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 _dictées_ 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 _liberté_, the poverty of which, our deplorable "libbeté," 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 in an age so candidly unconscious of them is to feel how much history we have seen unrolled. There were times when he but paced up and down and round the long table--I see him as never seated, but always on the move, a weary Wandering Jew of the _classe_; but in particular I hear him recite to us the combat with the Moors from Le Cid and show us how Talma, describing it, seemed to crouch down on his haunches in order to spring up again terrifically to the height of "Nous nous levons alors!" which M. Bonnefons rendered as if on the carpet there fifty men at least had leaped to their feet. But he threw off these broken lights with a quick relapse to indifference; he didn't like the Anglo-Saxon--of the children of Albion at least his view was low; on his American specimens he had, I observed, more mercy; and this imperfection of sympathy (the question of Waterloo apart) rested, it was impossible not to feel, on his so resenting the dishonour suffered at our hands by his beautiful tongue, to which, as the great field of elocution, he was patriotically devoted. I think he fairly loathed our closed English vowels and confused consonants, our destitution of sounds that he recognised as sounds; though why in this connection he put up best with our own compatriots, embroiled at that time often in even stranger vocables than now, is more than I can say. I think that would be explained perhaps by his feeling in them as an old equalitarian certain accessibilities _quand même_. Besides, we of the younger persuasion at least must have done his ear less violence than those earnest ladies from beyond the sea and than those young Englishmen qualifying for examinations and careers who flocked with us both to the plausibly spread and the severely disgarnished table, and on whose part I seem to see it again an effort of anguish to "pick up" the happy idiom that we had unconsciously acquired. French, in the fine old formula of those days, so much diffused, "was the language of the family"; but I think it must have appeared to these students in general a family of which the youngest members were but scantly kept in their place. We piped with a greater facility and to a richer meed of recognition; which sounds as if we might have become, in these strange collocations, fairly offensive little prigs. That was none the less not the case, for there were, oddly enough, a few French boys as well, to whom on the lingual or the "family" ground, we felt ourselves feebly relative, and in comparison with whom, for that matter, or with one of whom, I remember an occasion of my having to sink to insignificance. There was at the Institution little of a staff--besides waiters and bonnes; but it embraced, such as it was, M. Mesnard as well as M. Bonnefons--M. Mesnard of the new generation, instructor in whatever it might be, among the arts, that didn't consist of our rolling our r's, and with them, to help us out, more or less our eyes. It is significant that this elegant branch is now quite vague to me; and I recall M. Mesnard, in fine, as no less modern and cheap than M. Bonnefons was rare and unappraiseable.