Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Meantime there had arisen the question as to whether better educational advantages would not be obtained at Lille than at Brussels, but further inquiries made by Mr. Jenkins (who proved not to be British Consul in Brussels, but chaplain to the British Embassy) led to the selection of the pensionnat kept by Madame Héger in the Rue d’Isabelle.

  Emily and Charlotte, accompanied by their father, set off sometime during February 1842. Mr. Brontë remained in Brussels one night, and then returned to Haworth. He had prudently written out for himself a list of the French equivalents of the things he might be called upon to ask for during his return journey when he would be without interpreters. Charlotte’s scheme had been carried out in bulk and detail. Just as her father had gone up to Cambridge at the age of twenty-five, in statu pupillari after being a master at an Irish school, so she at the same age, after being a mistress at Miss Wooler’s and governess at Stonegappe and Underwood House, became a pupil again in Madame Héger’s pensionnat.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The external features and internal arrangements of the pensionnat were reproduced by Charlotte with such accurate and photographic detail in The Professor and Villette, that it is unnecessary to describe them. Mrs. Gaskell says that there were eighty to a hundred pupils there at the time, but Charlotte in a letter to Ellen states that there were about forty day pupils and twelve boarders. The terms for board and tuition were 650 francs per annum, so that Miss Branwell’s loan, even if it was only £50, not £100, easily covered the total expenses of the two girls for six months. The boarders all slept in one dormitory, at the far end of which, withdrawn behind a curtain, were Charlotte’s and Emily’s beds. Miss Branwell had paid something extra for this privilege, and Charlotte ‘considered it kind’ of her. It felt strange to her at first to be a pupil and once more ‘to submit to authority instead of exercising it,’ but she liked it. She had come here to learn, in order to fit herself for the future she had planned for herself and her sisters, and the life was congenial and delightful compared with that of a governess. The difference between the sisters and the other pupils in the matter of age, nationality, and religion caused her and Emily to be ‘completely isolated in the midst of numbers,’ but constant occupation and intense interest in it made the time pass only too quickly for her. The great chance was hers, and she meant to drain the utmost drop of profit from it.

  Emily, on the other hand, was throughout her time here entirely wretched. She was always unhappy away from Haworth, the presence of strangers had a more appalling effect on her than even on Charlotte, and when the two on school holidays went to see Mary and Martha Taylor, who were being educated at the Château de Kockleberg, or visited Mrs. Jenkins, Emily sat dumb and miserable. M. Héger and she, Charlotte recorded, ‘did not draw well together at all,’ and otherwise in her letters scarcely mentioned her. But the account she gave of Emily in the prefatory memoir she wrote to her poems after her death is heartrending. She alluded to the misery Emily experienced when at school, and

  now (at Brussels) the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer, but the victory cost her dear.

  It is possible that retrospective exaggeration tinges this account, but Brussels was evidently an inferno to the unhappy girl. Charlotte is strangely at error about Emily’s age in this memoir; she says she was twenty when she went to Brussels, whereas, as a matter of fact, having been born in 1818, she passed her twenty-fourth birthday there.

  During this first sojourn at Brussels, Charlotte wrote very few letters to Ellen. Being amongst strangers produced its invariable reactions, and she found the folk among whom she was thus isolated almost as disagreeable as those of her days of bondage as governess. Madame Héger came off best. She

  is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss Catherine Wooler. I think the severe points are a little softened, because she has not been disappointed and consequently soured. In other words, she is a married instead of a maiden lady.

  (Perhaps this is not so much appreciation of Mme. Héger as depreciation of Miss Wooler.) Then there were the three other mistresses — Mdlle. Blanche, Mdlle. Sophie, Mdlle. Marie:

  The two first have no particular character. One is an old maid, the other will be one. Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original but of repulsive and arbitrary manners.

