In Paris, where the Napoleonic Civil Code came into effect in 1804 and where inequality cannot be laid at the door of British aristocrats and the queen of England, the top centile owned more than 70 percent of total wealth in 1913, even more than in Britain. The reality was so striking that it even found expression in an animated cartoon, The Aristocats, set in Paris in 1910. The size of the old lady’s fortune is not mentioned, but to judge by the splendor of her residence and by the zeal of her butler Edgar to get rid of Duchesse and her three kittens, it must have been considerable.
