1843
Charlotte returned to the Pensionnat as both student and teacher. She still took French classes with some of the pupils whom she now taught English, and they liked her no better than they had the previous year. As fellow student, they felt she was at an unfair advantage because of her age (twenty-six) and maturity—and because she was teacher’s pet (Monsieur Heger often read her work aloud in class as an example). In classes such as dancing, she was ridiculed mercilessly for her ineptitude and lack of grace, and then these very same girls were presented at desks in front of her, to be taught English. Frederika Macdonald, interviewing some of the pupils who had been at the Pensionnat in 1842–3 many years later, found one “Mlle C” who testified that the girls played up in Mademoiselle Brontë’s class on purpose, because they scorned her lack of authority. One girl who was “extremely difficult to manage” precipitated a crisis in an already rowdy class after throwing a knotted handkerchief across the room that hit Miss Brontë on the arm. “Instead of showing anger or amusement, [she] appeared greatly distressed and embarrassed,” the former schoolgirl recalled, but Charlotte got her revenge at the next lesson when she brought in Monsieur Heger to reprimand the whole form, threaten the malefactors with expulsion if they did not improve their behaviour and exclude the ringleader from the English class.*1
Another former pupil said that Miss Brontë “was known to be very clever, but she had no sympathy with young people and no authority over them.” They despised her because she was ill-dressed, thin and sickly looking (“maigrelette” was the word), and also because she worked so hard. Charlotte was learning German this year and making both English and French translations of Schiller.*2 She did a polished translation of “Les Petits Orphelins” by Louis Belmontet, one of “L’Idole” by Auguste Barbier and versions in French of her own old favourites Scott and Byron. “L’Idole” (about Napoleon’s ruthless pursuit of glory to his country’s ruin) was an interesting choice, possibly Heger’s. Charlotte and he were in friendly rivalry about the late emperor and his nemesis, Wellington, and when Charlotte came to write an essay “The Death of Napoleon” later that spring, she made it into something of a partisan set-piece about the Duke. Heger was so pleased with it that he retained it for declamation at the school prize day.
On her return to Brussels, Charlotte made a valued new friend in Mary Dixon, the 34-year-old-cousin of Mary Taylor whom she had met after Martha’s death the previous October. Mary, a mature and intelligent woman, in delicate health, lived on the rue de la Régence in a cheerful household headed by her father Abraham, a failed banker and former foreign commission agent who was trying to make a living in Brussels as an inventor. Charlotte took to spending Sundays with Mary, a substitute elder sister perhaps for the one she had lost so long ago.
Charlotte felt sufficiently at ease with Mary Dixon to submit to her request to sit for a portrait. “I surrender my unfortunate head to you with resignation,” she wrote good-naturedly; “the features thereof may yield good practice as they never yet submitted to any line of regularity—but have manifested each a spirit of independence, edifying to behold.” Charlotte advised her not to send any resulting portrait to Mary Taylor, however: “she likes me well enough—but my face she can dispense with—and would tell you so in her own sincere and truthful language if you asked her.” This was all too true. Mary Taylor had been making rude remarks about Charlotte’s appearance ever since they met at Roe Head, and later complained that George Richmond’s 1850 portrait of Charlotte was far too flattering of “an ugly woman.”
A small chalk, ink and wash drawing of a young woman wearing a bonnet came to light in the 1990s, formerly in the possession of William Law, an avid collector of Brontëana, who had bought it from the Brontës’ servant Martha Brown some time before 1880. It has the words “Portrait of Charlotte Brontë given to Martha Brown 1839” in pencil on the back and is assumed to be of Charlotte, assumed to be, in fact, the portrait by Mary Dixon that she agreed to sit for in 1843. Subsequently, its date has been adjusted to “Brussels, c. 1843” in line with the letter quoted above. It seems much more likely that Mary Dixon’s picture of Charlotte (if indeed she went ahead and made one) is now lost, and that the chalk drawing at the Parsonage is of Mary Dixon herself, executed at the same period and given to Charlotte as a memento. That Charlotte had such a memento is evident from the fact that she told Mary in October of 1843 (when Mary had left Brussels) that she had “disinterred your portrait from the bottom of a trunk” because she was low-spirited and craved “a little society”: “I was comforted by discovering a certain likeness—notwithstanding what yourself and William Henry affirmed to the contrary.” The “William Henry” she refers to was William Henry Taylor, another cousin of the Dixons, fifteen years old, who was living with his Brussels relatives at the time. “If it were a little slenderer and paler—it would be very much like.” Charlotte is clearly not talking about taking comfort from an image of herself.*3 The chalk drawing is rather sentimental, of a sweet, conventional-looking woman with extremely regular features—not fitting any description of Charlotte Brontë. Commentators have remarked that it makes “Charlotte” look older and more matronly than one would expect of a 26-year-old, but Mary was seven years her senior.
