Emily Brontë
Bruxelles, representing them as of an inferior caste in many
respects. On further inquiry an institution at Lille in the
North of France was highly recommended by Baptist Noel and
other clergymen, and to that place it is decided that we are
to go. The terms are L50 a year for each pupil for board and
French alone; but a separate room will be allowed for this
sum; without this indulgence they are something lower. 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 Bruxelles to Lille on many
accounts."
For Charlotte to regret the change was for an improvement to be
discovered. She had set her heart on going to Brussels; Mrs. Jenkins
redoubled her efforts and at length discovered the Pensionnat of Madame
Heger in the Rue d'Isabelle.
Thither, as all the world is aware, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, both of
age, went to school.
"We shall leave England in about three weeks." The words had a ring of
happy daring in Charlotte's ears. Since at six years of age she had set
out alone to discover the Golden City, romance, discovery, adventure,
were sweet promises to her. She had often wished to see the world; now
she will see it. She had thirsted for knowledge; here is the source. She
longed to add new notes to that gamut of human character which she could
play with so profound a science; she shall make a masterpiece out of her
acquisitions. At this time her letters are full of busy gaiety, giving
accounts of her work, making plans, making fun. As happy and hopeful a
young woman as any that dwells in Haworth parish.
Emily is different. It is she who imagined the girl in heaven who broke
her heart with weeping for earth, till the angels cast her out in anger,
and flung her into the middle of the heath, to wake there sobbing for
joy. She did not care to know fresh people; she hates strangers; to walk
with her bulldog, Keeper, over the moors is her best adventure. To learn
new things is very well, but she prizes above everything originality and
the wild provincial flavour of her home. What she strongly, deeply loves
is her moorland home, her own people, the creatures on the heath, the
dogs who always feed from her hands, the flowers in the bleak garden
that only grow at all because of the infinite care she lavishes upon
them. The stunted thorn under which she sits to write her poems, is more
beautiful to her than the cedars of Lebanon. To each and all of these
she must now bid farewell. It is in a different tone that she says in
her adieus, "We shall leave England in about three weeks."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: Mrs. Gaskell.]
[Footnote 6: Mrs. Gaskell.]
CHAPTER VII.
IN THE RUE D'ISABELLE.
The Rue d'Isabelle had a character of its own. It lies below your feet
as you stand in the Rue Royale, near the statue of General Beliard. Four
flights of steps lead down to the street, half garden, half old houses,
with at one end a large square mansion, owning the garden that runs
behind it and to the right of it. The house is old; a Latin inscription
shows it to have been given to the great Guild of Cross-bowmen by Queen
Isabelle in the early years of the 17th century. The garden is older;
long before the Guild of the Cross-bowmen of the Great Oath, in
deference to the wish of Queen Isabelle, permitted the street to be made
through it, the garden had been their exercising place. There Isabelle
herself, a member of their order, had shot down the bird. But the garden
had a yet more ancient past; when apple-trees, pear-trees and alleys of
Bruges cherries, when plots of marjoram and mint, of thyme and
sweet-basil, filled the orchard and herbary of the Hospital of the Poor.
And the garden itself, before trees or flowers were planted, had
resounded with the yelp of the Duke's hounds, when, in the thirteenth
century, it had been the Fosse-aux-chiens. This historic garden, this
mansion, built by a queen for a great order, belonged in 1842 to
Monsieur and Madame Heger, and was a famous Pensionnat de Demoiselles.
There the Vicar of Haworth brought his two daughters one February day,
spent one night in Brussels and went straight back to his old house on
the moors, so modern in comparison with the mansion in Rue d'Isabelle.
A change, indeed, for Emily and Charlotte. Even now, Brussels (the
headquarters of Catholicism far more than modern Rome) has a taste
for pageantry that recalls mediaeval days. The streets decked with
boughs and strewn with flowers, through which pass slowly the
processions of the Church, white-clad children, boys like angels
scattering roses, standard-bearers with emblazoned banners. Surpliced
choristers singing Latin praises, acolytes in scarlet swinging censers,
reliquaries and images, before which the people fall down in prayer;
all this to-day is no uncommon sight in Brussels, and must have been
yet more frequent in 1842.
The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies and
delicate _roses d'amour_, filling the quaint mediaeval square before the
beautiful old facade of the Hotel de Ville. Ste.-Gudule with its spires
and arches; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth street),
its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely park, its
great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their
winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls
a sober glory of colours, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds,
brown golds, most vivid greens.
