Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  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 b
e 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, s
elf-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.