In her extensive research on classic fairy tales, undertaken between 1976 and 1978, Rego highlighted the French writer Madame d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) whom she considered to be ‘the greatest storyteller of her time’, as well as being ‘beautiful and having led a strange life’. In 1993, at the suggestion of writer and essayist Marina Warner, Rego returned to Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories and created a set of illustrations for the short story, The White Cat. These illustrations were published in 1999, together with the original text, in the Coleção Belém Artists’ Books.

The White Cat is a fantastically complex tale of seduction and transformation, entrapment and (violent) release, whose themes Madame d’Aulnoy employed with various degrees of subtlety to comment on the issues faced by aristocratic women of her time. Rego’s work portrays the story’s prince, who has fallen deep into a slumber, perhaps entranced, in the White Cat’s magnificent palace. In Madame d’Aulnoy’s tale, while the Prince cannot understand why the White Cat has human gestures and can speak, he falls in love with her. Eventually, it comes to light that she is in fact a princess, imprisoned inside the body of a cat at the hands of a fairy. Following instructions, the prince cuts off the cat’s head and tail, thereby releasing the princess whom he then marries.