Brontës (79 page)

The Chapter Coffee House made an ideal base for forays into the city and Charlotte was determined that see it they would. Since childhood and her creation of the Great Glasstown, she had been obsessed with the very idea of the metropolis. Now, on the dawn of her great adventure, she found herself in London with time to spare before the Ostend packet sailed for Belgium. Into three short days, she crammed a lifetime's ambition to see and experience the sights and sounds of the city. The rest of the party was bullied or cajoled into accompanying her on an orgy of culture. Mary Taylor, rather wearily, reported later to Mrs Gaskell:

she seemed to think our business was, and ought to be, to see all the pictures and statues we could. She knew the artists, and knew where other productions of theirs were to be found. I don't remember what we saw except St Paul's. Emily was like her in these habits of mind, but certainly never took her opinion, but always had one to offer.'
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Many years later Charlotte was to look back on the experience and, somewhat unfairly, blame Joe Taylor for the frenetic bout of sightseeing. Learning of the ‘travelling – and tugging and fagging about and getting drenched and mudded', all on only two meals a day, to which Joe had subjected his bride on her honeymoon, Charlotte remarked ‘it all reminds me too sharply of the few days I spent with Joe in London nearly 10 years since – when I was many a time fit to drop with the fever and faintness resulting from long fasting and excessive fatigue'.
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If Mary did not recall anything except St Paul's, Charlotte drank in and absorbed every new sight with the greed of one long deprived. Like Lucy Snowe in her novel
Villette
, she first heard the ‘colossal hum and trembling knell' of St Paul's as she lay in her bed in the Chapter Coffee House. The next morning, she looked out of the window and saw the cathedral for the first time.

Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn, orbed mass, dark-blue and dim – THE DOME. While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste
life: in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah's gourd … Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning.
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It was no coincidence that this passage echoed her own passionate ‘longing for wings' which she had so eloquently described to Ellen when reading Mary's descriptions of the pictures and cathedrals she had seen. No doubt, too, Lucy Snowe's words echoed her own feelings. ‘I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets, and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?'
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After St Paul's, there was Westminster Abbey to visit, the galleries of the British Museum and the pictures in the National Gallery. There was also the more mundane business of their travel arrangements. They had to purchase their passports, a transaction which the thrifty Patrick later recorded with quiet satisfaction in his notebook had cost them only five shillings each at the Belgian consul's office, half the amount charged by the French consul.
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Early on the morning of Saturday, 12 February, the little party made its way down to London Bridge Wharf and boarded the Ostend packet, a small steam ship which made the twice weekly voyage carrying mail and passengers between England and the Continent. The voyage took nearly fourteen hours, so the Brontës and Taylors would have arrived in Ostend late on Saturday night. Perhaps in deference to Mr Brontës age, or perhaps because the next day was a Sunday, they decided to stay in Ostend and only set off for Brussels on Monday morning.
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As the new railway line between Ostend and Brussels had not yet fully opened, they took the more cumbersome and much slower diligence, a public stagecoach which passed through the ancient town of Ghent (pronounced ‘Gong', Patrick noted in his home-made phrase-book).
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The long, slow journey of nearly seventy miles would have been a trial to most travellers anxious to reach their destination, but Charlotte savoured every moment of her first experience of a foreign country. Later, in
The Professor
, she recalled her own first impressions of Belgium through the eyes of her narrator, William Crimsworth.

This is Belgium, Reader – look! Don't call the picture a flat or a dull one – it was neither flat nor dull to me when I first beheld it. When I left Ostend on a mild February Morning and found myself on the road to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me. My sense of enjoyment possessed an edge whetted to the finest,
untouched, keen, exquisite … I gazed often, and always with delight from the window of the diligence … Well! and what did I see? I will tell you faithfully. Green, reedy swamps, fields fertile but flat, cultivated in patches that made them look like magnified kitchen-gardens; belts of cut trees, formal as pollard willows, skirting the horizon; narrow canals, gliding slow by the roadside, painted Flemish farm-houses, some very dirty hovels, a grey, dead sky, wet road, wet fields, wet house-tops; not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route, yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque.
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By the time the Brontës and Taylors arrived in Brussels, it was too dark to see anything but the lights of the city. They retired for the night to the Hotel d'Hollande which was conveniently near the diligence terminus.
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The next morning, the English Episcopal clergyman who had assisted them in their choice of school, Mr Jenkins, arrived with his wife at the hotel to escort them there.

The Pensionnat Heger advertised itself as a ‘Maison d'éducation pour les jeunes Demoiselles'. It was situated in the ancient quarter, close to the central park which had been a landmark in the city since at least the seventeenth century. Many of the houses in the area dated from the same period, though the Pensionnat Heger itself was only forty years old. It stood in the Rue d'Isabelle, a straight but narrow street, at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the park entrance. From the statue of General Belliard at the park gates it was possible to look down on the chimneys of the Rue d'Isabelle below. Halfway along and standing straight on the street was the Pensionnat Heger, a long, low, rather stark building, two storeys high with a regimented row of large, rectangular windows on each floor. The unpromising bleakness of the exterior belied the charms of the interior. Somewhat unexpectedly for a school in the centre of the city, the Pensionnat Heger had a delightful garden, lined with ancient fruit trees. This was to be a haven of peace and rest in the noisy bustle of school life.