Mary Taylor, now in Germany, was worried that Charlotte would not do well on her own in Brussels. “[S]he seems content at least but [I] fear her sister’s absence [?will] have a bad effect,” she told Ellen; “When people have so little amusement they cannot afford to lose any.” But, at first, Emily’s absence freed Charlotte to concentrate entirely, exclusively and in a deeply pleasurable way on her admiration for Monsieur Heger. His generosity, his natural brilliance, his eloquence—even his charitable work, piety and expansive interest in other people’s welfare—all struck her afresh. Most of all, she loved the calibre of his mind. As Lucy Snowe says of Paul Emanuel in Villette, the character based on Constantin Heger, “M. Emanuel was not a man to write books; but I have heard him lavish, with careless, unconscious prodigality, such mental wealth as books seldom boast; his mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.” And when Heger took Charlotte and another pupil into town to see the Mardi Gras carnival, though she dismissed the processions as “nothing but masking and mummery,” the thrill of being out in the evening with her beloved master, in the dark among a festive crowd, was a new sort of rapture.
The poem that she inserted into The Professor about the brief revelation of a gruff man’s sympathetic nature might be illuminating here too. Though the teacher soon readopts his former distant manner, his pupil now understands it differently: “I had learned to read/The secret meaning of his face,/And that was my best meed.” Reading “secret meanings” in Heger’s behaviour—which was, after all, very open to interpretation—became Charlotte’s obsessive pleasure.
The development that most encouraged Charlotte’s growing sense of intimacy with Heger was his request for her to give regular English lessons on Friday afternoons to him and his brother-in-law Monsieur Chapelle (the Conservatoire pianist with whom Emily had been hoping to study). This was a chance for Charlotte to assume authority at last, show her mettle as a teacher and engage with two adult male minds on terms of equality, a rare opportunity for any woman of the period. When Charlotte’s social constraint was laid aside, the results were always formidable: Heger must have been very impressed, not only with her eloquence and erudition in her mother-tongue, but in her changed manner. Heger’s ardent, anxious English student was transformed by the role-reversal into a woman of substance and seriousness, and Charlotte obviously relished the temporary power she had over her master, watching him struggle with vocabulary and pronunciation, as she reported amusedly to Ellen: “they get on with wonderful rapidity—especially the first—he already begins to speak English very decently—if you could see and hear the efforts I make to teach them to pronounce like Englishmen and their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would laugh to all eternity.”
In French class, where the roles of teacher and pupil swapped round again, the growing sense of confidence continued and Charlotte’s essays for Heger—less frequent, longer—became a form of colloquy. “La Chute des Feuilles” (“The Fall of the Leaves”), written in March, was an attempt at analysing the style of Millevoye’s poem, which, after a few pages of Charlotte posing questions about the nature and value of literary criticism, finds its way back to a subject always on her mind: the nature of genius. And at the point when she breaks cover and declares, “I believe that all true poetry is but the faithful imprint of something that happens or has happened in the poet’s soul,” Heger responds eagerly in the margin, “Très bon, très juste.” “I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek the details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that details come quite naturally without the poet having to seek them, that inspiration takes the place of reflection.” “Très bon…excellent.” Beneath this discussion of the balance between reason and inspiration, work and genius, analysis and production, another seems to be going on, about Charlotte’s own desires to be an artist. In the increased intimacy she had briefly gained with Heger, she may well have told him about her own poetry, or even shown him some, for in his copious comments at the end of her essay—a set of thoughts and afterthoughts generously engaging with the issues raised—he encourages her to continue to study, analyse, reflect, dissect as well as practise her creative work.
Without study, no art. Without art, no effect on humanity, because art epitomizes that which all the centuries bequeath to us, all that man has found beautiful, that which has had an effect on man, all that he has found worth saving from oblivion…Poet or not, then, study form. If a poet you will be more powerful & your works will live. If not, you will not create poetry, but you will savour its merits and its charms.
Heger’s advice was practical, as Southey’s had been, but lofty in spirit. He did not by any means rule out the possibility of Charlotte becoming—being—a poet, however little he thought she could or should do so professionally. And he didn’t rule it out because he knew what a peculiarly sensitive and appreciative reader she was. “His eyes pierced through the quartz and saw the diamond in the heart of it,” one acquaintance said in 1870 of the relationship between Heger and Charlotte; “and he made much of her and drew her out.”
But it’s clear from a letter as early as 6 March—only six weeks into her new situation—that Charlotte was already beginning to feel dashed and despondent. She told herself sternly that she could not be in love with her teacher like any foolish schoolgirl; this wasn’t a crush or a sexual fantasy, though the symptoms might be very similar—identical, indeed. As she got to know Heger better and better, and felt his attraction more powerfully, a concurrent awareness grew of the inappropriateness of such feelings, and their essential futility. This could and did not stop her from pursuing an intimacy that had an irresistible charm, mainly because it took place largely in her own head and was powered by an extraordinary imagination.
The Hegers were sensitive to Charlotte’s new status in the school and had warmly encouraged her to make use of their sitting room as her own; it was, in effect, a staff room during the day, where many part-time employees, especially the music teachers, went to and fro and waited for pupils. Charlotte found such lack of privacy upsetting and avoided using the offered privilege during school hours, but it was even more upsetting to her to go there in the evenings, when the sitting room reverted to being the Hegers’ family quarters. “I will not and ought not to intrude on Mr. & Mde Heger & their children,” she told Ellen in a homesick, lonely letter, but what she probably could not bear was the sight of her master en famille, the devoted husband and father relaxing with his little ones round the fire, his handsome wife, a baby on her knee, regnant over all.
