These great colleges, which were good enough for the sons of Louis Philippe, were not thought good enough for me by my dear mother, who was Irish, and whose only brother had been at Eton, and was now captain in an English cavalry regiment—so she had aristocratic notions. It used to be rather an Irish failing in those days.
My father, James Maurice, also English (and a little Scotch), and by no means an aristocrat, was junior partner in the great firm of Vougeot‑Conti et Cie., wine merchants, Dijon. And at Dijon I had spent much of my childhood, and been to a day school there, and led a very happy life indeed.
Then I was sent to Brossard's school, in the Avenue de St.‑Cloud, Paris, where I was again very happy, and fond of (nearly) everybody, from the splendid head master and his handsome son, Monsieur Mérovée, down to Antoine and Francisque, the men‑servants, and Père Jaurion, the concierge, and his wife, who sold croquets and pains d'épices and "blom‑boudingues," and sucre‑d'orge and nougat and pâte de guimauve; also pralines, dragées, and gray sandy cakes of chocolate a penny apiece; and gave one unlimited credit; and never dunned one, unless bribed to do so by parents, so as to impress on us small boys a proper horror of debt.
Whatever principles I have held through life on this important subject I set down to a private interview my mother had with le père et la mère Jaurion, to whom I had run in debt five francs during the horrible winter of '47‑8. They made my life a hideous burden to me for a whole summer term, and I have never owed any one a penny since.
The Institution consisted of four separate buildings, or "corps de logis."
In the middle, dominating the situation, was a Greco‑Roman pavilion, with a handsome Doric portico elevated ten or twelve feet above the ground, on a large, handsome terrace paved with asphalt and shaded by horse‑chestnut trees. Under this noble esplanade, and ventilating themselves into it, were the kitchen and offices and pantry, and also the refectory—a long room, furnished with two parallel tables, covered at the top by a greenish oil‑cloth spotted all over with small black disks; and alongside of these tables were wooden forms for the boys to sit together at meat—"la table des grands," "la table des petits," each big enough for thirty boys and three or four masters. M. Brossard and his family breakfasted and dined apart, in their own private dining‑room, close by.
In this big refectory, three times daily, at 7.30 in the morning, at noon, and at 6 P.M., boys and masters took their quotidian sustenance quite informally, without any laying of cloths or saying of grace either before or after; one ate there to live—one did not live merely to eat, at the Pension Brossard.
Breakfast consisted of a thick soup, rich in dark‑hued garden produce, and a large hunk of bread—except on Thursdays, when a pat of butter was served out to each boy instead of that Spartan broth—that "brouet noir des Lacédémoniens," as we called it.
Everybody who has lived in France knows how good French butter can often be—and French bread. We triturated each our pat with rock‑salt and made a round ball of it, and dug a hole in our hunk to put it in, and ate it in the play‑ground with clasp‑knives, making it last as long as we could.
This, and the half‑holiday in the afternoon, made Thursday a day to be marked with a white stone. When you are up at five in summer, at half past five in the winter, and have had an hour and a half or two hours' preparation before your first meal at 7.30, French bread‑and‑butter is not a bad thing to break your fast with.