The scholarly cat Murr, imagining himself to be a genius poet and thinker, writes memoirs. By chance, fragments of the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler—the tormented artist resisting the world of dullness and philistinism—find their way into his manuscript. Two life-lines, the cat’s self-satisfied complacency and human idealism, are whimsically interwoven into a single picture of manners.