the liveliest effect. This had
been M. Fezandie's grand conception; a son of the south, bald and
slightly replete, with a delicate beard, a quick but anxious, rather
melancholy eye and a slim, graceful, juvenile wife, who multiplied
herself, though scarce knowing at moments, I think, where or how to
turn; I see him as a Daudet _meridional_, but of the sensitive, not the
sensual, type, as something of a rolling stone, rolling rather down
hill--he had enjoyed some arrested, possibly blighted, connection in
America--and as ready always again for some new application of faith and
funds. If fondly failing in the least to see why the particular
application in the Rue Balzac--the body of pensioners ranging from
infancy to hoary eld--shouldn't have been a bright success could have
made it one, it would have been a most original triumph.

I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure, a brave
little seeing of the world on the happy pretext of "lessons." We _had_
lessons from time to time, but had them in company with ladies and
gentlemen, young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family, who sat
at long boards of green cloth with us and with several of our
contemporaries, English and American boys, taking _dictees_ from the
head of the house himself or from the aged and most remarkable M.
Bonnefons, whom we believed to have been a superannuated actor (he above
all such a model for Daudet!) and who interrupted our abashed readings
aloud to him of the French classics older and newer by wondrous
reminiscences and even imitations of Talma. He moved among us in a cloud
of legend, the wigged and wrinkled, the impassioned, though I think alas
underfed, M. Bonnefons: it was our belief that he "went back," beyond
the first Empire, to the scenes of the Revolution--this perhaps partly
by reason, in the first place, of his scorn of our pronunciation, when
we met it, of the sovereign word _liberte_, the poverty of which, our
deplorable "libbete," without r's, he mimicked and derided, sounding the
right, the revolutionary form out splendidly, with thirty r's, the
prolonged beat of a drum. And then we believed him, if artistically
conservative, politically obnoxious to the powers that then were, though
knowing that those so marked had to walk, and even to breathe,
cautiously for fear of the _mouchards_ of the tyrant; we knew all about
mouchards and talked of them as we do to-day of aviators or
suffragettes--to remember which i