The Brontës in Brussels, page 2
2
What Brought the Brontës to Brussels?
In February 1842 Charlotte Brontë was twenty-five, Emily Brontë twenty-three. Only four of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s six children had survived childhood: Charlotte, Branwell the only son of the family (then twenty-four), Emily and Anne, who was twenty-two. The two eldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, had died before reaching their teens. The children’s mother, Maria Branwell, had died when Charlotte was only five, and her sister – Aunt Branwell – had come to take care of them at the grey parsonage in Haworth on the Yorkshire moors.
In 1842 the two young women who only a few years later were to write two of the world’s best-selling novels, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, were still unknown. But all four surviving siblings had since childhood been compulsive writers, collaborating in creating wild, romantic stories set in imaginary countries, filling page after tiny page of miniature notebooks with minuscule handwriting almost impossible for outsiders to decipher.
When not ‘scribbling’, as they themselves called it, they were out roaming the moors. But much as they loved being at home together writing or walking the girls knew they had to earn a living and contribute to the family finances. Papa was a poor clergyman, and the brilliant but erratic Branwell could not be relied on to help support the family. He was never able to hold down a job for long and in later years would run up debts to fund his drinking.
Portrait of the Brontë sisters by Branwell Brontë, c. 1834, when he was seventeen. From left to right: Anne aged fourteen, Emily sixteen and Charlotte eighteen
They all dreamed of being published writers, but for the moment the only paid work open to the girls was teaching, at schools or as governesses. They had tried it. But they had not enjoyed the experience, and, with the possible exception of Anne, their success can be gauged from a remark made by a former employer: ‘I once had the misfortune to employ a governess of the name of Brontë.’
One reason for their unhappiness as teachers was that they were homesick whenever separated and away from Haworth. Charlotte saw a possible solution. They could open their own boarding-school, either in the Parsonage or elsewhere. She eventually opted for the Parsonage itself, despite the logistical problems of using a house with just four bedrooms and the drawback of having a brother who, when at home between jobs, had a tendency to roll in drunk in the small hours and once set his bed curtains on fire by knocking over a candle.
Branwell Brontë: self-portrait drawn c. 1840, when he was twenty-three
While working as a governess in September 1841 Charlotte wrote home to her aunt about this project and about an idea suggested to her by the experience of her friends Mary and Martha Taylor, who were improving their languages at a Brussels boarding-school.
My friends recommend me … to delay commencing the school for six months longer, and … to spend the intervening time in some school on the continent … I would not go to France or to Paris. I would go to Brussels, in Belgium … living is there little more than half as dear as it is in England, and the facilities for education are equal or superior to any other place in Europe. In half a year, I could acquire a thorough familiarity with French. I could improve greatly in Italian, and even get a dash of German … Martha Taylor is now staying in Brussels, at a first-rate establishment there. I should not think of going to the Château de Koekelberg, where she is resident, as the terms are much too high; but if I wrote to her, she, with the assistance of Mrs Jenkins, the wife of the British Chaplain, would be able to secure me a cheap and decent residence and respectable protection …
… I feel an absolute conviction that, if this advantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us for life. Papa will perhaps think it a wild and ambitious scheme; but who ever rose in the world without ambition? When he left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, he was as ambitious as I am now. I want us all to go on. I know we have talents, and I want them to be turned to account. I look to you, aunt, to help us.1
She was so set on this plan that she wrote in another letter, ‘Brussels is my promised land.’2
She had another reason for seeing Brussels as her promised land. After years confined to schoolrooms doing a job she hated, she was restless. Her youth was going by, and she had seen nothing of life or the world. She longed to experience the culture of a European city as Mary and Martha were doing. She felt, in her own words, ‘such an urgent thirst to see – to know – to learn’.3 Doubtless she dreamed of romance, too, of a real-life hero to take the place of the ones that had so far existed only in her imagination – in the books she read and the stories she wrote.
Patrick Brontë in old age. He was sixty-five in 1842, the year Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels.
From the start she planned to take Emily with her. This may seem an odd choice since Emily was always the most homesick of the sisters when away from the Parsonage. But she was Charlotte’s favourite sister, and Anne at that time was settled in a post as a governess.
When Charlotte set her heart on something she had a way of getting what she wanted. Aunt Branwell was persuaded to fund the venture, and a suitable school in Brussels was located by the wife of Evan Jenkins, the British Chaplain, who was the brother of a friend of Patrick’s. Mrs Jenkins recommended Madame Heger’s Pensionnat de demoiselles (‘boarding-school for young ladies’). It was agreed that Charlotte and Emily would board there, attend classes with the other pupils and have special tuition in French.
On 8 February 1842 the two girls and their father set off by train from Leeds in the company of Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor, who was returning to the Château de Koekelberg finishing-school in Brussels, and Mary’s brother Joe. Like Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, the novel in which Charlotte faithfully recorded much of her Belgian adventure, they did some sightseeing in London before crossing the Channel on the Ostend packet (steamship) from London Bridge wharf. After spending a couple of nights at Ostend, on Monday 14 February the party took the diligence (stagecoach) to Brussels. On arrival Patrick and Joe Taylor went to the town hall in Grand Place to have their names entered in the police register of foreign visitors. The group stayed in the Hôtel de Hollande in Rue de la Putterie, not far from where the Gare Centrale is today. The next morning Mary Taylor, accompanied by her brother, went off to her boarding-school in Koekelberg while the Rev. Jenkins took charge of the Brontës.