  Then there is M. Héger:

  A man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament: a little black 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 100 degrees removed from mild and gentlemanlike.... The few private lessons M. Héger has vouchsafed to give us are, I suppose, to be considered a great favour, and I can perceive they have already excited much spite and jealousy in the school.

  Brussels, she found, was a selfish city, and this a selfish school.

  If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls in this school, it is a character singularly cold, selfish, animal, and inferior ... their principles are rotten to the core.

  Their religion was as vile as themselves.

  My advice to all Protestants who are tempted to do anything so besotted as to turn Catholics is, to walk over the sea on to the continent; to attend Mass sedulously for a time; to note well the mummeries thereof; also the idiotic mercenary aspect of all the priests; and then, if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble, childish piece of humbug, let them turn Papists at once — that’s all.

  In spite of these disagreeable companions and uncongenial surroundings, Charlotte found that Brussels was fulfilling her expectations; it is evident also that Monsieur and Madame thought highly of the abilities of both the sisters, for in an undated letter to Ellen, Charlotte writes:

  I consider it doubtful whether I shall come home in September or not. Madame Héger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay another half-year, offering to dismiss her English master, and take me as English teacher: also to employ Emily some part of the day in teaching music to a certain number of the pupils. For these services we are to be allowed to continue our studies in French and German, and to have board, etc., without paying for it: no salaries, however, are offered.

  It is clear that this proposal must have been accepted by Charlotte on behalf of Emily and herself, though by the original arrangement they would have returned to England in August, at the end of their six months, for they both stopped at Brussels, through the vacances, into the new term which opened in September, and Charlotte began giving English lessons to younger pupils and Emily was teaching them the piano. Emily was now ‘drawing together better’ with M. Héger, and Charlotte, with a dryness that contrasts curiously with the passionate and perhaps remorseful tenderness of her subsequent memoir, says that ‘Monsieur et Madame Héger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character, under her singularities.’ Subsequently M. Héger spoke in the very highest terms of Emily’s abilities, ranking them far above Charlotte’s, both in mental grasp and in imaginative power.

  The two sisters were therefore now installed as pupil teachers at the pensionnat for another half-year. Charlotte, it may be remembered, had told Emily she did not propose to come back to England under twelve months. Late in October, Martha Taylor, Mary’s sister, died suddenly at the Château de Kockleberg; Charlotte wrote of her very tenderly in Shirley as Jessie Yorke. Then on November 2nd Charlotte got news of Miss Branwell’s serious illness, and, on the next day, of her death. The sisters sailed from Antwerp on the 6th, arriv
ing at Haworth two days afterwards, to find the funeral was over. Though Miss Branwell had supplied the funds wherewith Charlotte had realised her dream of going to Brussels, she had never had any affection for her aunt, and writing to Ellen immediately afterwards, she expressed neither sorrow nor gratitude. ‘All was over,’ she says. ‘We shall see her no more. Papa is pretty well’; then a fortnight later, inviting her friend to Haworth, she says: ‘Do not fear to find us melancholy or depressed, we are all much as usual. You will see no difference from our former demeanour.’ There is no further allusion in her subsequent letters either to Miss Branwell or to Mr. Weightman, Celia Amelia, whose death had preceded Miss Branwell’s by a few days.

  Patrick Branwell Brontë

  Branwell throughout this year had been living at Haworth since his dismissal from Luddenden Foot. He had there made friends with a young engineer on the Leeds and Manchester line, Francis H. Grundy, who was immensely impressed, even as the commercial travellers at the ‘Black Bull’ had been, by the brilliance of Branwell’s conversation, and was perfectly frank regarding his drunken habits. In his Pictures of the Past he tells us that Branwell, just before he made his acquaintance, had been in the habit also of taking opium, in emulation of De Quincey, but broke himself of it, though before the end of his life he resumed it again. There are several letters from Branwell to him during this year. Branwell had asked him if he could get him another appointment in the employment of the railway, but was not surprised to hear that there was no chance of it. He wisely rejected the idea of going into the Church, remarking that ‘I have not one mental qualification, save perhaps hypocrisy, which would make me cut a figure in the pulpit.’ He alone seems to have felt any regret for Miss Branwell’s death, whose favourite he had always been, and refers to her, who, he said, had been his mother for twenty years, with sincere feeling. He cannot at this period have been the utter wreck which he is represented to have been, for after this year at Haworth he became tutor to Mr. Robinson’s boys at Thorp Green, where Anne was already governess; they went there together directly after the Christmas holidays, and remained there for the next two years and a half. This Christmas of 1842, Mrs. Gaskell tells us, ‘they all enjoyed inexpressibly. Branwell was with them; that was always a pleasure at this time.’

