1842
As late as three weeks before they left for Brussels, Charlotte and Emily had been making plans to transfer to a school in Lille, but by the middle of January they had changed their minds again and come to an agreement with the proprietors of a highly recommended pensionnat des demoiselles within the city of Brussels that was almost within their budget. Charlotte had done the groundwork, and it was the “simple earnest tone” of her letters, carefully inquiring about the costs and every aspect of the curriculum, that persuaded the owner, Madame Zoë Heger, to do what she could to encourage the prospective foreign students. “These are the daughters of an English pastor, of moderate means, anxious to learn with an ulterior view of instructing others,” her husband remembered them saying to each other. “Let us name a specific sum, within which all expenses shall be included.” Monsieur Heger proved a sensitive reader from the first.
So, on a cold February morning in 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë left Haworth with their father en route for Brussels, via London. They were accompanied by Mary Taylor and her brother Joe, old hands at the journey, whose experience helped the Brontës face some dizzying novelties: their first long-distance railway ride, their first journey by steamship, and not least (for the girls) their first sight of London. Patrick Brontë found them all accommodation at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row in the heart of the city, a tavern frequented by Dr. Johnson and Thomas Chatterton in the previous century and still the haunt of literary hacks and booksellers; a very businesslike hostelry “solely frequented by men,” as far as Mrs. Gaskell could tell when she went to see it in the 1850s. It was where Patrick had stayed in his student days travelling through London, and he was not the man to branch out unnecessarily, however inappropriate it might be as a place to lodge three young ladies.
The party arrived at night and had their first proper sight of London the next morning, an experience reflected in Villette when Lucy Snowe wakes in the capital for the first time and sees St. Paul’s and the City from her inn window: “Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn orbed mass, dark-blue and dim—THE DOME. While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.” Mary Taylor, who, like Ellen Nussey, had visited the capital numerous times, was amused at Charlotte’s determination to take in as much as she could of this precious treasure-store: “she seemed to think our business was and ought to be, to see all the pictures and statues we could. She knew the artists, and knew where other productions of theirs were to be found.” After a couple of days of non-stop cultural bingeing, which included visits to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the National Gallery, everyone was exhausted. “I don’t remember what we saw except St. Paul’s,” Mary said later.*1
Charlotte was sea-sick throughout the fourteen-hour crossing from London to Ostend and staggered ashore to face a long slow coach journey on to Brussels. But excitement trumped exhaustion, and to her hungry eye the flat, rainy, Flemish landscape they passed through was intensely interesting, just as it was for William Crimsworth, in her novel The Professor, when he makes the identical journey: “not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route, yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque.” Patrick Brontë, as excited as any of them at his first trip to the Continent, had made himself a little phonetic phrasebook so that he could get by in French as the head of their party. The phrases, adapted to his accent, covered the usual travellers’ concerns about accommodation and food, but also gave a little leeway for small talk, and one can imagine him sticking his head out of the window of the coach to ask “Oo somay noo a prazong?” or to observe chattily “La shaump-an-y me paray shaurmaung.” At the inns along the way, he was equipped to be “tre caunetong” with the beds, if appropriate, and able to ask for “me soaliay” from the boot-boy, though one wonders if they had difficulty finding inns in the first place, if “Maungtnaung indiqe moa un bong o’berzh sil voo play Mosyoo” is actually what he said to anyone in the street.
When they arrived in Brussels on the evening of 15 February, the Brontës were met by Reverend Evan Jenkins, chaplain to the British Embassy and the brother of an old friend of Patrick Brontë from Hartshead days. The Jenkinses were prominent members of a sizeable English colony in Brussels of about 2,000, many of whom had settled in the city after the victory at Waterloo in 1815. The English had their own newsletter, The British and Continental Mercury, published by an English bookseller whose shop made a natural meeting-place for the ex-pats (though the unsociable Brontës don’t seem to have made much use of it). Anglican services in this thoroughly Catholic town were held in the Chapel Royal on an elegant haute ville square just a few minutes’ walk from where the girls were going to be living, and an oddly dressed assortment of Englishers could be seen there every Sunday: army families, businessmen, widows—many of them in Brussels for the sake of economy, for it was a much cheaper place to live than England.
Patrick Brontë stayed a week with the Jenkinses to make sure that the girls were settled at their new school and to see the sights of Brussels, prime among which was the famous battlefield, only ten miles out of the city. Patrick was so enamoured of the Iron Duke (“the greatest man in the world,” as he described him in a letter to the press the following year) that the proximity of Waterloo must have heavily influenced his decision to accompany the girls in the first place, might indeed have affected his acquiescence to the whole Brussels scheme. The battlefield had been a tourist draw while still strewn with the dead in 1815; by 1842 it was a vast memorial park, landscaped for ease of walking and embellished with a number of massy obelisks. In later life, Patrick Brontë needed little encouragement to reminisce about his visit and moralise about its significance, but his daughters had no time for sightseeing, so missed the excursion.
The city that the girls had come to live in had been substantially redesigned and reorganised since 1830, following its emergence as the capital of the newly created nation, Belgium. The old Brabantian medieval quarter was still a warren of narrow streets where buildings leant inwards and overshadowed the cobbles, and where guilds, trades and much humbler housing were all jumbled together, running down through all the mid-levels of society to the very lowest. High above these streets, like a three-dimensional model of the city’s evolving social life, were the French-style parcs and grands boulevards, the creamy elegant villas of the rue Royale, and stately palace and government buildings—neither too obviously showy nor splendid, in keeping with a modern constitutional monarchy.
