Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  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 nev
er 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 als
o 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.”