Having left his daughters in the care of Madame Heger Patrick spent some days with Rev. Jenkins and his wife seeing the sights of Brussels, also fitting in a visit to the battlefield of Waterloo before returning to Haworth and the Yorkshire moors.
Monuments at the Waterloo battlefield as depicted by H. Gérard, 1842
3
The Site of the Pensionnat Heger Today
If you leave the Metro at Parc station and walk down Rue Royale towards Place Royale you will soon see a statue on your right, at the top of a flight of steps leading down to Rue Baron Horta. The statue is of General Augustin Daniel Belliard, a French diplomat who, as France’s ambassador in Brussels, assisted the Belgians in negotiating their independence after the 1830 revolution against Dutch rule. In January 1832, coming away from a meeting at the palace, he died of a stroke close to the spot where his statue now stands. His mission had been accomplished; after a shaky start the brand-new country was established on a firm footing.
Belliard’s statue was already in place when the Brontës arrived in Brussels, but the steps we see today are not the ones they descended to the Pensionnat, which were steeper and narrower. There were more of them, too, since the school was at a lower level than the site is today.
When you reach the bottom of the steps there is no Pensionnat opposite. It has vanished along with its street, Rue d’Isabelle, which ran parallel to the higher Rue Royale. Today you find yourself in Rue Baron Horta, which is at a right-angle to Rue Royale, running in the same direction as the steps.
At first glance there is nothing at all to indicate that this is the site of the school. To the right is a BNP Paribas Fortis Bank building, to the left the Palais des Beaux-Arts arts centre (‘Bozar’), an Art Deco building designed by the architect after whom the street is named, Victor Horta. Bozar is an important place in Brussels, housing the city’s main concert hall. Ahead of you is the entrance to a shopping arcade, Galerie Ravenstein.
The Belliard statue; postcard, c. 1900
The steps behind the Belliard statue; postcard, c. 1900
The steps behind the Belliard statue were rebuilt in 1921; the photograph shows them as they are today.
There is no sign of the Pensionnat, then, and apparently no mention of the Brontës. But walk almost to the end of the street. Before you reach the main entrance of Bozar on the corner with Rue Ravenstein look up and you will see a plaque above a tiny narrow window, placed so high it is rarely spotted by passers-by. It reads:
Near this site formerly stood the Pensionnat Heger where the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë studied in 1842–43. This commemorative plaque was placed here by the Brontë Society with the kind permission of the Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten 28–9–79.
The school stood on the site occupied today by Rue Baron Horta and the bank building. It had a large garden which was on the area now occupied by Bozar.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts (‘Bozar’); the Brontë Society plaque is above the tiny window to the left of the awning with ‘BOZAR’ on it.
Charlotte’s first sight of the place on 15 February 1842 is recorded in The Professor, the first of her two ‘Brussels novels’. It was written soon after she left Belgium but was rejected by publishers and did not see the light of day until after her death. Its setting, like that of her later novel Villette, is a school in Brussels closely based on the Pensionnat, but its story is less biographical than Villette. For one thing the narrator is a young man, whereas Villette’s narrator Lucy Snowe is in many ways a portrait of Charlotte.
The hero, William Crimsworth, arrives in Brussels looking for work, which he is soon to find as a teacher of English. To fill in time before meeting a man who he hopes will help him find a job he goes for a stroll along Rue Royale:
I saw what a fine street was the Rue Royale, and, walking leisurely along its broad pavement, I continued to survey its stately hotels, till the palisades, the gates, and trees of the park appearing in sight, offered to my eye a new attraction. I remember, before entering the park, I stood awhile to contemplate the statue of General Belliard, and then I advanced to the top of the great staircase just beyond, and I looked down into a narrow back street, which I afterwards learnt was called the Rue d’Isabelle. I well recollect that my eye rested on the green door of a rather large house opposite, where, on a brass plate, was inscribed, ‘Pensionnat de Demoiselles’. (The Professor, Chapter 7)
What Charlotte and Emily saw when they went through this door is graphically recounted in both of Charlotte’s ‘Brussels novels’. It is described in most detail in Villette, written ten years after she left Brussels but with total recall of every room in the school. If we follow Lucy Snowe through the classrooms of Mme Beck’s school we will have a good idea of what life at the Pensionnat Heger was like for Charlotte and Emily.