Access to the rue d’Isabelle from the direction of the Parc and place Royale was like a drop into the past, down a set of steps so long and steep that the top of them was higher than the Pensionnat’s chimneys.*2 The street had been named after the Spanish Infanta and built as a short-cut from the old Palais de Coudenberg to the great cathedral of SS-Michel-et-Gudule, which stood only half a mile away and dominated the skyline. Another half-mile or so would take one to the Grand-Place and the place de la Monnaie, the city’s most beautiful old squares. The cathedral bell was audible all day, calling the faithful to Matins, to Compline, to Mass. It was the voice of the quarter, just as its two towers dwarfed everything else on the skyline and drew one’s eye and steps along the street towards it.
The Pensionnat Heger, where the Jenkinses escorted Patrick Brontë and his daughters on the morning after their arrival in Brussels, stood on the former exercise ground of an aristocratic guild of crossbowmen. Since then a hospice and a convent had both occupied the site, and the buildings where the school was set up in 1830—the year of the Belgian revolution—were only a few decades old, with the exception of a quaintly decorated theatre at the end of the garden, dating from the seventeenth century and used as a recreation area and hall.
The owner of the school, Madame Zoë Heger, née Parent, was a 38-year-old Frenchwoman whose family had fled France’s revolution in 1789 and settled in Brussels. She had been brought up as a deeply pious and conservative Catholic, educated by an aunt who had formerly been a nun but started a school for girls after the religious order she had been a member of was disestablished. The school, which used to be housed in the Parent family home, was handed on to Zoë in the 1830s and moved to the premises in the rue d’Isabelle, where the enterprising young woman built up its academic reputation and also made it into a successful business, with about ninety pupils in 1842–3. She had married in 1836 and managed to combine her work with a full family life: when the Brontës arrived at her door, Madame Heger was already the mother of three small children and heavily pregnant with her fourth.
The neat, clean establishment she showed them round that February morning was set out around three sides of a square courtyard, one side of which fronted on the rue d’Isabelle and contained the living quarters of the directrice and her family. The ground floor of the school building housed three light and airy classrooms and a refectory that was also used as a general study area; upstairs was a dormitory and oratory, with a statue of the Virgin Mary under which a votive candle burned continually. One imagines the Brontës passed quickly by this evidence of the institution’s religious affiliations. The school’s reputation for educational excellence must have been very impressive indeed to overcome their deep antipathy to anything to do with Catholics.
Mr. Brontë met the directrice one more time before he left for England later that week, but he did not meet her husband, who taught for the greater part of the day at the Athénée Royal, the most prestigious boys’ school in Brussels, which stood immediately adjacent to the Pensionnat and was divided from it by a high wall. To discourage any impropriety, that part of the garden that could be seen from the windows of the boys’ school, a shady walk of lime and laburnum, was out of bounds to the pupils and known as the “alleé défendue.” The rest of the sizeable garden—quite a rarity in such a central city property—was one of the school’s proudest features and a delightful pleasure-ground, beautifully laid out and maintained, with an arbour and a number of huge, venerable pear trees, famous for their yield and quality of fruit.
Patrick Brontë travelled home via Lille, Dunkirk and Calais, at a total cost, he was satisfied to note, of £23.10s. His three weeks away from parish duties was unprecedented, and this fascinating, if nerve-racking, expedition to the Continent was never repeated.
Charlotte and Emily were left on their own to adapt to a thoroughly novel environment, Charlotte, at least, relishing the change in the first stressful but stimulating months. To Ellen, she reported that “the difference in Country & religion makes a broad line of demarcation between us & all the rest we are completely isolated in the midst of numbers—yet I think I am never unhappy—my present life is so delightful so congenial to my nature compared to that of a Governess—my time constantly occupied passes too rapidly.” Due to their foreignness and age, a corner of the dormitory was curtained off for the Brontë sisters, to allow a little privacy. They did not join the rest of the school for prayers, went alone to the Protestant Chapel Royal on Sundays and probably, like William Crimsworth in The Professor, said their own “heretical” grace to themselves before meals.
For all its conventual background and structure, the Pensionnat was the home of a lively, formidably active and intellectual young couple with a growing family in the middle of a vibrant capital city, and the atmosphere was very different from that of any school Charlotte or Emily had formerly known. The effect of having both married women and men on the staff was not lost on Charlotte, who described Madame Heger with admiration as being “of precisely the same cast of mind degree of cultivation & quality of character as Miss Catherine Wooler—I think the severe points are a little softened because she has not been disappointed & consequently soured—in a word—she is a married instead of a maiden lady.” Charlotte was less enthusiastic about the resident female staff—“there are 3 teachers in the school Mademoiselle Blanche—mademoiselle Sophie & Mademoiselle Marie—The first two have no particular character—one is an old maid & the other will be one”—but she was impressed and perhaps slightly intimidated by the fact that “no less than seven masters attend to teach the different branches of education—French drawing—music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and German.”
The most prominent of those masters and “always an immense favourite” with the girls was the directrice’s husband, a short, dark, cigar-smoking man who taught rhetoric and French literature. Constantin Georges Romain Heger was five years younger than his wife and had a more romantic and chequered background. His family were originally from the Palatinate (which today can be found in west Germany) and had once owned a jewellery business on the rue Royale, but a reversal of their fortunes in the 1820s had forced Constantin to move to Paris alone, at the incredibly young age of fourteen. He got a job as a legal secretary with a view to a career in the law, but struggled to support himself on a clerk’s meagre wages and had to join the “claque,” or paid applauders, of a theatre to get access to the plays he adored but couldn’t afford to see. By 1829 he was back in Brussels, where he got a job as a teacher of French and mathematics at the Athénée and met and married a girl called Marie-Josephine Noyer, with whom he had a child. He was still only twenty.
