ok at a figure there, something like a
fireman carved in marble ('Themistocles,' the statuary calls it), try to
walk like the Commandant's statue, and you will never be 'improper.' It
was through strict observance of the great law of the _im_proper that
Godefroid's happiness became complete. There is the story:

"Beaudenord had a tiger, not a 'groom,' as they write that know nothing
of society. The tiger, a diminutive Irish page called Paddy, Toby,
Joby (which you please), was three feet in height by twenty inches
in breadth, a weasel-faced infant, with nerves of steel tempered in
fire-water, and agile as a squirrel. He drove a landau with a skill
never yet at fault in London or Paris. He had a lizard's eye, as sharp
as my own, and he could mount a horse like the elder Franconi. With
the rosy cheeks and yellow hair of one of Rubens' Madonnas he was
double-faced as a prince, and as knowing as an old attorney; in short,
at the age of ten he was nothing more nor less than a blossom of
depravity, gambling and swearing, partial to jam and punch, pert as a
_feuilleton_, impudent and light-fingered as any Paris street-arab. He
had been a source of honor and profit to a well-known English lord,
for whom he had already won seven hundred thousand francs on the
race-course. The aforesaid nobleman set no small store on Toby. His
tiger was a curiosity, the very smallest tiger in town. Perched aloft on
the back of a thoroughbred, Joby looked like a hawk. Yet--the great man
dismissed him. Not for greediness, not for dishonesty, nor murder, nor
rudeness to my lady, nor for cutting holes in my lady's own woman's
pockets, nor because he had been 'got at' by some of his master's rivals
on the turf, nor for playing games of a Sunday, nor for bad behavior of
any sort or description. Toby might have done all these things, he might
even have spoken to milord before milord spoke to him, and his noble
master might, perhaps, have pardoned that breach of the law domestic.
Milord would have put up with a good deal from Toby; he was very fond
of him. Toby could drive a tandem dog-cart, riding on the wheeler,
postilion fashion; his legs did not reach the shafts, he looked in fact
very much like one of the cherub heads circling about the Eternal Father
in old Italian pictures. But an English journalist wrote a delicious
description of the little angel, in the course of which he said that
Paddy was quite too pretty for a tiger; in fact, he offered to b