  Mrs. Gaskell makes some curiously erroneous statements with regard to Miss Branwell’s will and the disposition of her money. She states:

  The small property which she had accumulated by dint of personal frugality and self-denial, was bequeathed to her nieces. Branwell, her darling, was to have had his share: but his reckless expenditure had distressed the good old lady, and his name was omitted in her will.

  Subsequent biographers have followed her without troubling to verify her information, and we find Miss Robinson (Mme. Duclaux), for instance, closely paraphrasing Mrs. Gaskell. She says:

  The little property she (Miss Branwell) had saved out of her frugal income was all left to her three nieces. Branwell had been her darling, her only son, called by her name, but his disgrace had wounded her too deeply. He was not even mentioned in her will.

  These statements, which have passed into accredited Brontë-Saga, are so wide of the truth that it is worth while correcting their errors. The facts are these: Miss Branwell’s will was drawn up at York on April 30, 1833, and it was this will, made more than nine years before, which was now proved. At the time when she made her will Branwell was fifteen years old, and it is quite impossible that at that age ‘his reckless expenditure’ or his ‘disgrace’ had caused his aunt to revoke a previous will, and cut him off from the share she had intended for him; nor is there the slightest reason to suppose that any such previous will ever existed. He was, moreover, mentioned in her will: she left of her personal effects an Indian workbox to Charlotte, her china-topped workbox and an ivory fan to Emily, her Japan dressing-box to Branwell, her watch and various trinkets to Anne. Again, she did not leave her capital to her three nieces, but to four nieces, the Brontë girls being three of them, the fourth, Anne Kingston, being the daughter of another sister. Her capital was proved at ‘under £1500’ (i.e. over £1400), and her income of £50 a year was derived from it, and was not the result of frugality; she had been left it by her father. A further provision in her will was that her property should be divided between her nieces when the youngest of them attained the age of twenty-one. Anne, the youngest, at the time of her death was twenty-two, and therefore as soon as the will was proved the three sisters each came into a sum of over £300.

  On the sudden departure of Charlotte and Emily from Brussels owing to their aunt’s death, M. Héger wrote a letter to Mr. Brontë, which they brought with them. He spoke in it of his great regret, due to more than one cause, at their leaving the school; and this letter certainly must have carried great weight in determining the decision which so profoundly affected Charlotte’s future life and work. He wrote:

  En perdant nos deux chères élèves, nous ne devons pas vous cacher que nous éprouvons à la fois et du chagrin et de l’inquiétude; nous sommes affligés parce que cette brusque séparation vient briser l’affection presque paternelle que nous leur avons vouée, et notre peine s’augmente à la vue de tant de travaux interrompus, de tant de choses bien commencées, et qui ne demandent que quelque temps encore pour être menées à bonne fin. Dans un an chacune de vos demoiselles eût été entièrement prémunie contre les éventualités de l’avenir; chacune d’elles acquérait à la fois et l’instruction et la science d’enseignement: ... encore un an tout au plus et l’œuvre était achevée et bien achevée. Alors nous aurions pu, si cela vous eût convenu, offrir à mesdemoiselles vos filles ou du moins à l’une des deux une position qui eût été dans ses goûts, et qui lui eût donné cette douce indépendance si difficile à trouver pour une jeune personne.... Nous savons, Monsieur, que vous pèserez plus mûrement et plus sagement que nous la conséquence qu’aurait pour l’avenir une interruption complète dans les études de vos deux filles; vous déciderez ce qu’il faut faire, et vous nous pardonnerez notre franchise, si vous daignez considérer que le motif qui nous fait agir est une affection bien désintéressée et qui s’affligerait beaucoup de devoir déjà se résigner à n’être plus utile à vos chères enfants.