The next year he was involved in the revolution that founded the new Belgian nation, a revolt of the predominantly French-speaking, Catholic southern Netherlands provinces against their Dutch, Protestant, northern counterparts. In the four days of intense street fighting that took place in September 1830, Heger stood with the Nationalist rebels at the barricades and saw his young brother-in-law die there. Perhaps he resembled the young man at the top of the pyramidal form of triumphant citizens in Wappers’s epic painting Épisode des journées de septembre 1830 sur la place de l’Hôtel de Ville de Bruxelles, whose finger is pointing at the proclamation that was the focus of the Nationalists’ demands and that, by dint of this short but bloody action, shaped the new state. The picture expresses the energy and idealism of the revolutionary generation, and also its profound romanticism, all of which Heger personified.
In his private life, the young teacher was fated to suffer a terrible loss in the founding years of the new country, when both his wife and child died of cholera in 1833, a tragedy that later seemed to explain the fits of melancholy, moroseness and quick temper that were as much a part of his character as the outbursts of great tenderness and sympathy. By the time Charlotte Brontë met him, he had been married to his second wife, Zoë Parent, for six years and was thirty-three years old, only eight years Charlotte’s senior.
The surprising pleasure Charlotte found in her new life had its source in the novelty of living at close quarters with this extremely interesting man. She introduced him in her letter to Ellen with studied casualness and satire:
There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken Monsieur Heger the husband of Madame—he is professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament—a little, black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tom-cat—sometimes those of a delirious Hyena—occasionally—but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like he is very angry with me just at present because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as peu correct—not because it was particularly so in reality but because he happened to be in a bad humour when he read it.
There was an obvious difficulty, however, going back to being a schoolgirl after being a teacher and governess, and having to accept the same discipline as a teenager. Charlotte was so determined to prove herself a model pupil that she submitted to the situation uncomplainingly and took immense care over all her work, writing out her devoirs in the neatest handwriting, on hand-drawn lines of perfect regularity. The titles were usually drawn like engraved lettering, and the margins elegantly double-ruled, ready to receive Monsieur’s corrections. The content of these essays developed dramatically over the two years under his direction, but the first, a retelling of a fable by La Fontaine,*3 seems like a very retrograde performance on the part of the 25-year-old, whose works—albeit unknown and unpublished—included the extraordinary sophistications of “Caroline Vernon,” “Ashworth” and “Henry Hastings,” and whose knowledge of French, far from being rudimentary (like Emily’s), had stretched to verse translation of Voltaire and prizes from Miss Wooler.
In the classroom, Charlotte’s intellectual superiority was immediately obvious. The Belgian girls were impressed, though not in a friendly way, and Charlotte did nothing to make herself agreeable to them. One day, their simmering mutual disdain came out when some of the class picked a fight with Charlotte on the subject of England’s conduct towards Napoleon. Feelings about the late emperor had been revived by the long-delayed repatriation of his remains from St. Helena to Paris in 1840, and no doubt Charlotte was fiery in the defence of her country and Wellington in particular. Louise de Bassompierre, a fellow classmate, intervened and appealed for calm, earning Charlotte’s gratitude. Louise later wryly attributed to it the fact that the character given her surname in Villette was “less disagreeable than some of the others.”
Some interesting reminiscences of the Brontës in Brussels were left by the family of a doctor called Wheelwright who had given up his practice in England because of failing sight and moved to Brussels to save money. All five Wheelwright girls arrived at the Pensionnat in 1842, and Frances remembered Charlotte as “a diminutive, short-sighted, retiring personage, of remarkable talents and studious disposition, and very neat in appearance”—unlike her sister, who seemed of “an unsociable, unattractive, unsympathetic disposition; lanky and untidy in person.” Emily’s clothes caused widespread dismay: she had a leg-of-mutton sleeved dress, horribly out of fashion, but, worse still, she refused to display adequate shame about it. When challenged by the other girls, she simply replied that she was “as God made her,” and passed on. During the recreation periods in the garden, the Brontë sisters invariably kept apart from the other pupils, walking together in silence, “Emily, though so much the taller, leaning on her sister. Charlotte would always answer when spoken to, taking the lead in replying to any remark addressed to both; Emily rarely spoke to any one.” Frances Wheelwright disliked the younger Brontë on sight, but thought she had even greater genius than her sister, and noted Charlotte’s awed affection for her.
The Brontës didn’t see much of their friends Mary and Martha Taylor, despite being only a few miles away from the school at Koekelberg. The establishments were quite different, and both sets of sisters were fully occupied. Mrs. Jenkins had issued an open invitation to the Brontës to come to them on Sundays and holidays, but she soon let it lapse, as their company was simply too discomforting. Emily hardly ever opened her mouth, and Charlotte, though she could sometimes be persuaded to speak, and did so intelligently, had the utmost trouble making eye-contact and would wheel round on her chair to avoid it, ending up addressing the wall. The Jenkinses’ sons, John and Edward, never looked forward to escorting the Brontës home, as the walks would inevitably be conducted in a garroted silence. And this was among well-disposed English Protestants, friends at one remove from their father. With the girls at the Pensionnat, they must have appeared strange indeed.
