Warned by Brisbane’s experience and much to his disappointment, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, when they were organising the comparatively successful socialist community of Brook Farm, at West Roxbury (Mass.), carefully kept off phalansterian lines.[79]
Thus by the time Juliette came to live in Paris the Phalansterian Movement had been tried and found wanting. Nevertheless it was not dead. Its spirit still breathed in the numerous co-operative experiments, which were being tried on every hand; and one of these, the famous foundry at Guise, run on something approaching phalansterian lines, met with considerable success, owing to the organising genius of the founder, the Fourierist Godin. It endured until shortly before the Great War.
Fourier’s disciples, when in 1858 Juliette first came into personal contact with them, had grouped themselves into what was called l’École Sociétaire, which numbered some four thousand adherents. The school had its headquarters in the Rue de Beaune, in a shop for the sale of Fourierist literature, kept by a certain Mlle. Aimé Beuque.
It was to this shop that Juliette, soon after the publication of Idées Anti-Proudhoniennes, was taken by her good friend Dr. Bonnard. She found Mlle. Beuque an odd creature. A quaint birth-marked, shrivelled-up little old maid, wearing a rough black serge gown, a big black poke bonnet tied with broad strings, she had invariably hanging over her arm, a capacious bag, half satchel, half basket. Aimé Beuque had known Fourier when he was a grocer at Lyons. Sitting at his feet she had imbibed his doctrine and become one of its most convincing advocates, winning for the new philosophy many a distinguished adherent. For in that poor little wizened unattractive body there burned a great soul passionately convinced that perfect harmony would one day evolve out of all our apparently hopeless social chaos.
This little woman so charmed Juliette that she came away from the Fourier shop feeling that in la chère petite vieille Beuque, she had made a life-long friend. And for many a year whenever she was downhearted, depressed by the domestic trials which were now thickening around her, Juliette’s due feet would not fail to cross the bridge to Mlle. Beuque’s shop, in search of that encouragement and consolation which the “adorable” little spinster never failed to give her.
One of the most delightful features of Paris literary society has ever been the habit of writers and readers to foregather for leisurely afternoon talk in some well-known book-shop—at Anatole France’s father’s, for example, on the Quai Voltaire; at his successor’s, Honoré Champion’s, on the Quai Malaquais, or at Charles Péguy’s at the office of “Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine,” in the Rue de la Sorbonne.
Mlle. Beuque, too, had her afternoons; le Jour des amis de notre vieille Beuque was an institution highly valued by Juliette and her Fourierist friends.
The great and shining light, le grand homme of Tante Beuque’s shop parlour, was the eminent writer on natural history, Alphonse Toussenel.
His name had been a household word for Juliette in her childhood. Out of Toussenel’s book L’Esprit des Bêtes, Dr. Lambert had told his little girl many a thrilling tale about the habits of insects. And when, in their walks, they came to an ant-hill, father and daughter would both lie down flat while the red republican parent showed the ants at their work, designating the fighters, the layers of eggs and so forth, and declaiming loudly against the laziness of the queen ant as against that of all other royalties.
Now that Juliette made the acquaintance of Toussenel in the flesh she found him no less delightful than in his books. Though in certain respects wildly extravagant and greatly given to paradox, in others he appeared abundantly gifted with common sense. Some of his theories were almost as curious as those of his master, Fourier. In his manner of life he was as eccentric as his devoted comrade, Mlle. Beuque. In appearance, however, he presented a striking contrast to his meagre little companion. For Toussenel was a fine figure of a man, an athlete, whose face was tanned by life in the open air, a sportsman in spite of his love for animals, and also a bitter anti-semite[80] in spite of his aspirations after social harmony. Toussenel’s attractive personality and eloquent talk brought into the Rue de Beaune book-shop an atmosphere of the most brilliant salon.