THE BEAR AS A HUMORIST AND A FRIEND. 191 
nus on this point. He has known a bear, amateur both in music 
and painting, who took great pleasure in figuring in the quadrilles 
of the Odeon, and who imitated most capitally, as he assures us, 
the manner of M. Odry, in that most comical piece, the Bear and 
the Pacha. 
The bear is no more an enemy of gayety than he is awkward or 
blood-thirsty. I have known bears whose excessive amiability was 
even troublesome. Perhaps even, after the cat and the monkey, 
the bear is the most humorous and gamesome of all quadrupeds ; 
like all men of wit, he loves leisure and dancing ; he is a loafer 
crammed full of humor and funny tricks. These are the different 
qualities which have given him his popularity among the gamins’^ 
of Paris, a race essentially of banterers and haters of work. 
Win the favor of a bear, you will find him full of consideration 
and delicate attentions toward you. 
His favorite exercises are wrestling and boxing, but if you take 
a game with him, he will never hug you harder than is necessary 
to simulate a serious contest ; if in his gambols he upsets you, 
he will take care to fall under you upon the ground, so as to serve 
you as a mattress and to soften your fall. Far from crushing your 
head, to rid you of a fly, he will remove your shirt from your 
body without scratching the epidermis. 
At night, if you are keeping watch on the deck of a vessel, he 
willingly offers you his warm fur as a pillow and shelter from the 
cold damp and catarrh. He will forbid himself the slightest mo- 
tion, so as not to disturb your sleep ; he will also protect you 
against all annoyance. A lieutenant of my acquaintance, who be- 
fore his twenty-fifth year had sailed over some thirty thousand 
leagues of ocean, and who has studied thoroughly, beasts of both 
hemispheres and of all latitudes, declares that he has had great 
occasion to congratulate himself on the society and on the friend- 
ship of the bear in his hyperborean wanderings. But he has re- 
marked that in order to maintain good terms with the bear, to 
preserve relations of affectionate cordiality with him, it is neces- 
sary to treat him on a footing of the most perfect equality. 
The bear never pardons, it appears, those airs of superiority 
which are taken with subalterns, still less an impolite gesture, the 