Charlotte decided early on that it was easier to hate the Belgians than to worry about how uncomfortable they made her feel: “If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls in this school,” she wrote to Ellen, “it is a character singularly cold, selfish, animal and inferior—they are besides very mutinous and difficult for the teachers to manage—and their principles are rotten to the core—we avoid them—which is not difficult to do—as we have the brand of Protestantism and Anglicism upon us.” She elaborated these views in The Professor, where the narrator, a young Englishman teaching in a Brussels pensionnat, gives a scorching critique of the schoolgirls in his care, whom he exposes as mendacious, self-interested, calculating and far from the angels of popular myth. National characteristics condemn some of them, such as the Flamandes, to “deformity of person and imbecility of intellect,” in his view; others have a propensity to malevolence and agitation. Crimsworth believes that the Roman Catholic faith may be held responsible for most of their vices and bad habits of mind, but even among the British Protestants he makes a distinction between the class of ex-pats—tainted by long exposure to Catholics—and the rarer “British English” girl, the only kind worth anything.
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IT WAS A CAUSE of envy that Monsieur Heger gave the Brontë sisters separate lessons, to take account of their mature age and foreignness. He didn’t work them through the rudiments of the language, but started immediately on examples of classic French literature, and more recent works from his wide and avid reading. His taste was for the Romantics of his own language—Lamartine, Hugo, Chateaubriand and the essayists Mirabeau and Delavigne, all of whose works he could declaim in sonorous tones—and his teaching method was the same as he used with generations of his pupils: he would read aloud a carefully chosen passage and meticulously analyse its effects in discussion with the students. Then they would choose or be set a topic for composition “attuned to the same key, either grave or gay, of the model of excellence he had given, but of a sufficiently different character to make anything resembling unintelligent imitation impossible.” At first, Emily strongly objected to being asked to do “imitations” of any sort—she thought, with justification, it might stifle originality rather than help it—but Heger prevailed, and his method proved useful to both sisters. He was a stickler for revising and improving, and the girls soon got used to seeing the margins of their work dark with his commentaries. Rough copy, fair copy, corrected exercise: this was a discipline that neither Brontë had ever been required to think about. Charlotte had hitherto written whatever came into her head, and rarely shaped or revised it.
Charlotte was faced with a conflict of loyalties. She wanted, from a sense of duty, pride and growing personal inclination, to please Monsieur Heger, but the sister with whom she was so interdependent emotionally had an antipathy towards him, and an unsubmissive attitude to his pedagogy. Monsieur Heger and Emily “don’t draw well together at all,” Charlotte reported in May, and though by July she was relieved to note that the Hegers were beginning to appreciate “the valuable points of [Emily’s] character under her singularities,” one feels that their hosts were the ones making allowances, not the younger Brontë.
Emily clearly accentuated her “singularities” to keep herself at a remove. A strange account of her reception in Brussels filtered through to Elizabeth Gaskell when she was writing Charlotte’s biography that Emily had “absolutely repelled people by her cold sullen manner.” It is clear from what Charlotte said later that Emily was struggling valiantly against feelings of profound homesickness. In February 1843 Mary Taylor wrote to Ellen from Germany, eager for gossip about how Emily’s exposure to society (the most extended ordeal of the kind she ever underwent) had affected her. How could “the newly acquired qualities…fit in, in the same head & heart that is occupied by the old ones”? Mary marvelled. “Imagine Emily turning over prints or ‘taking wine’ with any stupid fop & preserving her temper & politeness!”
The answer was, the newly acquired qualities didn’t fit in at all, as Emily’s devoirs for Monsieur Heger indicate. Asked to compose a letter of invitation and reply, Emily took the opportunity to write a letter from a piano teacher to her pupil, crying off a musical party and advising her pupil to “choose a time when everyone is occupied with something other than music, for I fear that your performance will be a little too remarkable.” It’s a joke as acidic as Mr. Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice about his daughter Mary having “delighted us long enough” (and makes one wonder if Emily had read Austen’s novel—Charlotte had not at this date). Heger must have learnt to be on his mettle when he opened Emily’s cahiers: given the subject of “Filial Love,” she handed in something like a harangue from a pulpit. God takes a dim view of human baseness, the schoolgirl argued, and knows that his commandment “Honour thy father and thy mother” can be enforced only through fear and threats.
When he was interviewed by Elizabeth Gaskell fifteen years later, Constantin Heger said he felt Emily to have been the more remarkable of the two Brontë sisters, with a head for logic and argument “unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman.” “She should have been a man—a great navigator,” he said. “Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.” But, while this formidable will that “rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned” might have benefited a Magellan or a Drake, he acknowledged that it was hard to domesticate, and both he and his wife clearly found Emily an unsettling presence. Monsieur had also noticed how “egotistical and exacting” she was compared with Charlotte and how “in the anxiety of the elder to make her younger sister contented, she allowed [Emily] to exercise a kind of unconscious tyranny over her,” an interesting insight both into the sisters’ relationship and into Heger’s keen observation of them.
Charlotte’s essays, on the other hand, anticipated her teacher’s responses in a much more collaborative way. She knew what would appeal to his sensibility and indulged it; she also delighted in his marks of approval—“B” for “Bon,” “Tr. B” for “Très Bon”—which were as often about the content of her work as its correctness.
Charlotte’s essays had none of Emily’s bite, but showed an alertness to his suggestions that impressed Heger, as a pedagogue, very much indeed. At the end of an essay called “Le Nid” (“The Nest”), which Charlotte wrote for him in April, Heger—having extensively corrected and commented throughout—wrote the following pungent advice:
What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?—
Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect.
Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It’s sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect.
Read Harmony XIV of Lamartine, The Infinite: we will analyse it together, from the point of view of the details.
With what pleasure and interest Charlotte must have read this message from her master, and hastened to find Lamartine’s poem. Her subsequent essay “L’Immensité de Dieu” is heavily influenced by it, even down to Lamartine’s imagery and language; traces of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand—two more of Monsieur’s favourites—are also apparent. Monsieur’s carefully chosen words had been heeded in every way, and were bearing remarkable fruit, albeit in a foreign language, now that she had a sufficiently demanding reader.