In the same letter to Ellen she said, “if I could always keep up my spirits—and never feel lonely or long for companionship or friendship or whatever they call it [my italics], I should do very well.” Charlotte’s sense of isolation was less to do with her actual social life or opportunities (which had improved markedly) than with the quandary she was in, having identified a way to happiness along an utterly inaccessible path. It was the dilemma that caused her heroine Jane Eyre so much mental pain—the ideal mate turns out to be the impossible mate—though for Jane, Charlotte was able to adjust the outcome, and get rid of the wife who stands in her way.
Ellen had passed on, in an arch manner, some Yorkshire gossip that infuriated Charlotte: that her return to Belgium at a rate of pay so inferior to what she could get at home could only have been because she had her eye on a future husband there. This was so close in spirit to the truth that Charlotte could only answer in a sort of false negative:
These people are wiser than I am—They could not believe that I crossed the sea—merely to return as teacher to Mde Heger’s—I must have some more powerful motive than respect for the character of my Master & Mistress, gratitude for their kindness to induce me to refuse a salary of 50£ in England and accept one of 16 in Belgium I must forsooth have some remote hope of entrapping a husband somehow—somewhere—if these charitable people knew the total seclusion of the life I lead—that I never exchange a word with any other man than Monsieur Heger and seldom indeed with him—they would perhaps cease to suppose tha[t] any such chimerical & groundless notion has influenced my proceedings—Have I said enough to clear myself of so silly an imputation?
No, she hadn’t. Ellen had visited Haworth in January, just before Charlotte’s return, and must have been completely aware of, and surprised at, the intensity of her feelings for the Pensionnat and its charismatic professeur. Charlotte probably succumbed to the delicious temptation of talking far too much about Monsieur Heger all holiday, banking on the fact that, as a married man, he was securely off limits as a subject for romantic speculation. The girls were used to teasing and being teased over every bachelor of their acquaintance, eligible or not, and Ellen herself endured or enjoyed constant prods from Charlotte about the attentions of Mary Taylor’s brothers Joe and John and others. The underlying message of the angry denial in her letter is the same: Ellen’s choices are very different from hers: “Not that it is a crime to marry—or a crime to wish to be married—but it is an imbecility which I reject with contempt—for women who have neither fortune nor beauty—to make marriage the principal object of their wishes & hopes & the aim of all their actions—not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive—and that they had better be quiet & think of other things than wedlock—”
The heightened state of excitement and expectation with which Charlotte had returned to the Pensionnat was evident to Madame Heger from the start and soon aroused her concern privately. If Charlotte had become more outgoing and sociable as a result of her contact with the family and the school, if she had lost some of her mauvaise honte, Madame would have taken pride in the improvement (she made repeated efforts to get Charlotte to socialise more and make friends). But the English teacher’s animation was obviously and exclusively generated by her contact with the directrice’s husband, and he seemed to have little idea of the effect he was having.
Charlotte professed amazement later at the construal of her feelings towards Monsieur Heger being in any way romantic or erotic, but Madame sensed trouble. Her whole family’s livelihood depended on the school’s reputation, and it was her concern to monitor any sort of behaviour—acknowledged or unacknowledged—that might threaten it. She started to keep a close eye on Mademoiselle Brontë and probably asked one of the other young teachers, Mademoiselle Blanche, to report back what was said in the staff dormitory and how Charlotte used her spare time. Surveillance and discreet pre-emptive action were Madame’s preferred techniques—not confrontation. She may also have had a word with her husband—“crushes” on him must have occurred frequently—for Charlotte became aware of a chill in the air and a reduction in Monsieur’s attention before anything else. The English lessons stopped.
Charlotte at first couldn’t quite believe what was going on, but became increasingly unhappy and bitter. With Emily, she shared acid commentary on the doings of the fellow teachers with whom she lived, and aired her suspicions about Madame:
I am convinced she does not like me—why, I can’t tell, nor do I think she herself has any definite reason for the aversion; but for one thing, she cannot comprehend why I do not make intimate friends of Mesdames Blanche, Sophie and Haussé. M. Heger is wondrously influenced by Madame, and I should not wonder if he disapproves very much of my unamiable want of sociability. He has already given me a brief lecture on universal bienveillance, and, perceiving that I don’t improve in consequence, I fancy he has taken to considering me as a person to be let alone—left to the error of her ways; and consequently he has in a great measure withdrawn the light of his countenance, and I get on from day to day in a very Robinson-Crusoe-like condition—very lonely. That does not signify.
Of course it did signify, and Emily was the only person who would truly understand.
Writing to Branwell, she reverted not just to childhood slang—“the people here are no go whatsoever”—but a torrent of abuse against Belgians who “have not intellect or politeness or good-nature or good-feeling…the phlegm that thickens their blood is too gluey to boil.” The only exception—in the whole nation, she insinuates—is “the black Swan,” Monsieur Heger, who, albeit less and less frequently, still takes an interest in her, lends her books and is kindly disposed. Madame is already “not quite an exception.”
Charlotte tried to joke with Branwell about growing “misanthropic and sour—you will say this is no news,” but confessed that when she was alone in the dormitory during the nightly Catholic prayers, she retreated “as fanatically as ever to the old ideas the old faces & the old scenes in the world below,” in other words, the trance-like escape into Angrian fantasy that had almost taken over her life five years before. It was a bad sign, and she knew it. What if she broke down again as she had at Roe Head?
