Brontës (80 page)

Despite the odds stacked against them, the Brontës not only survived but flourished. They made no effort to win friends among their fellow
pupils and concentrated on their work to the exclusion of all else. For Emily, the difference between her old, self-regulated life in her quiet home in a moorland township and her new life in a large school in the midst of a foreign city must have been alarming. Apart from the six months of lessons she had had at Roe Head, the only French she knew was what Charlotte had passed on and what she herself had learnt from her reading. To be compelled not only to speak and write French all day every day, but also to have her lessons taught in it, must have been a severe trial. She had so much catching up to do before she could even begin to make sense of her lessons that there was no time for Gondal fantasy.
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Charlotte was more proficient in French than her sister and therefore adapted more easily. For her, the difficulties of her new position paled into insignificance compared with the bondage of governessing. At the beginning of May, after nearly three months in Brussels, she wrote to Ellen:

I was twenty-six years old a week or two since – and at that ripe time of life I am a schoolgirl – a complete school-girl and on the whole very happy in that capacity. It felt very strange at first to \submit to/ authority instead of exercising it – to obey orders instead of giving them – but I like that state of things – I returned to it with the \same/ avidity that a cow that has long been kept on dry hay returns to fresh grass – don't laugh at my simile – it is natural to me to submit and very unnatural to command.
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Charlotte had never lost her passion for acquiring knowledge and now, for the first time in ten years, she had a legitimate reason to submerge herself in an entirely selfish pursuit of learning. Describing the Pensionnat Heger to Ellen Nussey as a large school of forty day-pupils and twelve boarders, she drew analogies with Roe Head. Madame Heger reminded her of Catherine Wooler – she had ‘precisely the same cast of mind degree of cultivation & quality of character' though her ‘severe points' were softened because she was a married lady. The three teachers, Mesdemoiselles Blanche, Sophie and Marie, she dismissed as an old maid, a potential one and a talented and original lady whose manners were so repulsive and arbitrary that she had alienated all the pupils except the Brontës. Seven masters also came in to teach the seven branches of learning: French, drawing, music, singing, writing, arithmetic and German.
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One person alone had already made an outstanding impression upon Charlotte and that was Monsieur Heger, who taught the girls French literature.

There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken M Heger the husband of Madame – he is professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament – a little, black, ugly being with \a face/ that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tomcat – sometimes those of a delirious Hyena – occasionally – but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like he is very angry with me just at present because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as peu correct – not because it was particularly so in reality but because he happened to be in a bad humour when he read it – he did not tell me so – but wrote the accusation on the margin of my book and asked in brief stern phrase how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations – adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable the fact is some weeks ago in a high-flown humour, he forbade me to use either dictionary or grammar – in translating the most difficult English compositions into French this makes the task rather arduous – & compels me every now and then to introduce an English word which nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it.

Emily and he don't draw well together at all – when he is very ferocious with me I cry – & that sets all things straight. Emily works like a horse and she has had great difficulties \to contend with/ – far greater than I have had indeed those who come to a French school for instruction ought previously to have acquired a considerable knowledge of the French language – otherwise they will lose a great deal of time for the course of instruction is adapted to natives & not to foreigners and in these large establishments they will not change their ordinary course for one or two strangers – the few private lessons that monsieur Heger has vouchsafed to give us are I suppose to be considered a great favour & I can perceive they have already excited much spite & jealousy in the school –
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If Charlotte quickly recognized extraordinary powers in Monsieur Heger, he was not slow to realize the ability of his new pupils. They had begun their education on the usual system, preparing grammatical and syntactical exercises, taking down dictation and extending their vocabulary by copying and translating words and phrases. Having quietly observed their progress, Monsieur Heger decided that they were capable of something more advanced. He proposed to do what he had sometimes done with other older and abler pupils: read them some of the finest passages from French
literature, discuss and analyse them together and then get the sisters to reproduce their own thoughts in a similar style. His suggestion was received less than graciously. Emily gave it short shrift, saying she saw no good to be derived from the plan, which would result only in them losing all originality of thought and expression. Charlotte, less belligerently, also doubted the benefits of the scheme but was prepared to try it out simply because she felt bound to obey her teacher.
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In this unpromising way began the lessons which were to have such a tremendous influence on the Brontës. They subjected Charlotte, in particular, to a new and not unwelcome discipline which was ultimately to transform the whole way she was accustomed to write, releasing her from the verbiage of Angria and setting her firmly on the road to spare and elegant prose.

Frederika Macdonald, who was a pupil at the Pensionnat Heger nineteen years after Charlotte, described Monsieur Heger's method in greater detail.

He would read aloud some eloquent, pathetic, or amusing passage from a classical French author. He would then analyse this passage, and signalise its beauties or criticise its defects. Afterwards he would either himself suggest, or allow his pupils to select, a subject for composition, attuned to the same key, either grave or gay, of the model of excellence he had given; but of a sufficiently different character to make anything resembling unintelligent imitation impossible … The pupil was supposed to write in her own note-book a rough copy of the composition, leaving a wide margin for corrections. The fair copy of the exercise given Monsieur Héger was also to have a wide margin … when the corrected exercise was returned the pupil was held to verify the remarks made, and to re-write the composition, for her own benefit only, with the improvements suggested.

