reational, or at least a social, rather than a tuitional house;
which fact had, I really believe, weighed favourably with our parents,
when, bereft of M. Lerambert, they asked themselves, with their
considerable practice, how next to bestow us. Our father, like so many
free spirits of that time in New York and Boston, had been much
interested in the writings of Charles Fourier and in his scheme of the
"phalanstery" as the solution of human troubles, and it comes to me that
he must have met or in other words heard of M. Fezandie as an active and
sympathetic ex-Fourierist (I think there were only ex-Fourierists by
that time,) who was embarking, not far from us, on an experiment if not
absolutely phalansteric at least inspired, or at any rate enriched, by a
bold idealism. I like to think of the Institution as all but
phalansteric--it so corrects any fear that such places might be dreary.
I recall this one as positively gay--bristling and bustling and
resonant, untouched by the strenuous note, for instance, of Hawthorne's
co-operative Blithedale. I like to think that, in its then still almost
suburban, its pleasantly heterogeneous quarter, now oppressively
uniform, it was close to where Balzac had ended his life, though I
question its identity--as for a while I tried not to--with the scene
itself of the great man's catastrophe. Round its high-walled garden at
all events he would have come and gone--a throb of inference that had
for some years indeed to be postponed for me; though an association
displacing to-day, over the whole spot, every other interest. I in any
case can't pretend not to have been most appealed to by that especial
phase of our education from which the pedagogic process as commonly
understood was most fantastically absent. It excelled in this respect,
the Fezandie phase, even others exceptionally appointed, heaven knows,
for the supremacy; and yet its glory is that it was no poor blank, but
that it fairly creaked and groaned, heatedly overflowed, with its
wealth. We were _externes_, the three of us, but we remained in general
to luncheon; coming home then, late in the afternoon, with an almost
sore experience of multiplicity and vivacity of contact. For the beauty
of it all was that the Institution was, speaking technically, not more a
_pensionnat_, with prevailingly English and American pupils, than a
_pension_, with mature beneficiaries of both sexes, and that our two
categories were shaken up together to