paving-stone at the head of one of his friends,
a gardener by trade, under the pretext of
brushing off a troublesome fly. He believes,
however, the story to be apocryphal, and
that the bear is not only incapable of
such a piece of left-handedness; but that
he ought, on the contrary, to be considered
as one of the most dexterous beasts in
the existing creation. Awkwardness and
ferocity are two accusations made against
the bear, which are one just as good as the
other. The bear has also been selected as the
emblem of misanthropy, taciturnity, moroseness,
unsociability. He is nothing of the kind.

The bear is the emblem of Savagery, or
wild life, as the elephant is the emblem of
Edenism, or the period in the life of our
planet which corresponds to the first phase of
human life. His ruling passion is the love of
independence and the woods. The whole
history of the animal is comprised in that
one sentence.

It is well known that the savage is the
most hearty enemy of all unpleasant labour;
for which M. Toussenel does not blame him.
A savage would refuse all the refinements of
luxurious civilisation, at the price of an hour's
work at the loom or the plough. The case is
exactly the same with the bear. The charms of
a masked ball have never been able to seduce
him; and he professes the most sovereign
contempt for the majority of civilised fêtes. The
only idea which the savage has of happiness,
is a complete and constant enjoyment of
the seven natural rights of hunting, fishing,
gathering, pasturage, and so on. The same
thing holds with regard to the bear, who
has no notion of supreme happiness,
beyond the exercise of the two natural rights
of helping himself, and of freedom from
care. Not that the bear is utterly insensible
to the pleasures of the hunter's and the
fisher's art. The white bear, for instance,
would be very much put out, if he were
deprived of the latter privilege. I (we are
still quoting the bear's apologist) only
mean to say that a vegetable diet is more
suitable than any other to the bear's
temperament, fond as he is, above everything,
of strawberries and indolence. The bear
does not shut his eyes to the fact that the
shape of his person is better adapted to
climb a tree than to hunt down a deer, and
he pursues a line of conduct in conformity
with the aptitudes of his nature. His
frugivorous appetite being easily satisfied, he
profits by this facility of living in good style,
to amass, during the autumn, a large provision
of that hair-adorning grease, with which
the apothecaries of the Rue Vivienne
compose the precious cosmetic known to Parisian
fashionables under the title of Lion's pomade!
Prodigies of chemistry! All to persuade bald
people that the king of animals entirely
owes his thick and splendid mane to the
daily use of the aforesaid cosmetic.

It is known that Brother Bruin, when once
provided with his due store of stoutness,
retires into a den, where he passes the two
worst months of the year in sleep. But
fabulists and historians may talk for ever,
before they will persuade me that an animal
with such a character and disposition can
possibly be the enemy of man. The animal
which sleeps during the season of want and
crime, and which prefers honey, sorbs, and
other wild berries, to a quarter of kid, will
never pass for an ogre thirsting after blood.
The bear is a savage animal, M. Toussenel is
willing to confess, but he is assuredly one of
the most inoffensive carnivores that can be
met with—that is to say the civilised bear,
the French or Russian bear, the bear of the
Pyrenees or the Alps; but the grey bear of
the prairies of North America, and the white
bear of the Polar regions, devour whatever
they light upon, when they are pressed by
hunger.

In accordance with his being the emblem,
of the savage, the bear, of all the great
flesheaters, is the one who ought to suffer most
from the loss of his liberty. And such is the
fact; for, of all captives, the bear is the most
difficult to keep imprisoned. He is tamed,
but without ever abdicating either his
personality or his rights. He has been beheld
exercising the trade of a juggler to gain a
livelihood; but his master knows not what
amount of tribulation and remorse the
consciousness of his degradation costs him,
and how much philosophy he is obliged to
make use of, to gnaw in silence the bridle
of his servitude. More than one bear, after
having broken his chain, has been known to
preface the exercise of his re-conquered
liberty, by murdering his leader and all his
family. In the history of popular vengeances,
exist facts which were not without analogy
to these revolts of the bears.

When the captive bear is not occupied in
eating or drinking, he is meditating an
evasion. The whole force of his imagination is
directed towards that one single object, His
perpetual agitation betrays the torments
which consume his whole being. That head,
whose monotonous and regular movement
backwards and forwards fatigues your eyes,
is the pendulum of a fixed idea, which is
incessantly courted by the lover of liberty.
If the Pyrenean and the Russian bear does
not always sink under the wounds of sorrow,
if he does not die suddenly of a fit of shame,
when exposed in the public market-place,
the reason is that the love of liberty is
indestructible in his heart, and that hope
never deserts him. But the icy bear, which
cannot, like his congeners, snuff the solid
earth and the breezes of his native land, dies
with us, at the end of a few months, of
nostalgia and lukewarm water.

Conquered, persecuted, shelterless, without
profession, wandering from rock to rock, the
bear, like Mithridates, has been from the
first obliged to accustom himself to eat all