Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle Part 9

CHAPTER IV: THE PENSIONNAT HEGER, BRUSSELS

Had not the impulse come to Charlotte Bronte to add somewhat to her scholastic accomplishments by a sojourn in Brussels, our literature would have lost that powerful novel _Villette_, and the singularly charming _Professor_. The impulse came from the persuasion that without 'languages' the school project was an entirely hopeless one. Mary and Martha Taylor were at Brussels, staying with friends, and thence they had sent kindly presents to Charlotte, at this time raging under the yoke of governess at Upperwood House. Charlotte wrote the diplomatic letter to her aunt which ended so satisfactorily. {96} The good lady--Miss Branwell was then about sixty years of age--behaved handsomely by her nieces, and it was agreed that Charlotte and Emily were to go to the Continent, Anne retaining her post of governess with Mrs. Robinson at Thorp Green. But Brussels schools did not seem at the first blush to be very satisfactory. Something better promised at Lille.

Here is a letter written at this period of hesitation and doubt. A portion of it only was printed by Mrs. Gaskell.

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'_January_ 20_th_, 1842.

'DEAR ELLEN,--I cannot quite enter into your friends' reasons for not permitting you to come to Haworth; but as it is at present, and in all human probability will be for an indefinite time to come, impossible for me to get to Brookroyd, the balance of accounts is not so unequal as it might otherwise be. We expect to leave England in less than three weeks, but we are not yet certain of the day, as it will depend upon the convenience of a French lady now in London, Madame Marzials, under whose escort we are to sail. Our place of destination is changed. Papa received an unfavourable account from Mr. or rather Mrs. Jenkins of the French schools in Brussels, and on further inquiry, an Inst.i.tution in Lille, in the North of France, was recommended by Baptist Noel and other clergymen, and to that place it is decided that we are to go. The terms are fifty pounds for each pupil for board and French alone.

'I considered it kind in aunt to consent to an extra sum for a separate room. We shall find it a great privilege in many ways. I regret the change from Brussels to Lille on many accounts, chiefly that I shall not see Martha Taylor. Mary has been indefatigably kind in providing me with information. She has grudged no labour, and scarcely any expense, to that end. Mary's price is above rubies. I have, in fact, two friends--you and her--staunch and true, in whose faith and sincerity I have as strong a belief as I have in the Bible.

I have bothered you both, you especially; but you always get the tongs and heap coals of fire upon my head. I have had letters to write lately to Brussels, to Lille, and to London. I have lots of chemises, night-gowns, pocket-handkerchiefs, and pockets to make, besides clothes to repair. I have been, every week since I came home, expecting to see Branwell, and he has never been able to get over yet. We fully expect him, however, next Sat.u.r.day. Under these circ.u.mstances how can I go visiting? You tantalise me to death with talking of conversations by the fireside. Depend upon it, we are not to have any such for many a long month to come. I get an interesting impression of old age upon my face, and when you see me next I shall certainly wear caps and spectacles.--Yours affectionately,

'C. B.'

This Mr. Jenkins was chaplain to the British Emba.s.sy at Brussels, and not Consul, as Charlotte at first supposed. The brother of his wife was a clergyman living in the neighbourhood of Haworth. Mr. Jenkins, whose English Episcopal chapel Charlotte attended during her stay in Brussels, finally recommended the Pensionnat Heger in the Rue d'Isabelle. Madame Heger wrote, accepting the two girls as pupils, and to Brussels their father escorted them in February 1842, staying one night at the house of Mr. Jenkins and then returning to Haworth.

The life of Charlotte Bronte at Brussels has been mirrored for us with absolute accuracy in _Villette_ and _The Professor_. That, indeed, from the point of view of local colour, is made sufficiently plain to the casual visitor of to-day who calls in the Rue d'Isabelle. The house, it is true, is dismantled with a view to its incorporation into some city buildings in the background, but one may still eat pears from the 'old and huge fruit-trees' which flourished when Charlotte and Emily walked under them half a century ago; one may still wander through the school-rooms, the long dormitories, and into the 'vine-draped _berceau_'--little enough is changed within and without. Here is the dormitory with its twenty beds, the two end ones being occupied by Emily and Charlotte, they alone securing the privilege of age or English eccentricity to curtain off their beds from the gaze of the eighteen girls who shared the room with them. The crucifix, indeed, has been removed from the niche in the _Oratoire_ where the children offered up prayer every morning; but with a copy of _Villette_ in hand it is possible to restore every feature of the place, not excluding the adjoining Athenee with its small window overlooking the garden of the Pensionnat and the _allee defendu_. It was from this window that Mr.