But, just as Charlotte was writing this anxious letter home, Monsieur Heger came in to the room and gave her a present, a little German New Testament, kind encouragement and reward for her rapid mastery of the new language. “I was surprised for since a good many days he has hardly spoken to me,” she told Branwell in a postscript; but how foolish it was to have worried about any of that now—for here he was, as animated and thoughtful as ever. The clouds rolled away.
—
BACK IN HAWORTH, “these times, so critical and dangerous,” were preying on Patrick Brontë’s mind continually. Keighley was a major centre of Chartist activity, and the Working Men’s Hall became their headquarters. Brontë was also very agitated by dramatic proof of the growing influence of the Dissenters, whose opposition to parts of the 1843 Factory Bill led to its significant amendment: all the clauses that pertained to a new state school system had to be dropped because it had been proposed the Established Church should oversee it. He wrote an impassioned letter on the subject to The Leeds Intelligencer and was no more calm the following week, when he addressed The Halifax Guardian about “the Ominous and Dangerous Vagaries of the Times,” among which he counted Irish agitation for Home Rule, Welsh protests against turnpike tolls (“the Rebecca riots”) and the imminent separation from the Established Church of the United Free Church of Scotland. Everywhere was “a restless disposition for change, an untoward ambition, a recklessness of consequences, and a struggle for power and predominance, like the hydrophobia of the canine race.” Presumably, Patrick’s pistols were kept rigorously primed throughout this time.
Was rabies on his mind that summer because of an incident, undated in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography, when Emily saw a strange dog “with hanging head and lolling tongue” in the lane outside the Parsonage one hot day and, taking pity on it as she did all animals in need, took it a drink of water, only to be bitten by it? The bite made Emily fear it could be rabid, so, with “nobly stern presence of mind,” she went straight to the kitchen and cauterised the wound herself with one of Tabby’s smoothing irons, kept scorching hot on the stove, “telling no one, till the danger was well-nigh over, for fear of the terrors that might beset their weaker minds.” The incident is almost as alarming as her battering of Keeper.
Anne had a dog too, a present from the Robinsons, in whose household she seemed firmly established; they had taken her on holiday with them to Scarborough that summer and given her a Blenheim spaniel called Flossy, soon to become a favourite at the Parsonage, where no creature so genteel had ever been known before. Fortunately Flossy got on well with Keeper, though, looking at the relative sizes of their metal collars (now on display at the Parsonage Museum), that was far from a certainty: Keeper’s collar is almost eight inches in diameter, Flossy’s four.
Charlotte had a “general assurance” from Anne that Branwell was well settled at Thorp Green and satisfying his employers and their son, but Branwell himself proved a poor correspondent, and made excuses for the non-appearance of letters, which Charlotte clearly didn’t quite believe. She was obviously concerned about him, and deeply sympathetic to his bouts of low spirits that so much resembled her own, but her awareness of his weaknesses also brought out a monitory tone that was gradually displacing their former intimacy.
Her family and friends must have puzzled over her insistence at staying on in Brussels when she was so clearly unhappy. “[O]ne wear[ie]s from day to day of caring nothing, fearing nothing, liking nothing hating nothing—being nothing, doing nothing,” she wrote to Branwell uncompromisingly. In June she told Ellen that the reason for staying on, despite her depression (which she put down to loneliness and homesickness), was to learn more German, though of course she could have done that quite effectively by joining Mary Taylor in Iselholm. She had complained already of Madame Heger’s “mighty distance & reserve,” but affected not to understand what could have caused it. “I fancy I begin to perceive the reason,” she told Ellen; “it sometimes makes me laugh & at other times nearly cry—When I am sure of it, I will tell it you.”
One Friday afternoon, eleven days before the end of term, Heger came into the classroom where Charlotte was teaching and handed her—silently, one imagines—a small object wrapped carefully in a piece of thin writing paper. She opened it as soon as he left: the girls must have been occupied in one of the tedious copying or memorising exercises that were so much a part of Charlotte’s pedagogy. How did she hide her pleasure at the contents of the little package, a gift perfectly suited to her taste? Perhaps she could not, for inside the zig-zag wrapping was a small piece of pale wood, too thin to be anything other than crating, with the following written on it in ink: “Je tiens ce morceau du cercueil de Ste Hélène du/prince Achille Murat qui le tenais du prince de Joinville./Lebel.” It was a piece of “Napoleon’s coffin,” or, rather, since Napoleon was famously coffined in tin within mahogany within lead, possibly a piece of the outer casings in which the great man’s remains had been brought back to France three years earlier, under the command of his son, the Prince de Joinville, whose former secretary, Joachim-Joseph Lebel, was Heger’s friend and principal of the Athénée. Out of the fog of disregard, Heger had reached out to her with his most personal and thoughtful gift yet, a relic at once to be revered for its connections and regarded with a touch of pleasant mutual cynicism, a continuation of their conversation about the emperor and his British nemesis, and a reminder of her triumphant essay on the subject; a small gift which could be slipped into her hand without fuss, which Madame Heger would never notice, and which, above all, was a token of her abiding place in his thoughts. While the girls were still busy, Charlotte wrote on the spread-out wrapper the exact co-ordinates of place and time of this precious new possession:
August 4th 1843—Brussels—Belgium
1 o’clock pm
Monsieur Heger has just been into the 1st Class and given me this relic—he bought it from his intimate friend M. Lebel.
