Matagot

The Matagot, also spelled Matagò or Mandagot in regional dialects, is a treasure-bringing feline familiar attested across the langue d'oc territory of southern France and adjoining Catalonia. The principal nineteenth-century source is the Provençal lexicographer Frédéric Mistral, whose two-volume Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige: dictionnaire provençal-français (Aix-en-Provence: Veuve Remondet-Aubin, 1878–1886) defines the word with several example phrases drawn from the Vaucluse, the Bouches-du-Rhône, and the southern Cévennes. The lexicon Mistral compiled was the principal scholarly resource of the Félibrige literary revival movement of which he was the founding figure and the 1904 Nobel laureate in literature. The legend prescribes a specific ritual. A would-be owner must capture a Matagot, which is typically a black cat with golden eyes, by inviting it home on a Friday evening; once installed, the cat must be served the first and choicest morsel from every meal before the human eats. In return one gold coin is found beneath its bowl at each dawn. Breach of the food etiquette causes the Matagot to abandon the household, often striking the offender with a wasting illness in retaliation. The folklorist Claude Seignolle catalogued additional regional variants from the Pyrenees and the Languedoc in his 1960 work Les Évangiles du Diable (Maisonneuve et Larose), drawing on field interviews conducted in the 1930s and 1940s. Seignolle distinguishes the Provençal Matagot from the Breton chat ferré of similar function and from the Catalan Gat negre tradition, noting that the three traditions share a transactional structure but differ in the specific ritual elements. The Matagot also seeded later French literary cats, including those of Anatole France and the regional novelist Henri Bosco, whose 1948 Le Mas Théotime invokes the figure explicitly. In modern English-language fantasy gaming the term has been borrowed by tabletop role-playing supplements from the 1980s onward, generally with looser ritual prescriptions than the folklore source supplies.