  The effect of so emphatic and so kindly a persuasion might easily and naturally have determined Charlotte to go back to Brussels, as M. Héger strongly advised; Madame also, who up till now was on excellent terms with her, wrote her a kind and affectionate letter. Indeed, on the face of it, there seemed to be every reason for so doing. Emily, who, as Charlotte says in her memoir, had barely with the utmost power of her resolution got through the ordeal of living away from Haworth, would remain at the Parsonage with her father, while she went back to complete the education through which all the sisters would jointly profit when their school was established. Moreover, there was now no difficulty about money; they had, all three of them, come into a sum of £300, left them by Miss Branwell; besides, as it turned out, Mme. Héger amended her original offer of merely granting Charlotte board and tuition free, in return for the English class she was to hold, and gave her in addition a salary of £16. As the charges for board and tuition were only £26 a year, Charlotte got food, lodging, and tuition for £10. Yet in spite of all this, in spite of the fact that it was strictly in accordance with her principles about all girls, not Brontës alone, making their way in the world, that she should return to Brussels, and that Anne should go back to her post as governess at Thorp Green, Charlotte subsequently wrote to Ellen, saying:

  I returned to Brussels after aunt’s death against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.

  Now these are strong expressions, and for many years controversy raged over them. It was hard to understand why it should have been against Charlotte’s conscience to return there in accordance with M. Héger’s very kind and competent advice, and continue
the course which had been broken off by the purely extraneous circumstance of Miss Bramwell’s death, or why it should have been ‘senseless folly’ so to do, or why this senseless folly, which apparently was so eminently reasonable and wise, should have resulted in so long a forfeit of happiness and peace of mind. The only conjecture that was made by those who knew Charlotte best, namely, her friend Ellen Nussey and her subsequent husband Mr. Nicholls, was that she felt she ought to have stopped at home to look after her father, for he, like Branwell, drank too much, and her firm presence at Haworth might have checked this tendency. Therein we are let into another grim secret of the life at the Parsonage, but, as revelations which came out more than fifty years afterwards proved, this conjecture was not the real reason.

  Certain students of Charlotte’s novels formed another theory. They knew (as who does not?) that she used in her books every possible scrap of personal experience: there was never an author of fiction who owed so much to her own actual life. Cowan Bridge School, her sufferings as governess, the curates, her friends Mary and Martha Taylor, her sister Emily, the scenery and setting of her books, and, above all, she herself are drawn often photographically and without disguise. These students, working on a sound principle, found in Villette numbers of such portraits of M. Héger and the rest; the pensionnat in the Rue d’Isabelle was presented with the most exact fidelity, down to minute details, and they conjectured that Lucy Snowe’s passionate devotion to her teacher, Paul Emmanuel, was a fictional but faithful transcript of Charlotte’s feelings for M. Héger. The whole of the book, so they rightly pointed out, was a slice carved from her life: it was reasonable to suppose that the central motif was carved from it too. Such a theory also explained the nature of ‘the irresistible impulse’ to return to Brussels, and why this ‘selfish folly’ had so disastrous an effect on her happiness: Charlotte would scarcely (so they argued) have applied ‘irresistible impulse’ to her desire to learn more German, nor, since this acquisition was to result in benefit for her sisters as well, was this scholastic ambition a selfish folly. There was something more. She knew, they suggested, that she was falling in love with M. Héger and could not resist that fatal and dangerous impulse to go back to him.