C. Brontë
Charlotte must have got out this gift as a comfort and talisman many times in the dreary months that followed. The long vacation loomed ahead, but first Madame’s feast day, the feast of Sainte Claire on 12 August, had to be endured, when the directrice appeared with her abundant hair beautifully dressed and in lovely clothes that showed “the extreme whiteness and beauty” of her neck and arms, as one of the pupils recalled, and the swell of her belly, now just beginning to show another pregnancy.
Three days later was speech day, an extraordinary mixture for Charlotte of triumph and desolation. The triumph came when Monsieur Heger, in his most impressively oratorical mode and brimming with pride in himself and his pupil, declaimed Charlotte’s essay on Napoleon to the assembled crowd of Belgian dumplings and their parents. The effect must have been electrifying for Charlotte: her speech for Wellington in Heger’s mouth echoing round the little theatre.*4 On the same day, he presented her with the works of one of his favourite writers, Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, as a prize for her achievement, and in the evening they went out into the Parc and heard a concert at the bandstand, a “wild Jäger chorus.”*5
But speech day meant that term was over. The boarders left, the beds were stripped and covered with dustcloths; the Hegers, with their delightful little brood, headed off to the seaside; an animated, noisy and cheerful departure. The only person left behind with Miss Brontë in the silence and emptiness of the abandoned school was the cook.
Mary Dixon had left Brussels at the end of June to travel to Spa for her health; the Wheelwrights left at the end of August. Charlotte begged Ellen for letters to see her through the gaping weeks of solitude ahead. “It is the first time in my life that I have really dreaded the vacation,” she wrote pathetically. “Alas I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart.”
With so much time and solitude at her disposal, Charlotte found she could neither read nor write with pleasure. She wandered from room to room, unnerved by the silence. Walking the busy city streets was just as distressing: “I know you, living in the country can hardly believe that it is possible life can be monotonous in the centre of a brilliant capital like Brussels,” she wrote to Ellen; “but so it is.”
Charlotte dramatised her feelings of futility and loneliness in an essay—or story—called “Le But de la Vie” (“The Aim of Life”), which she copied with great care and made into a little pamphlet, possibly as a gift for Monsieur’s return. In it, she imagines a student rousing himself from a long period of solitary study to feel disgust at his own empty existence and waste of time. In his heart, he knows that the application that earns him praise from his peers and professors is a form of moral cowardice. The essay ends with the student resolving to dedicate himself to duty, guided by religion and reason alone, but what sticks with the reader is the uncompromising self-condemnation that precedes it: “I flee the world because I do not have the qualities needed to shine in it. Vivacity, grace and liveliness I lack. The taciturn man is always a burden on society…hence he loves solitude because he is at ease in it, a base and contemptible motive that comes from selfishness and indolence.” Couched as a fiction, Charlotte was able to express exactly her own tormented feelings when she was alone at the Pensionnat that August and September, pacing the rooms and revolving constantly on what the aim of her own life could possibly be, and not loving solitude at all.
In the past, at home, Charlotte would have filled her days with writing. She had told Branwell, rather guiltily, of her continued recourse to “the world below,” for want of any other pleasure or distraction. Did she try to compose any more stories for the old heroes of her youth, neglected now for several years? Some of her Angrian texts were probably in her trunk at the Pensionnat—their portability was part of their value—and perhaps she read over them in these lonely weeks and lost herself in the parallel universe they revived. One of the Angrian booklets certainly ended up in Brussels with the Hegers, left behind by the author or, most likely, given as a present. It is a collection of stories written in 1834 and 1835, beginning with “The Spell, An Extravaganza. By Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley” and containing “High Life in Verdopolis” and Lord Charles’s chatty “Scrap Book.” Like all the Angrian manuscripts, it is a marvel of miniaturism and ink engineering, compressing into twenty-four of Charlotte’s own small pages what appears in the modern printed edition in eighty-six. Monsieur Heger, if he was the recipient, is unlikely to have been able to decipher much of it, even with a magnifying glass, and, at more than 60,000 words, the length would have been baffling too.*6
Did Charlotte begin to write a new kind of story in this long period of aimless solitude? She was thinking of doing so. Inside a German exercise book that year, she drew up a plan of a “magazine tale,” listing the elements she thought it should contain:
Country—England
Scene—rural
Rank—middle
Person—first
Subject
Subject…there was a question! Charlotte wrote “Certain remarkable occurrences” against this heading. Other categories were just as comically vague: the opening was to be “cheerful or gloomy,” the plot “domestic—the romantic not excluded.” But by the end of the list, she had adopted the more businesslike tone of a memorandum and was warning herself to “avoid Richardsonian multiplication” in the number of characters (the besetting sin of the Angrian narratives) and to aim for “as much compression—as little explanation as may be.”
Mem. To be set about with proper spirit.
To be carried out with the same.
To be concluded idem.
Observe—no grumbling allowed.