Crimsworth of _The Professor_ looked down upon the girls at play. It was here, indeed, at the Royal Athenee, that M. Heger was Professor of Latin.

Externally, then, the Pensionnat Heger remains practically the same as it appeared to Charlotte and Emily Bronte in February 1842, when they made their first appearance in Brussels. The Rue Fossette of _Villette_, the Rue d'Isabelle of _The Professor_, is the veritable Rue d'Isabelle of Currer Bell's experience.

What, however, shall we say of the people who wandered through these rooms and gardens--the hundred or more children, the three or four governesses, the professor and his wife? Here there has been much speculation and not a little misreading of the actual facts. Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to learn. They did learn with energy. It was their first experience of foreign travel, and it came too late in life for them to enter into it with that breadth of mind and tolerance of the customs of other lands, lacking which the Englishman abroad is always an offence. Charlotte and Emily hated the land and people. They had been brought up ultra-Protestants. Their father was an Ulster man, and his one venture into the polemics of his age was to attack the proposals for Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. With this inheritance of intolerance, how could Charlotte and Emily face with kindliness the Romanism which they saw around them? How heartily they disapproved of it many a picture in _Villette_ has made plain to us.

Charlotte had been in Brussels three months when she made the friends.h.i.+p to which I am indebted for anything that there may be to add to this episode in her life. Miss Laet.i.tia Wheelwright was one of five sisters, the daughters of a doctor in Lower Phillimore Place, Kensington. Dr.

Wheelwright went to Brussels for his health and for his children's education. The girls were day boarders at the Pensionnat, but they lived in the house for a full month or more at a time when their father and mother were on a trip up the Rhine. Otherwise their abode was a flat in the Hotel Clusyenaar in the Rue Royale, and there during her later stay in Brussels Charlotte frequently paid them visits. In this earlier period Charlotte and Emily were too busy with their books to think of 'calls' and the like frivolities, and it must be confessed also that at this stage Laet.i.tia Wheelwright would have thought it too high a price for a visit from Charlotte to receive as a fellow-guest the apparently unamiable Emily. Miss Wheelwright, who was herself fourteen years of age when she entered the Pensionnat Heger, recalls the two sisters, thin and sallow-looking, pacing up and down the garden, friendless and alone. It was the sight of Laet.i.tia standing up in the cla.s.s-room and glancing round with a semi-contemptuous air at all these Belgian girls which attracted Charlotte Bronte to her. 'It was so very English,' Miss Bronte laughingly remarked at a later period to her friend. There was one other English girl at this time of sufficient age to be companionable; but with Miss Maria Miller, whom Charlotte Bronte has depicted under the guise of Ginevra Fanshawe, she had less in common. In later years Miss Miller became Mrs. Robertson, the wife of an author in one form or another.

To Miss Wheelwright, and those of her sisters who are still living, the descriptions of the Pensionnat Heger which are given in _Villette_ and _The Professor_ are perfectly accurate. M. Heger, with his heavy black moustache and his black hair, entering the cla.s.s-room of an evening to read to his pupils was a sufficiently familiar object, and his keen intelligence amounting almost to genius had affected the Wheelwright girls as forcibly as it had done the Brontes. Mme. Heger, again, for ever peeping from behind doors and through the plate-gla.s.s part.i.tions which separate the pa.s.sages from the school-rooms, was a constant source of irritation to all the English pupils. This prying and spying is, it is possible, more of a fine art with the school-mistresses of the Continent than with those of our own land. In any case, Mme. Heger was an accomplished spy, and in the midst of the most innocent work or recreation the pupils would suddenly see a pair of eyes pierce the dusk and disappear. This, and a hundred similar trifles, went to build up an antipathy on both sides, which had, however, scarcely begun when Charlotte and Emily were suddenly called home by their aunt's death in October. A letter to Miss Nussey on her return sufficiently explains the situation.

