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:
Time—from 30 to 50 years ago
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 dr
ama 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.”
—
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 R
everend Brontë’s problem “by C. B. herself,” who, she reported, “remedied the evil…quietly and firmly” on arrival home.
—
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:
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