Saturday, 25 September 2010

Writers’ unusual pets

Do you know which writers had the following unusual pets:-

1. A lobster which he took for a walk each evening around the streets of Paris using a ribbon as a lead.
2. A pet donkey with which he travelled.
3. A scorpion which he kept on his desk.
4. A pet ewe about which he wrote poems
5. A bat which he kept in a cage on his writing desk.
6. A pet bear, three monkeys, a parrot and a lot of other creatures.
7. A pet monkey which he took to sea with him.
8. A crane which followed him everywhere he went.
9. Llamas.
10. A zebra, a wombat, an opossum, a raccoon, an armadillo, and a host of other animals.
11. An anteater and a coatimundi.

1. Gerard de Nerval - who went n to hang himself with Marie Antoinette's garter!
2. Robert Louis Stevenson
3. Henrik Ibsen
4. Robert Burns
5. Charles Baudelaire
6. Lord Byron. Keeping the bear was a response to Cambridge Universitiy's rule forbidding the keeping of dogs!
7. Joseph Conrad
8. Anton Chekhov
9. Eugene O'Neill
10. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
11. Horacio Quiroga. After being abandoned by his second wife the Uruguayan writer turned the empty swimmng pool he had built for her into a a serpenatarium.


8 comments:

  1. 2nd try - I was trying to comment but got an error message.

    Right.

    Don't know any of them (the answers, not the authors) but I suppose the bat somehow matches Dante. Although it seems very cruel to keep a bat in a cage.

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  2. The great thing about setting questions is you don't have to guess the answers. Before reading about all these the only one I knew was Byron though Chekhov's crane rang a vague bell.

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  3. Well, was I right about Dante and the bat?

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  4. How interesting. At first, I thought the man who traveled with the donkey might have been Cervantes, but I truly had no clue about any of the others. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to get published -- there's nothing particularly eccentric about having a beagle for a pet!!
    Canadian Chickadee

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  5. I didn't know any of these. My literary history books must have been very dull.

    WV is "nesse". Did any author have the Loch Ness monster as his particular pet?

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  6. keeping anything in a cage is cruel

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  7. Most interesting! I did know this!

    I don't mind being a bit eccentric now and then...however, I think I'll just be content with my schnauzers.
    ;^)

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  8. I just knew the Conrad one. Ibsen's scorpion doesn't surprise me!

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