Assette the French cat who survived 18 days without food or water

Cats proverbially have nine lives don't they?

Well a French moggy called Assette has certainly had a part in maintaining that superstition - and then some.

Her incredible story appears in Monday's edition of the regional daily Le Progrès and tells how she was locked inside a house for 18 days without food and water before being freed weak and skeletal, but alive.

Assette belongs to Violaine, the daughter of actor and director Michel Crespin, best known for his work with street theatre companies.

She (Assette) was spending the summer at Crespin's holiday home in the village or Château-Chalon in eastern France.

The director's neighbour was an elderly woman who had recently died and in early August her children emptied the house of its contents before putting it on the market for sale.

That is of course when Assette's period of involuntary captivity began, says the paper, because she managed to get herself locked inside what was now an abandoned house.

Crespin began to worry after not having seen Assette for several days and began looking for her. He put up posters and distributed leaflets describing the missing black cat with a distinctive broken tail, and he mobilised fellow villagers to help him in his search.

One neighbour suggested that perhaps the four-year-old moggy was locked inside the abandoned house, but a look through the windows and plenty of calling of her name yielded no response.

It was with a heavy heart that he had to inform his daughter that Assette had gone missing and was nowhere to be found.

Fast forward to September 5 and Violaine, who lives 70 kilometres away in the city of Besançon, was in Château-Chalon for its annual festival when she decided to collect some apples from the garden of the abandoned house.

Almost instinctively while there, she called out the name of her cat...only to be greeted by a miaowed response from within the house.

A quick call to the number on the "for sale" board posted outside the property, and after a couple of hours wait for someone to unlock the front door and out charged Assette, thin, hungry and thirsty but otherwise in fine fettle.

"We didn't know in what state we would find her," Crespin told the newspaper

"It's just incredible - 18 days with nothing to eat or drink."

And in a new leaflet he has distributed to fellow villagers he writes, "If you see Assette in the street, say hello to her. She deserves it."

Some consider black cats unlucky, others lucky. The author's (almost) black cat, Hiro. For photos of Assette, click here.