Karl Lagerfeld stole his famously pampered cat, Choupette, and was not ashamed to say so.
“Choupette belonged to a friend of mine who asked if my maid could take care of her for two weeks when he was away,” Mr. Lagerfeld, the designer who died in Paris on Tuesday, told The Cut in 2015.
“When he came back, he was told that Choupette would not return to him,” Mr. Lagerfeld said. “He got another cat who became fat, and Choupette became the most famous cat in the world, and the richest.”
Fans of Choupette, and there are many, need not worry: Mr. Lagerfeld claimed to have taken measures to provide for her after his death. In an interview last year, the late designer said that Choupette, a Birman cat, would inherit some of his fortune.
“Among others, yes,” he told the fashion magazine Numéro last April. “Don’t worry, there is enough for everyone.” The exact value of his estate is not known, but most estimates are in the many millions.
In life, Mr. Lagerfeld took great care of Choupette. The cat would join him at the table for lunch and dinner. (She didn’t like eating on the floor, he said.) At meals, she would choose among three dishes made by the luxury brand Goyard: one for water, another with a croquette and a third bearing pâté, he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2012.
Choupette was the center of Mr. Lagerfeld’s world, but he was not alone in caring for her. Two maids tended to her, lavishing Choupette with attention, grooming her and documenting all of their interactions in a diary for Mr. Lagerfeld. An Instagram account dedicated to her has more than 215,000 followers.
“When I am not there, the maids take down, in little books, everything she did, from what she ate, to how she behaved, if she was tired, and if she wasn’t sleeping,” he told Women’s Wear Daily in an interview published in June 2012. “In the nine months, we already have almost 600 pages.”
Pampered though she was, Choupette reportedly earned her keep. Her likeness inspired some of Mr. Lagerfeld’s products and, in 2014, she earned 3 million euros from work on two projects. (“One was for cars in Germany and the other was for a Japanese beauty product,” the designer told The Cut.)
Despite her luxurious lifestyle, Choupette retained a taste for the simpler feline pleasures.
“She likes strange toys, toys that aren’t supposed to be toys,” Mr. Lagerfeld told Harper’s Bazaar. “She plays with pieces of wood, pieces of paper, shopping bags. She loves shopping bags.”
If it turns out that Mr. Lagerfeld left Choupette a substantial inheritance, she will be far from alone: There have been plenty of lucky pets left with eye-popping sums after the deaths of their owners.
The billionaire Leona Helmsley and Trouble, her Maltese, in 2003.CreditJennifer Graylock/Associated Press
When the billionaire real estate and hotel tycoon Leona Helmsley died in 2007, she left $12 million for her Maltese, Trouble. (After Ms. Helmsley’s death, Trouble was slowly weaned of her diet of hand-fed crab cakes, cream cheese and steamed vegetables with chicken to caviar from a can.)
In 1991, Carlotta Liebenstein, a German countess, left her $80 million estate to her dog Gunther. And, on her death nearly a century ago, Ella Wendel, a real estate heiress, reportedly left her $100 million estate to Tobey, her French poodle.