Heger’s devotion to excellence was unusual in a teacher of young ladies. It could be thought of as educational idealism, or, in the economic theory of the day, perhaps as conspicuous waste: the most that any of his female pupils would be able or expected to do with their opened minds would be to teach in turn, in conditions of less promise, for salaries much lower than those of their male counterparts. The idea of nurturing in his bosom future women of letters, who could take their place on the bookshelf alongside the venerated writers and poets to whom he introduced them, would not have crossed Heger’s mind at all. Yet he had two in the class before him: one taking notes assiduously, the other giving him an unsmiling stare.
With his natural acting ability and electrifying enthusiasms, it must have been an arresting experience to hear him read and comment on his favourite authors. When he was in “insane Tom-cat” mode, however, he would shout and rage at his pupils, and deliver withering critiques. Emily sat through such performances stony-faced, but Charlotte was much more susceptible to criticism, though pleased to report to Ellen that if Monsieur ever reduced her to tears, his demeanour changed immediately, “& that sets all things straight.”
No one has left an account of how Constantin Heger behaved with a class of boys, who occupied by far the greater part of his teaching life. The ex-pupils who rallied to his defence in later years were all female, and Heger’s power over girls seems to have pleased him particularly. Charlotte’s depiction in The Professor of William Crimsworth’s pleasure in domineering over a class of girls shows her complete awareness of the erotics of the classroom. Having deliberately dictated too fast, to discompose his new pupil, Crimsworth enjoys her confusion and anticipation of getting a bad mark, all the more to savour her relief at finding “Bon” at the bottom of her returned book: “she smiled, at first incredulously, then as if reassured, but did not lift her eyes; she could look at me, it seemed, when perplexed and bewildered, but not when gratified.”
Elsewhere, keen to scotch the idea that a classful of nubile females could be some sort of erotic free-for-all for a male teacher, Charlotte has Crimsworth explain how girls who in society might seem charming are revealed in their true colours in the schoolroom: “sullen tempers are shewn, disfiguring frowns spoil the symmetry of the face, sometimes coarse gestures banish grace from the deportment while muttered expressions, redolent of native and ineradicable vulgarity, desecrate the sweetness of the voice.” They are Belgians, in other words. The conscientious tutor doesn’t look for charm, beauty or flirtation in such a situation but “glories chiefly in certain mental qualities; application, love of knowledge, natural capacity, docility, truthfulness, gratefulness…These he seeks but seldom meets; these if by chance he finds he would fain retain for ever, and when Separation deprives him of them, he feels as if some ruthless hand had snatched from him his only ewe-lamb.”
The Hegers’ joint approach to the care of their charges was parental, attentive and, in many cases, affectionate. Writing to a favourite former pupil many years later, Madame reminded her of an incident when she was convalescent from an illness at school and Monsieur Heger had been so affected by her “large languid eyes” that he kissed her and “allowed himself to make a sort of discreet declaration. ‘Who,’ he asked the little invalid, ‘is my best girl?’ ‘Your wife,’ said K— dryly, turning her face to the wall.” Madame was recalling this story fondly, as a joint possession of herself and her husband (“we do not separate what God has so happily joined” she told the same pupil on another occasion, “and in our affection husband and wife are one”), but it evokes a way of dealing with pupils that the stiff-necked Brontës may well have found surprising. Monsieur’s vulnerability to tears was well known, and the fact that he kept bon-bons in his pocket to hand out to the girls, and himself, whenever the mood took him. K’s reminiscence of Monsieur at her sickbed makes one wonder about the inspiration behind Charlotte’s poem “I gave, at first, Attention close” (written in 1845–6). Was the tender scene it depicts between a teacher and student purely imaginary, or based on experience?
One day when summoned to the bed
Where Pain and I did strive,
I heard him, as he bent his head,
Say, “God, she must revive!”
I felt his hand, with gentle stress
A moment laid on mine,
And wished to mark my consciousness
By some responsive sign.
There is a similar hint in Charlotte’s poem “Frances” (a poem spoken as by the heroine of The Professor) of “a thrilling clasp” of the hand that persuaded the speaker that “another heart esteemed [hers] dear.” If Constantin Heger made a habit of such gestures, it is not surprising that Charlotte, love-starved and sensual, did indeed feel the yearning to make “some responsive sign.”
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THE SUMMER VACATION began on the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, when the Heger family, with their three little girls, new baby son Prospère and English nanny Martha Trotman, departed for the seaside, and all the boarders except Emily and Charlotte Brontë went home. But before she left for her annual holiday, Madame made the sisters an offer that shows how pleased she was with their progress and keen to help them as well as herself. She proposed that they stay another half-year to continue their lessons in French and German, with free board, in exchange for Charlotte taking on all the teaching of English (Madame could then save quite a bit by dismissing the current English master) and Emily teaching music “some part of each day.”
Mary Taylor, on the other hand (who had gone home to Yorkshire for the holidays with Martha), was ready to move on from Brussels to Germany, where she intended to live with a friend’s family and look for work as a teacher of English. She wrote to Ellen, “I am going to shut my eyes for a cold plunge—when I come up again I [will] tell you all what its like.” “You all” included their mutual friends the Brontës, whom Mary reported “well; not only in health but in mind & hope. They are content with their present position & even gay & I think they do quite right not to return to England though one of them at least could earn more at the beautiful town of Bradford than she is now doing”—that is, they’d be better off as mill-hands. “[I]f you can’t see or rather feel why they are right,” she continued, in a mild reprimand to the only one of their circle who had yet to show a dash of independence, “I could not make you understand them. It is a matter of taste & feeling, & I think you feel pent up enough where you are to see why they are right in staying outside the cage—though it is somewhat cold.”