Frequently the exercises would be discussed and criticized in class, the writer being called upon to defend her opinions or a particular choice of phrase. An exercise which met with Monsieur Heger's favour would have to be copied out again and presented to him to keep.
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This method of teaching can be seen working in practice in the essays Charlotte and Emily wrote throughout the summer of 1842. Around two dozen have survived, slightly less than half of them by Emily. At least three of Charlotte's earliest compositions can be traced back to their source pieces, which Charlotte transcribed into one of her notebooks. ‘The Sick Girl',
written on 18 April, was based on Alexandre Soumet's poem, ‘La Pauvre Fille', which her essay followed closely, opening with the same observation that sleep is a stranger to the bed of sickness and using the same images of the sun's rays on the mountain and the child's exclusion from the play of her friends; at the end, however, she departed from her original source and allowed the girl to recover.
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‘Evening Prayer in a Camp', written on 26 April, was more adventurous. The stimulus for this piece was the concept of the incongruity of Christian prayers being said on board ship in the middle of a vast ocean which was taken from Chateaubriand's ‘Priére du Soir â bord d'un vaisseau'. Charlotte transposed the scene to an Egyptian desert, added to the power of the image by turning those at prayer into soldiers on the eve of battle and strengthened the contrast by placing them in the confines of a heathen temple.
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The third essay, ‘Anne Askew', written on 2 June, was an ‘Imitation' and therefore the closest of all to its source, ‘Eudore. Moeurs Chrétiennes IV Siècle', also by Chateaubriand. The story of Eudore told how this early Christian was faced with being thrown to the lions for his faith; on the evening before his death he received a letter saying that his fiancée had been condemned to be the mistress of another man but would be restored to him undefiled if he sacrificed to the gods. Urged by his companions to make the sacrifice, Eudore went to do so but at the last minute dashed down the libations and declared, ‘I am a Christian.' Charlotte again gave the story a different twist, making the central figure Anne Askew, the English Protestant martyr who was burnt at the stake during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. Charlotte began in almost exactly the same words as Chateaubriand: ‘In the reign of Mary, Queen of England, a young girl named Anne Askew was about to be put to the rack.' Like Eudore, Anne receives a letter, in her case from the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, offering her a pardon if she will recant. Half dazed by the torture and tempted to end her sufferings Anne begins to sign the letter but, remembering that only the body can die, she returns voluntarily to the rack, declaring ‘I am a Protestant.'
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One can only wonder what
Monsieur Heger, a devout Catholic, thought of his pupil's choice of subject and her defiant conversion of a universal Christian martyr into a specifically Protestant one.

At other times, the passages chosen by Monsieur Heger for study would only be allowed to suggest a subject. One such example was Victor Hugo's account of Mirabeau at the Tribune, in which he pointed out both the faulty ‘exaggeration in conception' and the successful nuances of expression. Monsieur Heger then left his pupils to choose their own topic because, he said, ‘it is necessary, before sitting down to write on a subject, to have thoughts and feelings about it. I cannot tell on what subject your heart and mind have been excited.'
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On this particular occasion, Charlotte opted for Peter the Hermit, the preacher who had galvanized Europe into taking up the Crusade, while Emily chose King Harold of England on the eve of the Battle of Hastings. Charlotte's version exalted the spirit of the man, that fire within him which would always compel him to rise above the mundane. Clearly she identified with him herself, returning to the theme of physical beauty which had haunted her since childhood.

Peter the Hermit's strength was not merely physical strength for Nature, or rather, God, is impartial in the distribution of gifts, giving one grace, beauty, bodily perfection, another spirit and moral greatness. Peter was a little man and not good-looking; but he had that courage, that steadfastness, that enthusiasm, that emotional energy which crushes all opposition and makes the will of one man become the law of a whole nation.
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Emily, on the other hand, set out to prove that a man could rise to the occasion. To do this she contrasted Harold, the king, in peace time and Harold, the hero, in war.

Harold united in himself all the energy, the power, all the hopes of one nation. Now he was no longer a king, he was a hero. The situation had transformed him; in peace undoubtedly he would have been like almost all other princes occupying a peaceful throne: a miserable slave in his palace, wearied with pleasure, deceived by flatterers, knowing, for he was not a complete fool, that he was the least free of all his people … Harold on the field of battle, without his palace, without his ministers, without his courtesans, without his splendour, without his luxury, having only his country's sky above him and, beneath his feet, that land which his ancestors had held and which he will not abandon except with life; and Harold, surrounded by devoted hearts, who had entrusted him with their safety, their freedom, their existence – what a difference! A divine spirit shines in his eyes, visible to men as well as to his Creator – a multitude of human passions rise in him at the same time exalted, sanctified, nearly deified. His courage has no element of rashness, his pride of arrogance, his indignation of injustice, that assurance of presumption. He is inwardly convinced that no mortal power could defeat him. Death, alone, could snatch victory from his arms – and Harold is
ready to submit to her because the touch of her hand is to heroes what the blow striking off his shackles is to the slave.
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Mrs Gaskell rightly considered Emily's essay superior in both power and imagination to Charlotte's,
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though her command of French vocabulary and idiom did not yet rival that of her elder sister. Indeed, both girls had had only four months' tuition at this stage, so their achievement was already remarkable.

In some of the exercises, it is possible to make a direct comparison between Charlotte's and Emily's version of the same piece. Both sisters wrote an undated essay, for instance, on the siege of Oudenarde. Charlotte's, as befitted someone who had worshipped military heroes from childhood, concentrates on Simon de Lalaing, the heroic captain of the besieged town, who inspires courage and endurance in his defenders. When his two sons are captured by the enemy, Simon is forced to choose between seeing them executed before his eyes or handing over the keys of the town.