The Brontës in Brussels, page 8
The Brontës knew a couple of interesting English families in Brussels. Such families came to the city in search of educational opportunities for their children – a spell at a foreign school was considered beneficial – and in some cases business openings for themselves. Another common reason for moving abroad was money difficulties; creditors did not follow you across the Channel, and school fees and the cost of living were much lower in Brussels than in Britain. Dr Thomas Wheelwright, a London physician, moved his large family there because of financial problems, probably caused by his failing eyesight. His five daughters were pupils at the Pensionnat. The family arrived in Brussels in July 1842. For the first couple of months, while their parents travelled in Germany, the girls were left at the Pensionnat together with the Brontës and the few other boarders who did not go home for the vacation. These summer months at the Pensionnat in the company of Emily and the Wheelwright girls were much more pleasant for Charlotte than the vacation of 1843 when she was practically the only person who stayed on at the school.
The Wheelwrights rented an apartment in the Hôtel Cluysenaar towards the north end of Rue Royale. This building subsequently underwent various transformations and bore little resemblance to the one on the site today, the Hôtel Astoria, dating from the early twentieth century, which in its heyday was the grandest hotel in town and hosted many foreign celebrities.
The Hôtel Cluysenaar was built in 1838 by the rising young Dutch architect Cluysenaar, whose most famous creation, dating from a few years after the Brontës’ departure, is the Galeries Saint-Hubert, the elegant shopping arcade. The Cluysenaar apartment building was in a fashionable part of town near the site of the future Gare du Nord.
Connected to this building by a covered passageway was Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges in an older and much less smart area. Frances Henri lodges in a street of that name in The Professor. Charlotte probably saw the street on visits to the Wheelwrights. Frances earns a living as a lace-mender and the area round Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges was traditionally one of lace-makers, who, it was said, used to pray in the chapel that gave the street its name, Our Lady of the Snows, for their lace to be as white as snow. But by the Brontës’ time the reputation of the area was becoming rather less immaculate. In the 1870s it was demolished – always the preferred solution of Brussels city planners – on the grounds that it was an insalubrious area rife with prostitution. Today’s Rue de l’Enseignement is on the approximate site of the street whose name Charlotte, no doubt ignorant of its reputation, uses for the one where Crimsworth visits and woos Frances in her tiny lodgings.
The Wheelwrights’ apartment was in the Hôtel Cluysenaar on Rue Royale, probably the model for the Hotel Crécy in Villette.
Reproduced in Jacques Dubreucq, Bruxelles 1000, une histoire capitale
In the early twentieth century the Hôtel Cluysenaar was rebuilt as the smart Hôtel Astoria.
Photograph in Hôtel Astoria brochure, c. 1911
The Cluysenaar apartment building, with its wide staircases which the little Wheelwright girls amused themselves running up and down, is thought to have inspired the Hôtel Crécy in Villette where the Count De Bassompierre and his daughter Paulina, who wins the heart of Graham Bretton, have their apartment. In Chapter 23 of Villette Charlotte describes the Hôtel Crécy as ‘an hotel in the foreign sense: a collection of dwelling-houses, not an inn – a vast, lofty pile, with a huge arch to its street-door, leading through a vaulted covered way, into a square all built round’.
At parties at the De Bassompierres’ Lucy has some of her rare tastes of life in high society in Villette. Had Charlotte herself been invited to such parties it is unlikely that she would have felt comfortable at them; in later life, when she was a famous author being fêted on visits to London, she suffered agonies of shyness at large gatherings. But her social skills were not put to the test in this way in Brussels, and she enjoyed her visits to the Wheelwrights. Like the Taylors they were a lively and stimulating family. Theirs was one of the few households where she felt relaxed, just as she always did when she stayed with the Taylors in Yorkshire. She remained friendly with Laetitia, the eldest of the daughters, for the rest of her life. The Wheelwrights were fond of her in return, although their liking did not extend to Emily; the three youngest Wheelwright girls were among the pupils with whom Emily made herself unpopular by giving them piano lessons during their recreation periods.