Charlotte appreciated the goodwill behind Madame Heger’s proposal, and was glad to accept—not least because they would be saving money (there was no extra charge for staying through the vacation) and generally furthering the school plan. Emily’s feelings were very different: her views of what it meant to run a school must have been changing rapidly and “the cage” is hardly how she thought of home—that description better fitted everywhere else, in her eyes. Only disgust at her own feebleness, as at Roe Head, kept her from giving up and begging to accompany the Taylors back to Yorkshire. Charlotte bore witness later to the struggle Emily went through in her ten months abroad: “the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system,” she wrote with heartfelt sympathy. “Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal.”
The summer heat was intense, and the Brontë sisters had the schoolrooms, and the beautiful garden, almost to themselves. They also had each other’s company and the resources of the great city around them. They walked along the boulevards that followed the course of the old city walls, around the winding streets of the Basse-Ville and the tree-lined streets of the new faubourgs. They climbed the steep steps up to the Parc, and wandered along its pathways, between the bandstands and theatres, watching the Bruxellois promenading on foot or in carriages. They took excursions into the countryside to make sketches and spent much time and effort copying from printed sources, as before. A drawing by Charlotte known as Watermill dates from this time, almost certainly copied from an engraving and finished to an extremely high level: the tower, the mill, the water, every leaf on every tree and shrub have been rendered with stifling care. It is the opposite of lively, and represents days of effort.
During the holiday, the Brontës tutored the Wheelwright girls, whose parents had gone on a trip on the Rhine. Emily was meant to be teaching the three youngest ones piano, but she always arranged the lessons to suit her own convenience, and antagonised them as a result. It must have been clear to Charlotte, when considering her own plans to start a school, that Emily was not likely to make a very promising member of staff.
There was bad news from Haworth: Branwell had yet again been dismissed from a job. Leaving the work of running the station at Luddenden Foot to the porter, Branwell had been spending more and more time in the local inn, and when the station’s accounts were investigated, and a significant shortfall detected (of £11.1s.6d.), he was naturally held responsible. Francis Grundy imagined the porter, not Branwell, had been the thief, but the outcome was the same.
Though it looked strange that the only son was back at home, unemployed, while his three sisters were all out in the world, struggling to pay their way, Branwell was still sustained by his dream of becoming known as a writer, and his success of the previous year was at last opening doors for him. Between leaving Luddenden Foot (where he had clearly been able to fit in quite a bit of scribbling between trains) and having to take up another post in January 1843, he published no fewer than nine poems, and articles too, all under his pseudonym “Northangerland.” And he was as assiduously as ever soliciting the attention of established writers—James Martineau and the current editor of Blackwood’s—in the hope of getting published further afield.
Being at home alone with his disappointed elders made Branwell restless and uncomfortable, though: “nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys” (it was May) and “nothing to look at except heathery hills walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me.” His sisters’ letters from Brussels and his father’s recent journey abroad stung him with a craving to travel, perhaps get a job with a railway company on the Continent, where the system was just getting under way. He must have known his chances of employment in the same area at home were over, though he kept asking Grundy to look out for juicy vacancies.
Branwell had got to know William Weightman much better on his return to Haworth in the spring and found in the scholarly and charming curate a much more suitable companion than the town had offered him before, though one who stood so high in his father’s opinion that it must have been hard for Branwell not to feel discomforted by comparisons. Weightman was never found lounging in the snug of the Black Bull or lying late in bed. Weightman hadn’t been sent home time and again in defeat; he had used his talents and applied himself to work with ardour. God’s work too. Branwell was hardly ever seen in church.
But Weightman’s dedication to his duties had a tragic outcome in the autumn of 1842, when he contracted cholera while visiting the sick. It was then an incurable disease, and his death on 6 September, aged only twenty-eight, profoundly shocked the whole parish. Branwell, who had attended the curate’s dying bed in distress for two weeks, felt he had lost “one of my dearest friends”; Patrick Brontë mourned him as deeply, saying in a heartfelt funeral address, to a full congregation and to the accompaniment of Branwell’s audible sobs, that he had considered Weightman as a son. But at least, for Patrick, there was real comfort in Weightman’s exemplary deathbed, where the young man had “expressed his entire dependence on the merits of the Saviour” and closed his eyes “on this bustling, vain, selfish world…in tranquillity.”
Anne was away from home at her job with the Robinsons at Thorp Green Hall when Weightman died, and did not come home for the funeral, but the likelihood that she had been secretly in love with Weightman is strengthened by a poem she wrote that winter, “I will not mourn thee, lovely one,” which expressed much more than a general loss:
I’ll weep no more thine early doom
But O I still must mourn—
The pleasures buried in thy tomb
For they will not return!
In Brussels, the two elder sisters were about to face another shocking and rapid death from cholera, that of Martha Taylor, the youngest of their little circle of expatriate Yorkshire friends. Martha was taken ill at the end of September, and, despite Mary’s desperate efforts, “watching—nursing—cherishing her—so tenderly, so unweariedly,” she died on 12 October, aged twenty-three. Charlotte only heard that Martha was ill the day before, as she told Ellen: “I hastened to Kokleberg [sic] the next morning—unconscious that she was in great danger—and was told that it was finished, she had died in the night.” After so many alarms and vigils over her own and her family’s feeble health over the years, Martha’s swift removal by cholera, so prevalent in cities and areas of high population where water supplies could become quickly infected, was doubly shocking. Lively, flirtatious Miss Boisterous, who had always prompted “adventures” and jollity at Roe Head and Gomersal, had to be buried far from home, in the Protestant Cemetery of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, two miles north-east of Brussels’s city walls.