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'HAWORTH, _November_ 10_th_, 1842.

'MY DEAR ELLEN,--I was not yet returned to England when your letter arrived. We received the first news of aunt's illness, Wednesday, Nov. 2nd. We decided to come home directly. Next morning a second letter informed us of her death. We sailed from Antwerp on Sunday; we travelled day and night and got home on Tuesday morning--and of course the funeral and all was over. We shall see her no more. Papa is pretty well. We found Anne at home; she is pretty well also. You say you have had no letter from me for a long time. I wrote to you three weeks ago. When you answer this note, I will write to you more in detail. Aunt, Martha Taylor, and Mr. Weightman are now all gone; how dreary and void everything seems. Mr. Weightman's illness was exactly what Martha's was--he was ill the same length of time and died in the same manner. Aunt's disease was internal obstruction; she also was ill a fortnight.

'Good-bye, my dear Ellen.

'C. BRONTE.'

The aunt whose sudden death brought Charlotte and Emily Bronte thus hastily from Brussels to Haworth must have been a very sensible woman in the main. She left her money to those of her nieces who most needed it.

A perusal of her will is not without interest, and indeed it will be seen that it clears up one or two errors into which Mrs. Gaskell and subsequent biographers have rashly fallen through failing to expend the necessary half-guinea upon a copy. This is it:--

Extracted from the District Probate Registry at York attached to Her Majesty's High Court of Justice.

_Depending on the Father_, _Son_, _and Holy Ghost for peace here_, _and glory and bliss forever hereafter_, _I leave this my last Will and Testament_: _Should I die at Haworth_, _I request that my remains may be deposited in the church in that place as near as convenient to the remains of my dear sister_; _I moreover will that all my just debts and funeral expenses be paid out of my property_, _and that my funeral shall be conducted in a moderate and decent manner_. _My Indian workbox I leave to my niece_, _Charlotte Bronte_; _my workbox with a china top I leave to my niece_, _Emily Jane Bronte_, _together with my ivory fan_; _my j.a.pan dressing-box I leave to my nephew_, _Patrick Branwell Bronte_; _to my niece Anne Bronte_, _I leave my watch with all that belongs to it_; _as also my eye-gla.s.s and its chain_, _my rings_, _silver-spoons_, _books_, _clothes_, _etc._, _etc._, _I leave to be divided between my above-named three nieces_, _Charlotte Bronte_, _Emily Jane Bronte_, _and Anne Bronte_, _according as their father shall think proper_. _And I will that all the money that shall remain_, _including twenty-five pounds sterling_, _being the part of the proceeds of the sale of my goods which belong to me in consequence of my having advanced to my sister Kingston the sum of twenty-five pounds in lieu of her share of the proceeds of my goods aforesaid_, _and deposited in the bank of Bolitho Sons and Co._, _Esqrs._, _of Chiandower_, _near Penzance_, _after the aforesaid sums and articles shall have been paid and deducted_, _shall be put into some safe bank or lent on good landed security_, _and there left to acc.u.mulate for the sole benefit of my four nieces_, _Charlotte Bronte_, _Emily Jane Bronte_, _Anne Bronte_, _and Elizabeth Jane Kingston_; _and this sum or sums_, _and whatever other property I may have_, _shall be equally divided between them when the youngest of them then living shall have arrived at the age of twenty-one years_. _And should any one or more of these my four nieces die_, _her or their part or parts shall be equally divided amongst the survivors_; _and if but one is left_, _all shall go to that one_: _And should they all die before the age of twenty-one years_, _all their parts shall be given to my sister_, _Anne Kingston_; _and should she die before that time specified_, _I will that all that was to have been hers shall be equally divided between all the surviving children of my dear brother and sisters_. _I appoint my brother-in-law_, _the Rev. P. Bronte_, A.B., _now Inc.u.mbent of Haworth_, _Yorks.h.i.+re_; _the Rev. John Fennell_, _now Inc.u.mbent of Cross Stone_, _near Halifax_; _the Rev. Theodore Dury_, _Rector of Keighley_, _Yorks.h.i.+re_; _and Mr. George Taylor of Stanbury_, _in the chapelry of Haworth aforesaid_, _my executors_.