Plaque placed by the Brontë Society in 1979 to commemorate Charlotte’s and Emily’s stay in Brussels
4
Charlotte and Emily at the Pensionnat
I don’t deny that I sometimes wish to be in England or that I have brief attacks of homesickness – but … I have been happy in Brussels because I have always been fully occupied with the employments that I like. (Letter to Ellen Nussey, July 1842)
Emily is making rapid progress in French, German, music and drawing. Monsieur and Madame Heger begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities. (Letter to Ellen Nussey, July 1842)
If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls in this school … their principles are rotten to the core. (Letter to Ellen Nussey, July 1842)
On the Brontës’ arrival the ‘portress’ (‘Rosine’ in Villette) would have taken them into the parlour in the living quarters of Mme Heger, her husband and their three young children. After this first meeting with her they would have been shown round the school. The buildings formed three sides of a quadrangle, and large casement windows opened on to an extensive garden – not visible from the surrounding streets – that occupied quite a lot of the irregular triangle formed by Rue d’Isabelle, Rue Terarken and Rue des Douze Apôtres. Downstairs, they would have been shown the three big classrooms and the refectory, which was used not just for meals but also for evening study followed by the lecture pieuse deprecated by Charlotte – readings about the lives of saints and martyrs. Upstairs was the long dormitory in which they were to sleep with the other boarders and the oratory, used for the evening prayers which they, as Protestants, were not expected to attend.
Panoramic view of Rue d’Isabelle and the Pensionnat, with the Cathedral in the background, probably dating from the 1850s
From Victor Tahon, La rue Isabelle et le Jardin des Arbalétriers
In this building Charlotte spent the best part of the next two years and Emily about nine months until she returned to Haworth towards the end of 1842. They studied diligently. They sat in the back row in one of the classrooms, attending the lessons with the other girls. There were around ninety pupils, only some of whom boarded at the school. The Brontës wrote homework assignments, essays, for Monsieur Heger, the headmistress’s husband, who taught literature at the school and tutored them in French.
In the dormitory the two sisters, who at twenty-five and twenty-three were much older than the other pupils, were given a certain amount of privacy by curtains that separated off their end of the room from the rest. This was emblematic of their position at the school throughout their time there. They were always together, ‘isolated in the midst of numbers’, as Charlotte put it in a letter to her best friend Ellen Nussey,1 although they were not the only foreigners studying there. Like expatriates and immigrants today who have trouble ‘integrating’ in the host culture, they suffered from a fair amount of what is nowadays termed ‘culture shock’. It has to be said, though, the Brontë girls suffered from culture shock in all their encounters with the world outside their close family unit, whether in England or abroad.
Rue d’Isabelle. The photograph shows the Pensionnat as it was in the later nineteenth century when the façade had been rebuilt in a more uniform style. In the Brontës’ time most of the school buildings were hidden out of sight from the street behind a row of small houses. These were subsequently acquired by the Hegers and incorporated into the school building, and the façade was remodelled.
Published in Frederika MacDonald, The Secret of Charlotte Brontë
They in fact made no attempt to ‘integrate’. They sought friends only among their English connections in the city. The other girls found them odd. They were particularly struck by the strange appearance of Emily who never followed the fashions and favoured straight skirts and outmoded wide sleeves when the vogue was for the opposite. ‘I wish to be as God made me,’ she would say in defence of her shapeless dresses.
Emily left no written record of how she felt about her stay in Belgium. She had few correspondents, hardly any of her letters have survived and none of her writings make any direct reference to her time abroad. But we know that she was always miserable away from home. Writing after her sister’s death, Charlotte said that Emily failed to adjust to Brussels. ‘She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills.’2
All the lessons were given in French, and Charlotte said that Emily initially struggled to follow them, although her surviving French essays, like Charlotte’s, show a competent level in the language. But the Brontës didn’t just study French language and literature. Emily had drawing lessons and took advantage of the music teachers available in Brussels to make progress with her piano playing. She also gave piano lessons to some of the younger pupils. She does not seem to have been a popular teacher, though, one reason being that she insisted on giving the lessons during recreation periods so that she could maximize her own study time. She did have one admirer, however, a girl whose name was De Bassompierre and who found Emily more sympathique than Charlotte.
Both sisters also took the opportunity to learn some German, probably from a Mlle Mühl who Charlotte mentions in a letter as charging rather high fees for her classes. (Similarly, in Villette Lucy and Paulina De Bassompierre learn German together with a Fräulein Braun.) Emily seems to have enjoyed these studies, since back at the Parsonage she would prop her German grammar book in front of her on the kitchen table while kneading the dough for the household’s bread.
If Emily left no record of what she thought of the Pensionnat, Charlotte recorded her own feelings about it all too thoroughly. In her letters and novels she hardly had a good word to say about anyone in the school. She was dismissive of Belgians but did not spare other nationalities either. She found both the girls and teachers lacking in principle, feeling and intelligence, insincere, frivolous and dull.
Why did she regard everyone in the place as so despicable, with the exception of herself and Emily and some of the other English pupils? (As we shall see, she also made an exception of M. Heger, the sole man in residence.) Charlotte’s analysis was simple. They were foreigners. And Catholics! That explained their lack of every good quality bred into good English Protestants. She saw Catholicism as ‘ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning’. At the Pensionnat where Lucy Snowe works in Villette, the directress, Mme Beck, is dominated by priests, and the pupils and teachers, in turn, are constantly spied on by her. The pupils are not trusted to behave well of their own volition and not encouraged to think for themselves. What is more, keeping up appearances, les convenances (propriety), is seen as more important than having genuinely sound values, going to church more important than telling the truth.