“Every trivial accident sad or pleasant reminds me of her & of what she went through,” Mary told Ellen three weeks later, when she went to visit the grave with the Brontës. But, battening down her terrible feelings of loss, she went ahead with her plan to move to Germany alone—an even colder plunge now than she had anticipated.
Just a few days later, on 2 November, a letter arrived for Charlotte and Emily from their father informing them that Aunt Branwell was seriously ill. The girls decided to go home immediately, but on the heels of the first letter came another telling them that Aunt Branwell was dead. However quickly they set off, it was clear they could not be in time for the funeral, but there was no question of staying in Brussels: the pull of home at this crisis was overpowering, and Emily, at least, was glad to be drawn back by force majeure. The interruption to their schooling would be considered later, as the Hegers made haste to reassure them. The couple, always very sympathetic to matters of family duty, saw the Brontë sisters off with every kindness, and each of them wrote to Patrick Brontë offering sincere condolences and expressing the hope that his daughters’ education could be resumed at an appropriate time.
On their hasty departure from the Pensionnat, and with the awful feeling that they might not be able to return, Charlotte gave Madame her fine drawing of the watermill, with a dedication written so small that it is barely visible, interwoven with the foliage—“Madame Heger from one of her pupils”—to which the artist has added for clarification (but impossible to read with the naked eye), “A token of affection and respect.” Emily gave her a watercolour, “most spirited and beautiful,” of a female figure arrested in flight. It was an adaptation of one of Richard Westall’s illustrations to Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron and perfectly expressed Emily’s eagerness to depart.*4
Emily and Charlotte travelled home by the next Sunday’s steam packet from Antwerp to London, spent another full day travelling overland and reached Haworth on 8 October, five days after Elizabeth Branwell, 65-year-old spinster of a parish she had never wanted to live in, was buried, according to her wishes, “as near as convenient to the remains of my dear sister.”
It was a sombre reunion of the siblings. Anne had not got home from Thorp Green in time to see her aunt alive, but Branwell had been there to witness “such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure,” as he told his friend Francis Grundy, and spent many sleepless nights at his aunt’s sickbed as she endured the rapid advance of what seems to have been a bowel or stomach cancer. Branwell had always been his aunt’s favourite, and now felt that he had lost someone as dear as a mother to him, “the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood.” Already wrought up to a pitch of emotionalism by the death of William Weightman, he felt oppressed by “gloomy visions either of this world or another” (casual wording that would have shocked his father to hear), and doubtless his pain over his aunt’s death was exacerbated by feelings of guilt that he had not managed to reward her faith in him with better results.
Branwell was presumably prepared for the contents of his aunt’s will, since it did not consternate him. He was left a japanned dressing case as a personal memento and that was all. The four legatees were Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their cousin Eliza Kingston (the only child of Elizabeth’s younger sister Jane Branwell, who had suffered an abusive marriage and returned to Penzance from America years before). The will had been drawn up in 1833, when Branwell was sixteen and had bright prospects ahead of him. Elizabeth Branwell clearly believed that a young man could make his own way, but girls without patrimony, like his sisters and Eliza, deserved to have family assets directed towards them, just as Elizabeth herself and her sister Maria had benefited significantly from the annuities left them by their father decades earlier. Not least, an inheritance would give the girls more choice over whether or not to marry.
Elizabeth Branwell had managed to put by quite a bit of money as well as pay her way at the Parsonage all the years she lived with her brother-in-law. Her independent, rigorously scrupulous behaviour had been a source of pride to her and a powerful example to her nieces. Though middle-class females of the period are so often thought of as having been financial burdens on their male relations, the stereotypes were reversed in the case of the Brontës; Patrick Brontë and his son were the ones needing to be subsidised by their womenfolk’s frugality, hard work and careful stewardship of resources.
Aunt Branwell had invested over £1,000 in the York and North Midland Railway Company, promoted vigorously in the 1830s by “The Railway King,” George Hudson, as a portal to the future. The first part of the line from York to London opened in 1839 with huge success, and Aunt’s investment was doing remarkably well, yielding around 10 per cent in each of the first four years. The Brontë sisters decided to hold on to the shares rather than cash them in—for the time being, at any rate—but the volatility of the railway business, requiring massive capitalisation as well as returns, unnerved Charlotte, who told Miss Wooler that “any day a small share-holder may find his funds shrunk to their original dimensions.” Emily, on the other hand, was a risk-taker and found it extremely exciting to have a stake in the market. She took over the management of the investments on behalf of all three sisters and became obsessed with checking “every paragraph & every advertisement in the news-papers that related to rail-roads”; not that she moved any of the stock in the years they owned it, but watching it rise so often as it did gave her deep pleasure. None of the sisters dwelt too long on the fate of Aunt’s other speculation—in a Cornish tin-mining business that had collapsed entirely.*5
Probate on Elizabeth Branwell’s will was granted at the end of December, but in the weeks since their aunt’s death the three sisters had taken stock of their changed situation and made some important decisions. They now each possessed a nest-egg worth about £300, the equivalent of twelve years’ income at Anne’s governess job. Patrick Brontë was ageing, his sight was deteriorating, and his spirits had been dashed by the recent bereavements; one of his daughters would be expected to stay at home and take their aunt’s place as his companion and housekeeper. Anne was well established in her post with the Robinsons (and determined, moreover, to stick at it); she had also helped Branwell to get a job with the same family, starting in January 1843, as tutor to their twelve-year-old son, Edmund. Emily was the obvious candidate to stay at home. The only question was, would Charlotte stay with her?