Tragedy struck this family, too, in Brussels when the youngest of Emily’s reluctant little piano pupils, Julia, died of typhus only two months after Martha Taylor and was buried near her in the Protestant cemetery. She was seven years old. The funeral records of the Protestant Chapel show that she had only a ‘third-class’ funeral, which meant that unlike Martha she didn’t get a headstone. Her remains doubtless ended up with Martha’s in a mass grave in Evere when the old cemetery was closed.
The Dixons in Rue de la Régence
Finally, there was the Dixon family at 11 Rue de la Régence. This house is no longer standing; the street numbering has changed and today’s number 11 is in a part of Rue de la Régence that was not yet built in the Brontës’ time. The building where the Dixons lodged probably disappeared when the art museums were expanded.
Charlotte knew them through their family connection with the Taylors; Abraham Dixon was an uncle of Mary and Martha’s. He was a man of ideas and projects, a not always successful inventor who was trying to sell his patents to the Belgian woollen manufacturing industry. A widower, he was living in Brussels with various family members including his daughter Mary with whom Charlotte struck up a friendship at the start of her second year. A son of his who worked for a firm in Birmingham travelled between England and Belgium on business and carried Charlotte’s letters for her just as Mary Taylor’s brother did.
Despite Charlotte’s frequent complaints of loneliness in Brussels she was fortunate in having several congenial friends there, one of whom was Mary Dixon. In later years she stayed in touch with her, as she did with Laetitia Wheelwright. But like her other English friends in Brussels, the Dixons did not stay long, and when Mary left for Germany in the summer of 1843 she was one of the people Charlotte missed most. It is still a common experience in Brussels today: you make friends, fellow expatriates, but then lose these new acquaintances when they move back to their home countries or on to a new posting abroad.
Where Was ‘La Terrasse’?
In Villette the place described most evocatively, apart from the Pensionnat itself, is ‘La Terrasse’, the ‘little château’ or manor house on the outskirts of Brussels where Graham Bretton lives with his mother and where he takes Lucy to recuperate when she has a kind of nervous breakdown.
Charlotte Brontë always put her own experience into her novels. If she visited a friend’s home there was a good chance that it would appear as that of a character in one of her books, and it is possible that La Terrasse was inspired by a real house she saw. But which one? The Taylors’ Château de Koekelberg school in the north of the city, perhaps, at the end of its avenue of trees? Or was it more likely to have been inspired by a building seen in the south of Brussels? Lucy refers to it as being down an avenue leading off a chaussée a mile beyond the ‘Porte de Crécy’. There was no gate of that name in Brussels, but since Crécy was a battle in which the English were victorious, could it be a veiled reference to Waterloo? Was La Terrasse perhaps one of the large houses off the Chaussée de Waterloo? Possibly it was an amalgam of more than one little château spotted by Charlotte.
No such doubt surrounds the origin of Graham and Mrs Bretton, although unlike most of the other characters in Villette they are not based on people Charlotte met in Brussels. Graham was modelled on her publisher George Smith, who snapped up Jane Eyre and published it within a few weeks of receiving it. She quickly became friendly with the handsome, charming Smith and used to stay with him and his mother (‘Mrs Bretton’) on trips to London. Lucy’s impressions of the interior of La Terrasse may owe something to the Smiths’ London residence. But in its outer appearance, the Brettons’ château seems to be typical of the old-fashioned manor houses to be seen in and around the Belgian capital.
14
Brussels in the Brontës’ Time
Brussels is a beautiful city. (Letter to Ellen Nussey, May 1842)
I have tramped about a great deal and tried to get a clearer acquaintance with the streets of Bruxelles … I go out and traverse [them] sometimes for hours together. (Letter from Charlotte Brontë to Emily, 2 September 1843)
I had crossed the Place Royale, and got into the Rue Royale, thence I had diverged into the Rue de Louvain – an old and quiet street. I remember that, feeling a little hungry, and not desiring to go back and take my share of the ‘gouter,’ now on the refectory-table at Pelet’s – to wit, pistolets and water – I stepped into a baker’s and refreshed myself on a couc (?) – it is a Flemish word, I don’t know how to spell it – à corinthe-anglice, a currant bun – and a cup of coffee; and then I strolled on towards the Porte de Louvain. Very soon I was out of the city, and slowly mounting the hill, which ascends from the gate. (The Professor, Chapter 19)
In 1842 the population of Brussels was not much more than 100,000, and in places the countryside was still close to the boulevards ringing the city (today’s inner ring road) on the site of the former defensive walls. Charlotte and Emily’s walk to the Protestant cemetery, only about a kilometre from the Porte de Louvain, took them along a country road.