“The Master,” a novel heavily based on her own experience in Brussels in 1842–3 and centring on the relationship between a teacher and his pupil, was completed three years later and could have been started at any time from 1842 onwards, though the final draft seems to follow a different set of objectives than the ones sketched out here: “The Master” strives to be realistic rather than relying for drama on “remarkable occurrences” and is full of what could be jokingly referred to as “grumbling,” the minute probing of injustices, great and small, that became characteristic of all Charlotte’s novels. But the notebook contains an interesting fragment of a different story, at the back:
There was once a large house called Gateshead stood not far from a [illeg.] high-road in the North of England—it is gone now every vestige of it, and the site is [replaced?] by a Railway Station. No great loss was the demolition of that said house for it was never a tasteful or picturesque building.
Charlotte Brontë later said that she always made two or three starts on her novels before settling down, and here we see a very early glimpse of her second novel, Jane Eyre, which opens at the home of Jane’s aunt Reed, Gateshead Hall. It’s odd to think Charlotte may have been hatching the story in the long lonely summer at the Pensionnat.
A cruel twist of fate was that Charlotte’s solitude was broken only by the return at the end of August of the hated Mademoiselle Blanche from her holiday, after which they had to have meals together, conducted in rigid silence, so that Mademoiselle could be in no doubt of Miss Brontë’s “utter dislike.” “[She] never now speaks to me,” Charlotte reported to Emily with satisfaction; “a great relief.” Charlotte took to walking the city streets to keep out of the way, and it was on one of these long days, 1 September, a Friday, that she went out to Saint-Josse-ten-Noode to visit Martha’s grave. After visiting the cemetery, Charlotte cast herself out further into the countryside, as far as she could go before the light began to fail. And that was the day when, coming back into the city at dusk, she let herself be drawn into the confessional at SS-Michel-et-Gudule.
“[W]hen people are by themselves they have singular fancies,” she told Emily, trying to relate this wholly uncharacteristic episode in a detached, almost anthropological manner, stressing novelties about the experience that she knew would interest her sister. “They do not go into the sort of pew or cloister which the priest occupies, but kneel down on the steps and confess through a grating. Both the confessor and the penitent whisper very low, you can hardly hear their voices.” When her turn came, she explained, and the little wooden door behind the grating that separated her from the priest opened, Charlotte of course did not know what to do. “It was a funny position,” she told Emily. “I felt precisely as I did when alone on the Thames at midnight.” As on that strange, dark tide, Charlotte faced the unknown with an instinctive resolve to see it through, and though the priest, on hearing that she was a Protestant, at first refused to hear her confession, “I was determined to confess.”
The corresponding scenes that form a crisis in Villette, the novel Charlotte wrote almost ten years later, could hardly be more different in tone. There is no joking or detachment here, though strung through the text are exact words and phrases from Charlotte’s letter to Emily, and the movement of the narrative as the heroine is drawn into the salut by the bell as she passes the church, and joins the waiting penitents almost unawares, is identical. The incident in the novel is powered by the extraordinary force of mental horror that Lucy Snowe has experienced just before, alone in the Pensionnat:
The solitude and the stillness of the long dormitory could not be borne any longer; the ghostly white beds were turning into spectres—the coronal of each became a death’s head, huge and snow-bleached—dead dreams of an elder world and mightier race lay frozen in their wide gaping eye-holes.
This, from the perspective of 1852, has all the weight of the horrors Charlotte had lived through by that time, the devastating tragedies of her siblings’ deaths. But her connection of that ravaged mental landscape with her time in extremis in Brussels is telling. These were consonant tides of suffering.
And Lucy’s commerce with the priest in the confessional may give us a clue to what Charlotte Brontë said to the priest in the cathedral: not a confession of a sin or crime, not illicit love, but “the mere outline of my experience.” Rather in the manner of unburdening oneself to a therapist or analyst, Lucy gains relief from “pouring out of some portion of long accumulating, long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again diffused.”
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WHEN THE HEGERS RETURNED from holiday and the school reassembled, Charlotte felt more homesick and isolated than ever. “They are at their idolatrous ‘Messe,’ ” she reported to Emily scornfully,
and I am here, that is, in the Refectoire. I should like uncommonly to be in the dining-room at home, or in the kitchen, or in the back kitchen. I should like even to be cutting up the hash, with the clerk and some register-people at the other table, and you standing by, watching that I put enough flour, not too much pepper, and, above all, that I save the best pieces of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper; the first of which personages would be jumping about the dish and carving-knife, and the latter standing like a devouring flame on the kitchen-floor…How divine are these recollections to me at this moment!
But she felt that she lacked a “pretext” for coming home: “I have an idea that I should be of no use there; a sort of aged person upon the parish.”
Emily was clearly concerned about Charlotte’s state of mind after receiving the letter about her confession and may have emphasised the severity of some news from home about the deterioration of their father’s eyesight in order to sway Charlotte towards home and the call of duty; her father’s condition certainly became Charlotte’s presenting anxiety over the next few years. Emily might also have reported the gossip that was circulating in Haworth in October 1843 about the amount of alcohol the minister drank. Concern was such that the chairman of the Haworth Church Lands Trust and his wife had called at the Parsonage to assess the situation, after which Brontë issued a defiant denial, saying he would “single out one or two of these slanderers and…prosecute them, as the Law directs.” Perhaps some of his political enemies remarked that Brontë was both a founder member of the Haworth Temperance Society and a regular customer of James and Richard Thomas, wine merchants; someone had certainly complained that he smelt of alcohol. He had been using a lotion for his eyes, he explained, “and they have ascribed the smell of that to a smell of a more exceptionable character.”
