Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  “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.

  NINE

  Long-looked-for Tidings

  1844–5

  On the morning that the packet steamer took Charlotte back across the Channel, 2 January 1844, the town she was coming home to was astir with excitement at the opening of a new day school in the Church Lane building. It was a proud if anxious occasion for Patrick Brontë, his latest move to fight back against the growing influence of Dissenters in the parish. In Charlotte’s absence, he had secured
a curate for Oxenhope and rented a room in which services could be held (to save parishioners the long walk to St. Michael’s). The day school was another attempt to nurture allegiance to the Established Church.

  There was also a new curate in Haworth since Charlotte was last at home, an Irish graduate of Trinity College Dublin called James Smith, who had arrived in March 1843 (and whom the gossips had claimed was Patrick Brontë’s secret drinking companion). Smith was energetic, but no substitute for William Weightman, and his temperament was too volatile to seem entirely trustworthy.*1 The incumbent was better pleased with his new schoolmaster, Ebenezer Rand, who was only twenty-three but learned and ambitious, and who managed to attract 170 pupils to the day school within the first six months. The usual excitement attending the arrival of a highly eligible young man in a small town was short-lived, for Rand seems to have come to Haworth already intending to marry a woman called Sarah Bacon, which he did that spring, and soon afterwards his reasonable request for an assistant at the school was answered by her appointment as schoolmistress at £20 per annum. Thus he both frustrated local spinsters by not being properly in want of a wife, and must have caused disappointment at the Parsonage with the swift disposal of a job which any of the Brontë sisters would have been glad to take.

  Charlotte was made very much aware of her father’s increased agitation and distraction, and of the deterioration in his sight during her two years abroad, evident in the large, messy characters of his handwriting at this date. In February 1844 Reverend Brontë was putting off visiting the Taylors at the Manor House in Stanbury until there was a thaw, “as my eyes, are very weak, I cannot, very well, go out whilst the snow, is on the ground.” His parish work fell largely on the shoulders of the curate, Mr. Smith, and the household was left to Emily and Charlotte to run.

  Charlotte sought to reassure him about her future by reviving the long-discussed plan for the girls to start up their own school at the Parsonage. She seemed newly motivated in that direction, and the diploma from Monsieur Heger could not have failed to impress her father. But privately Charlotte was terribly despondent and deflated after the heightened emotions of her departure from the rue d’Isabelle. “[T]here are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings except a few friendships and affections are changed from what they used to be,” she wrote to Ellen three weeks after getting home; “something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken—I have fewer illusions—what I wish for now is active exertion— a stake in life—Haworth seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world—I no longer regard myself as young, indeed I shall soon be 28—and it seems as if I ought to be working and braving the rough realities of the world as other people do.” Ought to be working, and could have been: Charlotte’s return to Yorkshire, diplomaed and tri-lingual, had prompted interest in her as a teacher and soon after getting home she had received an invitation to run a large boarding school in Manchester for the impressive sum of £100 a year (which school and by whom is not known).*2 She dismissed the offer for what sounded like a rock-solid reason: her father needed her at home. But was that a valid explanation for passing up an opportunity like the one in Manchester, especially when Emily was at home now for good? Without casting doubt on Charlotte’s genuine concern for her father’s welfare, she was very capable of overlooking it when she really wanted to do something (such as return to Brussels after Aunt Branwell’s death) and capable also of using it as an excuse for inaction, as she did on many occasions over the next years.

  She knew she could not bear to go back to being a governess again, and, although the practical difficulties of setting up her own establishment gave Charlotte many welcome reasons to stay in touch with Constantin Heger, in discussing them with her father, she saw only how unlikely it was that they could afford to convert the Parsonage into a school, or persuade anyone to send their children to it. She seemed in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be rescued by someone or something. And although she wrote to one of her former Belgian pupils (whom she now addressed fondly as “My dear little Victoire”) that she was “not likely” ever to return to Brussels, she told Heger that as soon as she had the money, she would come back to see him, “if it is only for a moment.” “Oh it is certain that I shall see you again one day—it really has to be.”

