Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (570 page)

‘C. Brontë.’

TO MISS ELLEN NUSSEY

‘Haworth,
January
10
th
, 1842.

‘My dear Ellen, — Will you write as soon as you get this and fix your own day for coming to Haworth?  I got home on Christmas Eve.  The parting scene between me and my late employers was such as to efface the memory of much that annoyed me while I was there, but indeed, during the whole of the last six months they only made too much of me.  Anne has rendered herself so valuable in her difficult situation that they have entreated her to return to them, if it be but for a short time.  I almost think she will go back, if we can get
 
a good servant who will do all our work.  We want one about forty or fifty years old, good-tempered, clean, and honest.  You shall hear all about Brussels, etc., when you come.  Mr. Weightman is still here, just the same as ever.  I have a curiosity to see a meeting between you and him.  He will be again desperately in love, I am convinced. 
Come
.

‘C. B.’
 

CHAPTER IV: THE PENSIONNAT HÉGER, BRUSSELS

Had not the impulse come to Charlotte Brontë 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.
 
 
 
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 Institution 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 Saturday.  Under these circumstances 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 Embassy 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 Héger in the Rue d’Isabelle.  Madame Héger 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 Brontë 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 Athenée with its small window overlooking the garden of the
 
Pensionnat and the
allée défendu
.  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 Athenée, that M. Héger was Professor of Latin.  Externally, then, the Pensionnat Héger remains practically the same as it appeared to Charlotte and Emily Brontë 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 emancipation.  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 friendship to which I am indebted for anything that there may be to add to this episode in her life.  Miss Lætitia 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 Lætitia 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 Héger, recalls the two sisters, thin and sallow-looking, pacing up and down the garden, friendless and alone.  It was the sight of Lætitia standing up in the class-room and glancing round with a semi-contemptuous air at all these Belgian girls which attracted Charlotte Brontë to her.  ‘It was so very English,’ Miss Brontë 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 Brontë 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 Héger which are given in
Villette
and
The Professor
are perfectly accurate.  M. Héger, with his heavy black moustache and his black hair, entering the class-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 Brontës.  Mme. Héger, again, for ever peeping from behind doors and through the plate-glass partitions which separate the passages 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. Héger 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. Brontë.’

The aunt whose sudden death brought Charlotte and Emily Brontë 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 Brontë
;
my workbox with a china top I leave to my niece
,
Emily Jane Brontë
,
together with my ivory fan
;
my Japan dressing-box I leave to my nephew
,
Patrick Branwell Brontë
;
to my niece Anne Brontë
,
I leave my watch with all that belongs to it
;
as also my eye-glass and its chain
,
my rings
,
silver-spoons
,
books
,
clothes
,
etc.
,
etc.
,
I leave to be divided between my above-named three nieces
,
Charlotte Brontë
,
Emily Jane Brontë
,
and Anne Brontë
,
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 accumulate for the sole benefit of my four nieces
,
Charlotte Brontë
,
Emily Jane Brontë
,
Anne Brontë
,
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. Brontë
, A.B.,
now Incumbent of Haworth
,
Yorkshire
;
the Rev. John Fennell
,
now Incumbent of Cross Stone
,
near Halifax
;
the Rev. Theodore Dury
,
Rector of Keighley
,
Yorkshire
;
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
.