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THE DASH HOME in November had been a jarring interruption of the Brussels experiment, which Constantin Heger and his wife had regretted sincerely. Monsieur Heger had sent the sisters home with a letter addressed to their father, to make sure that there was some chance of a return: it was both a progress report and a suggested plan for the coming term. Heger paid tribute to the girls’ “love of work and their perseverance”—clearly learnt from home—and lamented that his own “almost fatherly affection” was touched by their sudden departure: “and our distress is increased by the realization that there are so many incomplete tasks, so many things which have been well begun, and which only need a little more time to be satisfactorily completed. In a year’s time, each of your daughters would have been fully prepared for all future contingencies; each was both improving her knowledge and learning how to teach.” Emily had been about to have piano lessons “from the best teacher we have in Belgium” (who happened to be Heger’s first wife’s brother-in-law); Charlotte had begun to give lessons in French “and to gain the assurance and aplomb so essential in teaching.” A total interruption of their studies would be inadvisable, Heger felt, since they were within sight of reaping real rewards; one or the other of them would be welcome as a full-time teacher in time. “This is not a question of our personal advantage,” he wrote, “but a question of affection; you must pardon me if we speak to you of your children and concern ourselves with their future as if they formed part of our family; their personal qualities, their good will, their extreme zeal are the only reasons leading us to venture in this way.”
The reference to “one of them” possibly finding permanent employment at the Pensionnat was aimed of course at Charlotte, not Emily. She had a special place in Heger’s affections, and knew it. His delight in her progress was heartfelt—she had been, in effect, his perfect pupil, clever, subordinate, vulnerable. He could see her intelligence and sense her genius, but it seemed his to awaken and, unlike Emily’s, gratifyingly malleable. With this testimony to Heger’s regard, and repeated encouragement from Madame, in kind and affectionate letters, to return and continue her studies, there was little doubt what Charlotte wanted to do. Three years later, she looked back on her decision with searing self-condemnation as “selfish folly,” indulged against the promptings of her conscience and punished “by a total withdrawal for more than two year[s] of happiness and peace of mind.” But at the time the impulse to fly back to Brussels at the first opportunity was, as she admitted, “irresistible.”
If Aunt Branwell had been alive, Charlotte would never have been allowed to undertake the journey as she did, completely alone. She left home on Friday, 27 January 1843, travelling from Leeds to London by train and arriving in the capital so late—ten o’clock at night—that she decided not to go as planned to the Chapter Coffee House but to take a cab and head straight for London Bridge wharf and try to board the steamship that she was booked on to leave the next morning. When the cabbie left her in an alarming scrum of foul-mouthed watermen, all jostling for custom, it dawned on Charlotte how dangerous her situation was, but she persisted in being rowed out to find the boat, a hard task in the inky darkness. They had to go from one vessel to another, holding up a lantern until the Earl of Liverpool was found. The crew were at first very dubious at the sight of a tiny young woman in heavy winter travelling dress standing in a rowing-boat among her valises and demanding to be let on board so many hours before time, but the “quiet simple statement of her wish, and her reason for it” swayed the officer on duty, and she was hauled up and shown to a berth, where she collapsed in relief. “I had no accident,” she told Ellen later, “but of course some anxiety.” Any sense of danger had been eclipsed by a feverish and growing excitement. Elizabeth Gaskell later said that Charlotte’s recollection of her journey back to Brussels was “pretty much as she has since described it in ‘Villette,’ ” but Villette offers no explanation for the heroine’s sense of quiet exultation, which turns her apprehensions into a dark source of pleasure:
Down the sable flood we glided; I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face, and midnight-clouds dropping rain above my head; with two rude rowers for companions, whose insane oaths still tortured my ear, I asked myself if I was wretched or terrified. I was neither. Often in my life have I been far more so under comparatively safe circumstances. “How is this?” said I. “Methinks I am animated and alert, instead of being depressed and apprehensive?” I could not tell how it was.
*1 Charlotte complained many years later (when she was feeling out of sympathy with him) that Joe Taylor had dragged them from sight to sight exhaustingly, but at the time Mary said it was the other way round and that Charlotte was the relentless one.
*2 Now that the old quarter has been largely obliterated by even more extensive remodelling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rue d’Isabelle exists only as a fragment of the medieval street that itself was unknown to the Brontës, buried in the foundations of the current Palais de Coudenberg. The whole area round where the Pensionnat used to stand is oddly jigsaw like and confusing, but the connections between the contemporary quarter and the one the Brontës knew have been brilliantly illustrated by Eric Ruijssenaars in Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land and The Pensionnat Revisited, with maps drawn by Selina Busch.
*3 CB’s essay “L’Ingratitude” came to light in 2012, having been lost for almost a hundred years. It is dated 16 March 1842. See London Review of Books, 8 March 2012, and Brian Bracken’s notes.
*4 Emily’s picture is now lost, but a photograph of it remains (see Art of the Brontës, 385–7). It was in the Heger family until the 1880s, then given to a former pupil and bequeathed to her niece. It is known as The North Wind, though whether or not EJB gave it that title is uncertain. Charlotte’s Watermill hangs at the Brontë Parsonage Museum; see Art of the Brontës, 260.
*5 Elizabeth Branwell might also have owned some property in Cornwall, as CB makes a reference to rent paid in May 1846 by Eliza Kingston, the Cornish legatee, to Patrick Brontë, which seems to be connected to Miss Branwell’s estate (LCB 1, 472).