_Written by me_, ELIZABETH BRANWELL, _and signed_, _sealed_, _and delivered on the_ 30_th_ _of April_, _in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-three_, ELIZABETH BRANWELL.

_Witnesses present_, _William Brown_, _John Tootill_, _William Brown_, _Junr_.

_The twenty-eighth day of December_, 1842, _the Will of_ ELIZABETH BRANWELL, _late of Haworth_, _in the parish of Bradford_, _in the county of York_, _spinster (having bona notabilia within the province of York_). _Deceased was proved in the prerogative court of York by the oaths of the Reverend Patrick Bronte_, _clerk_, _brother-in-law_; _and George Taylor_, _two of the executors to whom administration was granted_ (_the Reverend Theodore Dury_, _another of the executors_, _having renounced_), _they having been first sworn duly to administer_.

Effects sworn under 1500 pounds.

Testatrix died 29th October 1842.

Now hear Mrs. Gaskell:--

_The small property_, _which she had acc.u.mulated 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_.

A perusal of the will in question indicates that it was made in 1833, before Branwell had paid his first visit to London, and when, as all his family supposed, he was on the high road to fame and fortune as an artist. The old lady doubtless thought that the boy would be able to take good care of himself. She had, indeed, other nieces down in Cornwall, but with the general sympathy of her friends and relatives in Penzance, Elizabeth Jane Kingston, who it was thought would want it most, was to have a share. Had the Kingston girl, her mother, and the Bronte girls all died before him, the boy Branwell, it will be seen, would have shared the property with his Branwell cousins in Penzance, of whom two are still alive. In any case, Branwell's name was mentioned, and he received 'my j.a.pan dressing-box,' whatever that may have been worth.

Three or four letters, above and beyond these already published, were written by Charlotte to her friend in the interval between Miss Branwell's death and her return to Brussels; and she paid a visit to Miss Nussey at Brookroyd, and it was returned.

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'HAWORTH, _November_ 20_th_, 1842.

'DEAR ELLEN,--I hope your brother is sufficiently recovered now to dispense with your constant attendance. Papa desires his compliments to you, and says he should be very glad if you could give us your company at Haworth a little while. Can you come on Friday next? I mention so early a day because Anne leaves us to return to York on Monday, and she wishes very much to see you before her departure. I think your brother is too good-natured to object to your coming.

There is little enough pleasure in this world, and it would be truly unkind to deny to you and me that of meeting again after so long a separation. Do not fear to find us melancholy or depressed. We are all much as usual. You will see no difference from our former demeanour. Send an immediate answer.

'My love and best wishes to your sister and mother.

'C. BRONTE.'

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'HAWORTH, _November_ 25_th_, 1842.

'MY DEAR ELLEN,--I hope that invitation of yours was given in real earnest, for I intend to accept it. I wish to see you, and as in a few weeks I shall probably again leave England, I will not be too delicate and ceremonious and so let the present opportunity pa.s.s.

Something says to me that it will not be too convenient to have a guest at Brookroyd while there is an invalid there--however, I listen to no such suggestions. Anne leaves Haworth on Tuesday at 6 o'clock in the morning, and we should reach Bradford at half-past eight.

There are many reasons why I should have preferred your coming to Haworth, but as it appears there are always obstacles which prevent that, I'll break through ceremony, or pride, or whatever it is, and, like Mahomet, go to the mountain which won't or can't come to me.

The coach stops at the Bowling Green Inn, in Bradford. Give my love to your sister and mother.

'C. BRONTE.'

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

'HAWORTH, _January_ 10_th_, 1843.

'DEAR NELL,--It is a singular state of things to be obliged to write and have nothing worth reading to say. I am glad you got home safe.

You are an excellent good girl for writing to me two letters, especially as they were such long ones. Branwell wants to know why you carefully exclude all mention of him when you particularly send your regards to every other member of the family. He desires to know whether and in what he has offended you, or whether it is considered improper for a young lady to mention the gentlemen of a house. We have been one walk on the moors since you left. We have been to Keighley, where we met a person of our acquaintance, who uttered an interjection of astonishment on meeting us, and when he could get his breath, informed us that he had heard I was dead and buried.

'C. BRONTE.'

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY