DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. A bunch of cats living in a museum basement are really lucky. A French philanthropist made them the beneficiaries for a small sum of money in his will. I mean, sure, philanthropists are known for giving money to museums but to museum cats? These are special cats, I guess. Fifty of them live in the basement of the Hermitage Museum in Russia. Cats have been living there since the 1700s, and they've long been deemed the guardians of the art galleries. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.