The turf was verdant, the gravelled walks were white; sun-bright nasturtiums clustered beautiful about the roots of the doddered orchard giants. There was a large berceau, above which spread the shade of an acacia; there was a smaller, more sequestered bower, nestled in the vines which ran all along a high and gray wall, and gathered their tendrils in a knot of beauty, and hung their clusters in loving profusion about the favoured spot where jasmine and ivy met and married them.
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On one side of the garden ran the Allée défendue', a narrow walk overlooked by the windows of the Athenée Royal, the neighbouring boys' school. For that reason it was out of bounds to the pupils of the Pensionnat Heger, though the boys would have had to have extremely sharp eyes to pierce the thick, tangled foliage of the trees and shrubs which grew over the alleyway. Hardly the pleasantest spot in the garden because of its dense shade, it acquired an air of mystery because it was forbidden – an air that Charlotte was to exploit to the full in both her novels set in Brussels.

The two schoolrooms were large, pleasant and airy, with the teacher's desk set on a dais at one end. Above them ran the long dormitory containing about twenty beds; there was also a long, narrow
réfectoire
where the girls dined, prepared their evening lessons and attended their daily mass. Monsieur and Madame Heger, with their three small daughters, lived on the school premises.
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Madame Claire Zoe Heger, who was thirty-eight years old, was the
directrice
of the school. Her husband, Constantin Georges Romain Heger, was five years younger and, at thirty-three, had already an eminent reputation as a teacher at the Athenée Royal; he also gave literature lessons to his wife's pupils.
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Madame Heger's terms were comparatively expensive: 650 francs a year for board and an education, ‘based on Religion', which included the French language, history, arithmetic, geography, scripture and ‘all the needlework that a well-brought up young lady should know'. An additional thirty-four francs was required if the pupil could not provide her own bedding and there were extra charges for lessons in music and languages other than French. Altogether, without the expense of travel, clothing, books and other personal effects, the total cost of six months' schooling for Charlotte and Emily would have come to around 1055 francs or forty-two pounds each.
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This came within the budget set by Aunt Branwell, but left little room for manoeuvre or for unexpected crises. Charlotte had therefore written anxiously beforehand to enquire about the exact cost of all the ‘extras'. The Hegers were struck by the simple, earnest tone of her letter, and agreed between themselves that

These are the daughters of an English pastor, of moderate means, anxious to learn with an ulterior view of instructing others, and to whom the risk of additional expense is of great consequence. Let us name a specific sum, within which all expenses shall be included.
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The Hegers' kindness towards their English pupils further extended to permitting them to be absent from the daily mass and even to providing them with a curtained-off recess at the end of the school dormitory, so that they could enjoy at least a measure of privacy.

In handing over his daughters into Madame Heger's care, Patrick must have felt a certain satisfaction in the arrangements that had been made. Charlotte and Emily would enjoy the full benefit of a continental education at a reasonable cost. With his own eyes he had seen that the school fulfilled its claims to be situated in one of the healthiest parts of the town and that the wellbeing of pupils was an object of active concern.
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He knew that the Taylors were close at hand in the Château de Koekelberg and their cousins, the Dixons, even closer in lodgings in the Rue de la Régence. Mr and Mrs Jenkins had not only promised to keep an eye on the girls but had also given them an open invitation to spend their Sundays and half-holidays at their house in the Chaussée d'Ixelles, just outside the ancient part of the city.
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Patrick remained in Brussels for about a week longer, moving out of his hotel to stay with Mr and Mrs Jenkins at their invitation. He used his time to see the sights of the city, visit his daughters to ensure that they were settling in and to achieve what must surely have been his ultimate goal, a trip to Waterloo. For years afterwards, he would regale the parishioners of Haworth with his recollections of the battlefield where the fate of Europe had been decided.
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Then, and only then, did he set off for home, travelling down through Flanders and northern France before crossing the Channel at Calais and returning to Haworth, via London. Now, with the satisfaction of a seasoned traveller, he could record in his notebook:

I went to Brussels, Lille, Dunkirk, & Calais, in Feby 1842 = and found, the expenses of travelling, under all circumstance generally, to be neither below, nor above one fifth less there, than in England

1842. B—

I was only between 2 and 3 weeks away – And the whole expenses of my journey, amounted to about £23-10-0, not more =
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Chapter Fourteen

ISOLATED IN THE MIDST OF NUMBERS

Charlotte and Emily did not fit easily into their new life at the Pensionnat Heger. In many ways they were already marked out as different from their fellow pupils. Unlike the Château de Koekelberg, where most of the girls were English or German, the Pensionnat Heger catered expressly for Belgians. Lessons were taught exclusively in French and no concessions were expected or sought for the fact that the Brontës were as yet not fluent in the language. They were also almost unique in being Protestant, all the other residents were Catholic except for one other pupil and Madame Heger's English nursery maid. At twenty-five and twenty-four, Charlotte and Emily were considerably older than their classmates and this, combined with their foreign ways and religion, made them seem remote to their fellow pupils. There was, Charlotte noted, without any sense of regret, ‘a broad line of demarcation between us & all the rest we are completely isolated in the midst of numbers'.
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