  She must have begun writing to him almost as soon as she was home, and he replied—not ardently, not quickly, but still, he replied. Perhaps this led Charlotte to think that the thing she wanted most—constant access to Heger’s mind and possession of his attention—might be possible after all. “I look on your letters as one of the greatest joys I know,” she told him unequivocally. “I shall wait patiently to receive them until it pleases and suits you to send them.” By the time she wrote that, in July, she had already incurred Heger’s displeasure for sending “a letter which was hardly rational” (now lost). She swore such a performance would not be repeated (she lied), but at the rue d’Isabelle, Heger must have realised that all his worst fears about Charlotte were turning out to be true. She was obsessed with him, woefully dependent on his attention and behaving more like an incubus than a friend. He didn’t answer.

  None of Heger’s letters to her and only four of Charlotte’s to him survive from what must have been a fairly copious and almost entirely one-sided correspondence. These heartbreaking documents, three of which were torn up at some date and then very carefully mended, are possibly the most wrenching examples of unsolicited, unrequited love laments in our whole literature, “a record of romantic love…that has never before been rivalled,” as Frederika Macdonald described them soon after their publication in 1913. Except that, of course, they were not written as literature. Charlotte Brontë transferred much of the passion and yearning and heartbreak mapped out here into her novels, but she lived it first.

  The first of the surviving letters, written on 24 July 1844, was already far into their correspondence and refers to Heger’s request that she should not write to him again out of turn, a mild enough restriction, given that “letter which was hardly rational” earlier in the year. By writing to him at all on 24 July, Charlotte was breaking the compact, but imagined there had to be some pressing professional reason for his uncommunicativeness—the end of term, the exams. Pathetically, she protested that she didn’t want to “add an atom to the burden…But all the same I can still write you a little letter from time to time—you have given me permission to do so.” It’s clear that Charlotte can’t believe Heger is deliberately ignoring her, can’t believe that his feelings for her could have changed so significantly—or that she could have misinterpreted them in the first place.

  There was indeed, she argued, a real necessity for her to keep in touch with him. She was anxious that she might forget French, she said, so was setting herself half a page a day to memorise and recite aloud, a process that let her imagine they were “chatting” together. Keeping up her fluency was not just a matter of intellectual pride but had a poignant personal motive, which Heger can’t have been comforted to hear: “for I am quite convinced that I shall see you again one day—I don’t know how or when—but it must happen since I so long for it, and then I would not like to stay silent in your presence—it would be too sad to see you and not be able to speak to you.” How like a ghost this makes her sound, a revenant appearing before him but condemned to silence.

  What she really wanted to tell Heger was that she had not given up her true ambition:

  I fear nothing so much as idleness—lack of employment—inertia—lethargy of the faculties—when the body is idle, the spirit suffers cruelly. I would not experience this lethargy if I could write—once upon a time I used to spend whole days, weeks, complete months in writing and not quite in vain since Southey and Coleridge—two of our best authors, to whom I sent some manuscripts were pleased to express their approval of them—but at present my sight is too weak for writing—if I wrote a lot I would become blind.

  Heger would of course have rem
embered the thick glasses from behind which Miss Brontë’s penetrating gaze was projected, her bent form straining over a book, her uncertain apprehension of his approach, and changed expression when she was sure of it. But this claim of incipient blindness (in step, in sympathy, in competition, with her father?) must have sounded neurotic, as it partly was.

  This weakness of sight is a terrible privation for me—without it, do you know what I would do, Monsieur?—I would write a book and I would dedicate it to my literature master—to the only master that I have ever had—to you Monsieur…That cannot be—it must not be thought of—a literary career is closed to me—only that of teaching is open to me—it does not offer the same attractions—never mind, I shall enter upon it and if I do not go far in it, it will not be for want of diligence.