However, Brussels was already beginning to spread apace beyond these boulevards, which followed the line of the ‘pentagon’, the five-sided or heart-like shape of the old town. New faubourgs had sprung up outside the gates – Faubourg de Namur beyond the Porte de Namur on the way to the house of the Jenkins family in Ixelles, Faubourg de Flandre outside the Porte de Flandre on the way to the Koekelberg school. The neat little house M. Paul rents for Lucy, where she is to open a school while she waits for him to return from the West Indies, is in a suburb to which Charlotte gives the imaginary name of Faubourg Clotilde.
It was a time of expansion and development for Belgium generally, which since gaining its independence had become a confident, liberal and rapidly modernizing country. Like Britain, the country was in the midst of an industrial revolution, the first in continental Europe. It was also the first country on the Continent to build a railway, with the opening of a service between Brussels and Mechelen in 1835. In the early years of the railway, trains arrived in Brussels at a station by the Canal de Willebroeck called Allée Verte, beside the popular avenue of that name. But by the beginning of the 1840s there was already a Gare du Midi in the south of the city and work had started on the Gare du Nord, just off the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique, which was to replace Allée Verte. When Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in 1843 she travelled by train there from Ostend, a six-hour journey. Making the journey by stagecoach, as the two girls and their father did in 1842, was already becoming outmoded.
As a small capital Brussels could not of course compete with Paris or London in brilliance and variety; some travellers found it rather dull and Thackeray, visiting at the time the Brontës were there, mocked the small scale of everything, the city’s ‘absurd kind of Lilliput look’.1 But other visitors and contemporary guide books paint a picture of a city of spacious, elegant squares full of shops and cafés, the liveliest after Place Royale being Place de la Monnaie with its Royal Theatre. Grand hotels possessed every amenity as well as supplying improbably abundant meals; Thackeray was astounded by the twenty dishes his own hotel offered for dinner.
The first railway station in Brussels, Allée Verte, opened in 1835
From Paul and Henri Hymans, Bruxelles à travers les âges
Smart shopping streets such as Rue de la Madeleine were packed with luxury establishments for the well-to-do. This street has since been truncated and is now a shadow of its former self but even today retains a few elegant shops.
Rue de la Madeleine was one of the smartest shopping streets. This engraving dates from 1825.
Contemporary images show an animated and cheerful town. One of its great attractions was the park. There were plays at the Théâtre du Parc, a café and ballroom at the ‘Vauxhall’, and, on fine days, music at the bandstand; the paths teemed with strollers.
Boulevard du Jardin Botanique and the botanical gardens by W.H. Bartlett, c. 1840
The boulevards were another of the city’s charms. In letters home Charlotte describes ‘tramping’ about Brussels for hours, particularly when depressed, and specifically mentions tramping along the boulevards. This was before the time of those built in the later nineteenth century by Leopold II – Boulevard Anspach, for example, created on top of the Senne when the river was covered over. Charlotte was referring to the pleasant tree-lined roads encircling the city that had been constructed under the period of Napoleonic rule in the early years of the century on the site of the fourteenth-century city walls when these were demolished.
In her time the boulevards were still dotted with toll gates manned by guards, for the unpopular toll levied on many goods entering the city was not abolished until 1860. Lucy Snowe, who has set out from La Terrasse for a night out with her friends the Brettons, describes entering Brussels by carriage in the days of the toll gates:
The Porte de Louvain by Paul Lauters. The Brontës would have walked through this city gate on their way to the Protestant cemetery to visit the grave of Martha Taylor.
