“Let us resume.  Godefroid de Beaudenord was respected by his tradespeople, for they were paid with tolerable regularity.  The witty woman before quoted—­I cannot give her name, for she is still living, thanks to her want of heart——­”

“Who is this?”

“The Marquise d’Espard.  She said that a young man ought to live on an entresol; there should be no sign of domesticity about the place; no cook, no kitchen, an old manservant to wait upon him, and no pretence of permanence.  In her opinion, any other sort of establishment is bad form.  Godefroid de Beaudenord, faithful to this programme, lodged on an entresol on the Quai Malaquais; he had, however, been obliged to have this much in common with married couples, he had put a bedstead in his room, though for that matter it was so narrow that he seldom slept in it.  An Englishwoman might have visited his rooms and found nothing ‘improper’ there.  Finot, you have yet to learn the great law of the ‘Improper’ that rules Britain.  But, for the 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.”