Young Henry James and the Institution Fezandié

Young Henry James and the Institution Fezandié By Pierre A. Walker, Western Michigan University and Alfred Habegger, University of Kansas Of the many different schools young Henry James was sent to, the one he represented as most unusual in his memoir of childhood, A Small Boy and Others, was a private academy in Paris known as the Institution Fezandié. Located on rue Balzac in a section of Paris dominated by the Champs-Elysées and the Arc de Triomphe, the school offered an educational program "loose and vague," with little discipline and no sense of a "pursuit of abstract knowledge" (AU 205). It was James's impression that the man who ran it, M. Fezandié, was an ex-Fourierist and that his conception of the school was inspired by "a bold idealism" (AU 206). The physical plant included a "big square villa" (AU 205) and a pleasant "high-walled garden" [AU 206). The students were primarily interested in improving their French; they were "prevailingly English and American" (AU 206) of both sexes—"earnest ladies from beyond the sea" and "young Englishmen qualifying for examinations" who struggled to master the "idiom" (AU 208). There were also, "oddly enough, a few French boys" (AU 208). Although many of the foreigners boarded at the school as at a pension, James and two of his brothers attended as externes—day students present for the morning and the midday luncheon only. One of these brothers was almost certainly Wilky, two years younger than James. Whether the other one was William, the firstborn, or Bob, the fourth and youngest brother, is uncertain. The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 107-20. © 1994, The Johns Hopkins University Press 108 The Henry James Review As was the case for the other schools James attended, he vividly remembered his instructors—the aged Bonnefons, who imposed a pure standard of French enunciation and elocution and moved in "a cloud of legend" (AU 207), and a younger man named Mesnard who struck the boy as comparatively "modern and cheap" (AU 209).1 Bonnefons was rumored to be "a superannuated actor" (AU 207), and young James was greatly impressed by his constant movement in the classroom, his sudden enthusiastic imitations of Talma, and his "quick relapse to indifference" (AU 208). James's vivid and touching evocation of this old teacher, "artistically conservative" and loyal as well to the glories of the Revolution , suggests that Bonnefons exerted a powerful attraction on the small boy's imagination (AU 207). The "old equalitarian" (AU 208) seemed to detest his English students (favoring the Americans), and James never forgot how he "almost terrorised...the barbarous races" for their wretched pronunciation and diction: "I remember deeply and privately enjoying some of his shades of scorn" (AU 210). Bonnefons may well have reinforced or even inspired James's great respect for "correct" enunciation, as evidenced by his respectful treatment of the old actress Madame Carré in The Tragic Muse, by his late essay "The Speech of American Women," and by his nagging corrections of his niece Peggy. It happens that there was only one person in the Paris city directories of the latter 1850s whose name is close to Bonnefons, and that was Georges Bonnefond, residing at Chaussée d'Antin, 45 bis (Annuaire et Almanack 105). This unknown man's vague but splendid term for his profession, "homme de lettres," is exactly what one would expect of the charmingly antiquated grandstander James described, though it is not enough to confirm that Bonnefond was in fact James's influential teacher.2 "He above all such a model for Daudet!" James exclaimed of Bonnefons or Bonnefond (A U 207). In this and many other ways, the chapter and a half devoted to the Institution Fezandié evoke James's desire to give the school a picturesque literary treatment—to represent it, in particular, in the manner of Alphonse Daudet, master of "the concrete and the palpable" (LC 256). In an earlier chapter of A Small Boy dealing with James's brief attendance at a private academy in New York, the Institution Vergnès, which was full of "small homesick Cubans and Mexicans," James had recalled Daudet's colorful account in Jack...