Abstract: This article reconsiders the controversial oeuvre of painter Balthus through the formative lens of childhood loss and interspecies intimacy. Tracing the profound emotional and artistic impact of the young artist’s bond with a stray cat named Mitsou—and the grief of her disappearance—it reinterprets the feline imagery in Balthus’s later paintings not simply as symbols of erotic tension, but as expressions of melancholic attachment and ontological kinship. Through Rainer Maria Rilke’s overlooked preface to Mitsou and reflections on the phenomenology of cats, the piece explores how art mediates the irreconcilable distance between species and selves. Ultimately, it suggests that Balthus’s cat imagery resists strict anthropocentric readings, opening instead a space for a multispecies metaphysics of affection, loss, and possession.