Patrick Brontë’s behaviour was always sufficiently volatile to be interpreted as drunkenness, even when he was sober, and his eyesight was clouded by cataracts, so it is easy to see how he might have appeared drunk. But he became very defensive about the matter, preserving a copy of a letter to his old friend John Outhwaite of Bradford Infirmary in September 1844 with the words “to be retained—semper,” as if in expectation of having to produce evidence in his own defence. The letter signed off on their friendship in a stiff and proud way, and, though the editor of Brontë’s letters speculates that this break might have been over politics (Outhwaite was always more rigidly conservative than Brontë), it smacks of something more personal and painful. Brontë had been sufficiently anxious about accusations of alcoholism to insist on getting his doctor’s signature back in 1838 to a recommendation that, as a remedy for dyspepsia, he should take a glass of wine or spirits before dinner. And in 1841 one of his unsolicited letters of advice to The Leeds Intelligencer was on the medicinal value of a mixture of brandy and salt (proportions unstated), even to those not given to drink: “Should any timid, over-scrupulous person imagine that this might lead to habits of intemperance, let him consider that such a melancholy result could never take place except where there was a previous bias, and that even where such a bias existed, the nauseous taste of the mixture I speak of would be far more likely to give a disrelish than an inclination for intoxicating liquors.”
Years later, Ellen Nussey claimed that Charlotte hurried home from Brussels on hearing that her father—in company with his curate Mr. Smith—“had fallen into habits of intemperance.” Ellen knew little, then or later, of Charlotte’s racking misery over Constantin Heger, so may have misinterpreted some of the tensions in the household at the time, but insisted that she had been told about Reverend Brontë’s problem “by C. B. herself,” who, she reported, “remedied the evil…quietly and firmly” on arrival home.
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IN EARLY OCTOBER, Charlotte’s nerve snapped and she went to Madame to give in her notice. The directrice, now just a few weeks away from the birth of her fourth daughter, accepted the resignation, probably with some relief, but when he was told about the move, her husband reacted very differently and called for Charlotte. His “vehemence” against her decision surprised her and beat her down—“I could not at that time have persevered in my intention without exciting him to passion”—but the scene was far from tender or gratifying, and since her departure was only delayed six weeks after this date, Heger’s determination that she should stay till Christmas was probably prompted by reasons of orderliness and prior commitments, not least his wife’s imminent confinement and the necessity of finding a replacement for the departing teacher.
The day after reporting this to Ellen, Charlotte sat at her desk on the estrade above the girls she was supervising, took her pen and wrote the following, neatly, inside the much-scribbled-on back boards of her copy of Russell’s General Atlas of Modern Geography, brought from home:
Brussels—Saturday Morning Octbr 14th 1843.—First Class—I am very cold—there is no Fire—I wish I were at home With Papa—Branwell Emily Anne & Tabby—I am tired of being amongst foreigners it is a dreary life—especially as there is only one person in this house worthy of being liked, also another who seems a rosy sugar-plum but I know her to be coloured chalk—
Charlotte used the unprinted backs of the maps in Russell’s General Atlas as empty pages for doodling: she drew idealised heads, made lists and notes, and, very interestingly, totted up long calculations to do with lines and words, like the word count of a work in progress. Among the doodles is a romantic veiled female in three-quarter length, a bald man, a sharp-featured, frowning woman, a strange giant figure dancing among tiny ones, buildings, scribbles, eyes, mouths. There is also a queer little pencil drawing, on the reverse of the map of Australasia, of a young woman.*7 Her chin is resting on her right hand. She has hair parted in the middle and tied out of sight, a wide brow, prominent eyebrows and large, deep-set eyes, a long nose and a mouth that twists up at one side. An unflattering image, but one with the look of having been observed from life rather than imagined. Could this be a self-portrait, made in Charlotte’s long leisureless hours alone? In this season of miserable introspection, might she have done what Jane Eyre does as “wholesome discipline”: sit in front of a mirror and take her own likeness “faithfully; without softening one defect: omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, ‘Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain’ ”?*8 In the novel, the sketching of her own image is Jane’s way of convincing herself that she must not interpret Rochester’s behaviour towards her favourably. To do so is to court humiliation:
“You,” I said, “a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You gifted with the power of pleasing him? You of importance to him in any way? Go! your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference—equivocal tokens, shown by a gentleman of family, and a man of the world, to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe!—Could not even self-interest make you wiser?…It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication…”
A future as a teacher, not a poet, is what Constantin Heger imagined for his English pupil, and right up to the last Charlotte kept repeating the mantra of wanting to set up her own school. The Hegers were keen to encourage that idea and even suggested that they would send one of their own daughters to the Brontës as a pupil, though as the eldest, Pauline, was still only six, that was probably a gesture of goodwill rather than strong intent. Talking about thinking about running a school was one failsafe way to capture a little of Monsieur’s attention, but throughout the whole two years of their acquaintance Charlotte had failed to make him understand that, bold though it might seem, her primary ambition lay quite beyond the classroom. One of her last devoirs for him, “Lettre d’un pauvre Peintre à un grand Seigneur,” tries to make it clear. The letter is hardly at all about patronage, much about problems of artistic self-belief, as a young painter defiantly asserts his right to persevere in an artistic career despite the difficulties ahead: “Do not be indignant at my presumption or accuse me of conceit; I do not know that feeble feeling, the child of vanity; but I know well another feeling, Respect for myself, a feeling born of independence and integrity. Milord, I believe I have Genius.”
