sake of the bond between
us--that bill for a thousand francs--I will just give you some idea of
it. I have been in England myself.--I will give him wit enough for a
couple of thousand," he added in an aside to Blondet.

"In England, Finot, you grow extremely intimate with a woman in the
course of an evening, at a ball or wherever it is; next day you meet
her in the street and look as though you knew her again--'improper.'--At
dinner you discover a delightful man beneath your left-hand neighbor's
dresscoat; a clever man; no high mightiness, no constraint, nothing
of an Englishman about him. In accordance with the tradition of
French breeding, so urbane, so gracious as they are, you address your
neighbor--'improper.'--At a ball you walk up to a pretty woman to ask
her to dance--'improper.' You wax enthusiastic, you argue, laugh,
and give yourself out, you fling yourself heart and soul into the
conversation, you give expression to your real feelings, you play
when you are at the card-table, chat while you chat, eat while you
eat--'improper! improper! improper!' Stendhal, one of the cleverest and
profoundest minds of the age, hit off the 'improper' excellently well
when he said that such-and-such a British peer did not dare to cross his
legs when he sat alone before his own hearth for fear of being improper.
An English gentlewoman, were she one of the rabid 'Saints'--that most
straitest sect of Protestants that would leave their whole family to
starve if the said family did anything 'improper'--may play the deuce's
own delight in her own bedroom, and need not be 'improper,' but she
would look on herself as lost if she received a visit from a man of her
acquaintance in the aforesaid room. Thanks to propriety, London and its
inhabitants will be found petrified some of these days."

"And to think that there are asses here in France that want to import
the solemn tomfoolery that the English keep up among themselves with
that admirable self-possession which you know!" added Blondet. "It is
enough to make any man shudder if he has seen the English at home, and
recollects the charming, gracious French manners. Sir Walter Scott was
afraid to paint women as they are for fear of being 'improper'; and at
the close of his life repented of the creation of the great character of
Effie in _The Heart of Midlothian_."

"Do you wish not to be 'improper' in England?" asked Bixiou, addressing
Finot.

"Well?"

"Go to the Tuileries and lo