The snug comfort of the close carriage on a cold though fine night, the pleasure of setting out with companions so cheerful and friendly, the sight of the stars glinting fitfully through the trees as we rolled along the avenue; then the freer burst of the night-sky when we issued forth to the open chaussée, the passage through the city gates, the lights there burning, the guards there posted, the pretence of inspection to which we there submitted, and which amused us so much – all these small matters had for me, in their novelty, a peculiar exhilarating charm. (Villette, Chapter 20)
The fortress-like gates of earlier times had gone by then, with the exception of the Porte de Hal in the south, still in place today but much embellished. The gates Charlotte and Emily passed through were of much newer construction. The toll booths at the Porte de Namur between which they would have walked on their way to the Jenkins’ house can still be seen, although not in their original location because they were reconstructed by the entrance of the Bois de la Cambre at the end of Avenue Louise.
The Porte de Hal, by the Brontës’ time the only surviving medieval city gateway, as depicted by Paul Lauters. It is still in place today, much restored.
The boulevards offered an eight-kilometre round walk, with views over the countryside. Today one can still walk along Boulevard de Waterloo or Boulevard du Régent, but as the traffic thunders by it is difficult to conjure up in imagination the elegance of the spacious avenues where Charlotte and Emily sometimes took their exercise. Boulevard du Jardin Botanique, for example, took them past the impressive botanical gardens, which like the Park have today lost something of their former splendour.
One of the most popular walks for the bruxellois was to follow the Allée Verte, the tree-lined avenue that led along the Canal de Willebroeck to the royal family’s palace in Laeken. Used by the faithful in the time of the Archduchess Isabella as a route of pilgrimage to the church of Notre Dame de Laeken, it had since become a fashionable promenade. In a school composition written in German Charlotte described going for a picnic in the countryside with another teacher and some of the pupils, returning to the city along the Allée Verte.2
One of the toll booths (customs houses) of the Porte de Namur, the gate the Brontës would have passed through on their way to Sunday lunch with Rev. Jenkins and his family in Chaussée d’Ixelles. The booths have been reconstructed at the entrance to the Bois de la Cambre.
Shaded by four rows of venerable lime trees, this wide avenue was the place to head to on a Sunday to show off your carriage, your horses, your toilette and your cachemire. (Mrs Sweeny, the whisky-tippling nursemaid of dubious origin employed to look after Mme Beck’s children until ousted by Lucy, maintains her standing in the establishment largely thanks to her possession of a cashmere shawl.)
Its starting-point was near the location of today’s Yser metro station, and although one can still stroll beside the canal nothing remains today to remind one of the route’s former glories as depicted in old prints. Its popularity waned in the 1860s, when the fashionable started to desert it for the new Avenue Louise leading to the Bois de la Cambre.
The Allée Verte, Brussels’ most fashionable promenade in the Brontës’ time, as depicted by F. Stroobant
Most of these places were in the new, posh Upper Town with the symmetrical French-style buildings that had transformed Brussels into a ‘miniature Paris’, as it was sometimes called. By contrast, there was the old Basse-Ville of winding cobbled streets, irregular Flemish-style houses with stepped gables and old churches and convents. There were ornate Baroque churches such as the seventeenth-century St Jean Baptiste, which was the church of the Béguinage, an enclosed quarter for women who belonged to the lay religious order of Béguines. Confusingly, this was not the model for the church called St Jean Baptiste in Villette, which partly refers to St Jacques sur Coudenberg in Place Royale. Equally confusingly, although a Béguinage church is mentioned in Villette its description does not altogether fit the one in Brussels. We are told that after Lucy emerges from her confession in an unnamed church, she falls down in a faint in front of another one, ‘an old church belonging to a community of Béguines’. But this fictional church has a giant spire, which St Jean Baptiste au Béguinage does not. Lucy describes it as being in a part of the old town unfamiliar to her, ‘full of narrow streets of picturesque, ancient, and mouldering houses’. Lucy Snowe’s Béguinage church is doubtless an imaginary one fashioned out of Charlotte’s memories of more than one church glimpsed in the Basse-Ville.