“B,” “B,” “tr B,” Heger wrote in the margins, lightly, in pencil. But there was no expansive commentary at the end of the paper, no engagement with the freighted content of this eloquent essay, which seems so directly addressed to him. Miss Brontë was preparing to leave the Pensionnat, and his work with her was “done and well done,” as one of his favourite phrases went.
By the middle of December, Charlotte’s imminent departure was known all round the school and she was amazed to have pupils and fellow teachers express genuine sadness about it. “I did not think it had been in their phlegmatic natures,” she said to Ellen, continuing an ungenerous habit of mind towards the Belgians she had lived with for two years. Mademoiselle Sophie was suddenly being nice to her and giving her souvenirs; the girls were relenting and wishing her well. On 10 December, a Sunday, she was taken to a concert at the Salle de la Grande Harmonie, an episode that she put into Villette in detail. One of the performers was Monsieur Chapelle, and perhaps he and his brother-in-law arranged the treat as a thank you to the departing assistant.
On 29 December, Monsieur Heger devised a little ceremonial that celebrated Charlotte’s achievements at the Pensionnat, presenting her with a diploma, signed by himself and sealed with the seal of the Athénée Royal de Bruxelles, that certified her ability to teach French.*9 When she parted with him three days later, he gave her an anthology of sixteenth-century French verse, which she inscribed, with the same precision as usually accorded his presents: “Given to me by Monsieur Heger on the 1st January 1844, the morning I left Brussels.” This last interview proved overwhelmingly emotional for Charlotte: “I suffered much before I left Brussels—I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with Monsr Heger cost me—It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true and kind and disinterested a friend.” His reciprocal sorrow at parting seems to explain a lot of Charlotte’s subsequent anguish. It calls to mind the scene depicted in Charlotte’s poem “I gave, at first, Attention close” (later inserted into The Professor), where the teacher parting with his star pupil clasps her to his breast, a gesture that, if it happened in real life (as was likely—Heger was French, after all), would certainly have stoked Charlotte’s already heated feelings. It also evokes the scene in Jane Eyre when Jane faces separation from Rochester just as her feelings for him have become clear: “I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in,—with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.”
In the novel, the wrenching pain of separation is miraculously overturned by Rochester’s immediate declaration of love, proposal of marriage and rapturous embraces. In Villette too there is a parting scene that turns into a declaration of love: Paul Emanuel takes Lucy’s hand and pushes back her bonnet to look into her face; later “he gently raised his hand to stroke my hair; it touched my lips in passing; I pressed it close, I paid it tribute.” These tiny gestures, so minutely observed, are full of very obvious sexual meaning in Charlotte’s fiction. But Heger’s gestures proved much harder to read. She could not believe that they had been offered frivolously, or in bad faith, but what were his true feelings, and where might they lead? The erotic charge of her classic novel comes from Charlotte’s obsessive alertness to lovers’ signs, but in her own life she could not control their interpretation at all, or steer them towards a happy ending.
Madame Heger accompanied Charlotte to the packet boat at Ostend, on what must have been a dreadfully uncomfortable journey for both of them. There was a story that as they parted finally, Charlotte turned to her erstwhile employer and said, “Je me vengerai!”—“I will have my revenge!” Such words are very unlikely to have been uttered. But the feelings were certainly there.
*1 Charlotte would have been amused to learn that the teen troublemaker later became a nun (Frederika Macdonald, “The Brontës at Brussels,” 286).
*2 Her version of “Der Taucher” (“The Diver”) was the nearest thing she ever got to writing blank verse; an interesting experiment. See PCB, 357–61.
*3 Since the chalk portrait was in Charlotte’s possession in 1843, and presumably went back to Haworth with her the following year, its eventual home with Martha Brown, along with so many other items of Brontë memorabilia that ended up with her after Charlotte’s death and Arthur Nicholls’s removal to Ireland, is easily explicable.
*4 I am assuming that the year in which Charlotte’s essay was read at the prize day was 1843, not 1842, as Heger himself assigned the date 1843 to the revised version (the one he read from), also the “Mlle C” who gave her recollections of CB to Frederika Macdonald was recalling events almost exclusively from CB’s year as a teacher.
*5 Winifred Gérin (Charlotte Brontë, 238) has shown that Charlotte must have attended the concert that she describes so specifically in Villette, as the programme of music at the bandstand on the evening of 15 August 1843 was the same.
*6 In 1892 it was passing out of the hands of another Brussels resident, E. Nys, to a collector of Brontëana. See the coda for more on the fate of the Brontë papers and relics once in the Hegers’ possession.
*7 Reproduced in the photographs of this book.
*8 To get the face turned aslant a self-portraitist would have to use two mirrors, no difficulty if the artist has access to a dressing table.
*9 Only the envelope now remains (at BPM), but from what she says about it in Life, Mrs. Gaskell must have seen the original in 1856–7.