All this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls
from Yorkshire; and Charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty
and strangeness. But Emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural
narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory
of her home--she longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two
Brontes were very different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame
Heger's Pensionnat. They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at
school--twenty-four and twenty-six--and they seemed to feel their
position; their speech was strained and odd; all the "sceptical, wicked,
immoral French novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for
French conversation to be met with," which the girls had toiled through
with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their
accent nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur
Heger, indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their
manners, even among English people, were stiff and prim; the hearty,
vulgar, genial expansion of their Belgian schoolfellows must have made
them seem as lifeless as marionettes. Their dress--Haworth had permitted
itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton
sleeves (Emily's pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut
lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a
very caricature of mediaevalism on Emily's tall, thin, slender figure.
They knew they were not in their element and kept close together, rarely
speaking. Yet Monsieur Heger, patiently watching, felt the presence of a
strange power under those uncouth exteriors.
An odd little man of much penetration, this French schoolmaster. "_Homme
de zele et de conscience, il possede a un haut degre l'eloquence du bon
sens et du coeur._" Fierce and despotic in the exaction of obedience,
yet tender of heart, magnanimous and tyrannical, absurdly vain and
absolutely unselfish. His wife's school was a kingdom to him; he brought
to it an energy, a zeal, a faculty of administration worthy to rule a
kingdom. It was with the delight of a botanist discovering a rare plant
in his garden, of a politician detecting a future statesman in his
nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two
English pupils above their schoolfellows. He watched them silently for
some weeks. When he had made quite sure, he came forwards and, so to
speak, claimed them for his own.
Charlotte at once accepted the yoke. All that he set her to do she
toiled to accomplish; she followed out his trains of thought; she
adopted the style he recommended; she gave him in return for all his
pains the most unflagging obedience, the affectionate comprehension of a
large intelligence. She writes to Ellen of her delight in learning and
serving: "It is very natural to me to submit, very unnatural to
command."
Not so with Emily. The qualities which her sister understood and
accepted, irritated her unspeakably. The masterfulness in little things,
the irritability, the watchfulness of the fiery little professor of
rhetoric were utterly distasteful to her. She contradicted his theories
to his face; she did her lessons well, but as she chose to do them. She
was as indomitable, fierce, unappeasable, as Charlotte was ready and
submissive. And yet it was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur
Heger's admiration. Egotistic and exacting he thought her, who never
yielded to his petulant, harmless egoism, who never gave way to his
benevolent tyranny; but he gave her credit for logical powers, for a
capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman.
She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained
that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own
determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned. He fancied she
might be a great historian, so he told Mrs. Gaskell. "Her faculty of
imagination was such, her views of scenes and characters would have
been so vivid and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show
of argument that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might
have been his previous opinions or his cooler perception of the truth.
She should have been a man: a great navigator!" cried the little, dark,
enthusiastic rhetorician. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new
spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong
imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or
difficulty; never have given way but with life!"
Yet they were never friends; though Monsieur Heger could speak so well
of Emily at a time, be it remembered, when it was Charlotte's praises
that were sought, when Emily's genius was set down as a lunatic's
hobgoblin of nightmare potency. He and she were alike too imperious, too
independent, too stubborn. A couple of swords, neither of which could
serve to sheathe the other.
That time in Brussels was wasted upon Emily. The trivial characters
which Charlotte made immortal merely annoyed her. The new impressions
which gave another scope to Charlotte's vision were nothing to her. All
that was grand, remarkable, passionate, under the surface of that
conventional Pensionnat de Demoiselles, was invisible to Emily.
Notwithstanding her genius she was very hard and narrow.
Poor girl, she was sick for home. It was all nothing to her, less than a
dream, this place she lived in. Charlotte's engrossment in her new life,
her eagerness to please her master, was a contemptible weakness to this
embittered heart. She would laugh when she found her elder sister trying
to arrange her homely gowns in the French taste, and stalk silently
through the large schoolrooms with a fierce satisfaction in her own
ugly sleeves, in the Haworth cut of her skirts. She seldom spoke a word
to any one; only sometimes she would argue with Monsieur Heger, perhaps
secretly glad to have the chance of shocking Charlotte. If they went out
to tea, she would sit still on her chair, answering "Yes" and "No;"
inert, miserable, with a heart full of tears. When her work was done she
would walk in the Cross-bowmen's ancient garden, under the trees,