descendants see these alliances. My sister's son is called Ariel and Ariel means the lion of God.
My grandparents lived about forty kilometres from Paris, we resided at this house. People used to bring their cats to this farm to be looked after for the summer. We took in all sorts of animals... even people who were lost! The home was an open house, a refuge. There were horses, my mother had a goat, we took sheep to keep the goat company.
My father worked in Paris. He had a business in the 7th arrondissement.
One of my father's clients, who was a photographer, had a baby lion, which he photographed in the arms of people passing in the streets of Paris. It was the 70s and it was fashionable...
Not knowing what to do with the lion, my father offered to keep it until he could find a solution. There were lots of animals in the yard of our house, we had enough room for the lion, and my grandfather loved animals. He took the lion to the vet to be checked out and to find out what he should do with it. It turned out that the lion had been treated by a vet at the time the photographer was taking care of him and that he had undergone a surgical operation followed by complications; the lion also had a Bone decalcification problem, so the vet thought that he might not live very long..
And then my grandfather, who had become very attached to the lion, chose to keep him to look after him! That's how we ended up with a lion at home.
It was truly my grandfather's lion, they had a thing together. In the morning the lion would call my grandfather until he came. And then all was fine. He needed him. They were in complete harmony.
At the beginning, the lion was quite small, like a big cat, and he stayed in bed with my grandparents. Then later, because it's a rather large animal, it started to be the size of a dog, and he had to sleep downstairs with the other dogs. It took a lot of training to get him to sleep downstairs after he had been sleeping in the bed since he was a little baby.
We didn't even realise it: as it was a farm, there were all sorts of animals, we had kept an ocelot, a collection of rare pheasants that were so cute. So there was also a lion.
The older girls in my school's senior year would come home to see him, we were his mascots. It was fun. People pinched their noses at the smell because it was a lion! However, he wasn't a circus animal at all and he didn't really like being with other people, he only liked the people in his house.
There was only one accident, not his fault, but mine. My grandparents had a small van, a Volkswagen combi. My sister and I were seated in the back and the lion sat in the middle. My grandfather hit the brakes and I fell with my seat on the lion. My grandmother was petting him and he bit her hand, which was punctured by the lions teeth. However, it did not stop her from continuing her knitting! The lion lived until he was 4 or 5 years old. It was very sad to lose such an important, impressive animal, who also really was a member of the family. But what was maybe even more sad was the fact that he was there. He ended up being disabled in his lower back. So, my grandfather had built a sort of wheelchair for him.
In my opinion, it's the consequences of doing anything with wild animals and it should never have happened. But it's true that during the 70s, we were much less aware of that. And again: nowadays it is absolutely ridiculous how many people you can see on Instagram with wild animals in their homes...
We always tried to take animals that were already in kennels, or to take animals in that were given to us. My grandparents at the time were Dutch horticulturists, they grew flowers. So there was room to store the flowers, to dry them, etc. It was a bit like the wildlife and the animals. It was a bit like flora and fauna, you could say.
My cat's name is Lucknow, which is the name of a city in India. We actually took a female Maine Coon and she had babies. At the time I was working a lot in India and I had planned to be back when she was supposed to give birth, but she gave birth a week early. She had seven kittens. Which is a lot. She had never had babies before and didn't understand what was happening to her!
Just after the birth, she would take her babies from place to place, always leaving one behind. It was a nightmare: only two kittens survived. And I was not there, whereas I was used to taking care of baby animals. When I got home, I watched over them like milk on fire. I woke up every two hours to see how they were doing. To check that she was giving them the milk and so on. I never left them out of my sight. We had put a lot of carpets in the room, so it became the cats' room. My husband came home one evening and went to see the kittens and then came back half an hour later, looking very unwell. He said to me "I've run over one of the babies". I was in a state. I don't think I've ever screamed like that in my whole life. The vet came to the house, and I called a friend, who has one foot here on earth, and one foot in the afterlife. I told him to do something for us because I wouldn't let this baby die. He said, "I'll take care of it.” I watched over them all night, and the kitten survived. After that, he never had any problems anymore. So I named him the Lucknow: I was so lucky!
We communicate quite a bit: if I talk to the cat, the cat answers. There's a kind of conversation.
The cat is a transitional element of total affection. You can completely merge with a cat, as you can with a baby. As I can't do it with my children anymore, who have grown up, they say I prefer cats!
The cat shows us how to take life by putting pleasure above all else: it is a master.
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