Brontës (88 page)

Charlotte's loneliness – which one cannot help feeling was largely self-imposed – was compounded by the removal of the Dixon and the Jenkins families from Brussels. Mary Dixon, Mary Taylor's cousin and Charlotte's closest friend in the family, had already left for Germany earlier in the year. By the middle of August, Abraham Dixon had given up his house in the Rue de la Régence and removed, with the rest of the family, to cheaper accommodation in Ostend. Mr Jenkins, the Episcopal clergyman in Brussels who had been so kind to the Brontës on their first arrival, was away for the best part of the summer. Shortly after his return from a visit to England he fell seriously ill of a brain fever; though he recovered, he seems to have spent the rest of the summer convalescing in Ostend and then England.
³⁷
Only the five Wheelwright girls remained out of all Charlotte's English friends in Brussels, but even they went away on holiday in the latter part of August. For the two other English girls now at the Pensionnat Heger, Charlotte had little time or sympathy: Susanna Mills made no impression upon her at all and Maria Miller she considered selfish, worldly and sly.
³⁸

It was therefore no wonder that Charlotte dreaded the prospect of the long vacation. Writing to Ellen on 6 August, she told her:

I forewarn you that I am in low spirits and that Earth and Heaven seem dreary and empty to me at this moment – In a few days our vacations will begin – everybody is joyous and animated at the prospect because everybody is to go home – I know that I am to stay here during the 5 weeks that the holidays last and that I shall be much alone and consequently get downcast and find both days & nights of a weary length – It is the first time in my life that I have really dreaded the vacation … Alas I can hardly write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart – and I do so wish to go home – is not this childish? Pardon me Nell, I cannot help it
³⁹

Being on her own at Roe Head for a few weeks over Easter in 1838 had reduced Charlotte to mental and physical breakdown. Three weeks into this vacation, therefore, Charlotte could write with some relief to Emily
that ‘more than half the holidays are now past, and rather better than I expected'. She had, she said, spent much of the time wandering rather aimlessly through the streets of Brussels but one incident showed just how low her morale had sunk. She related her little adventure to Emily with a casualness deliberately designed to play down its startling unorthodoxy. After a walk to visit Martha Taylor's grave in the Protestant cemetery outside Brussels, she had returned to the city and almost accidentally found herself in the great Cathedral of Ste Gudule where vespers was taking place. She sat through the service but then could not find the will to leave.

An odd whim came into my head. In a solitary part of the Cathedral six or seven people still remained kneeling by the confessionals. In two confessionals I saw a priest. I felt as if I did not care what I did, provided it was not absolutely wrong, and that it served to vary my life and yield a moment's interest. I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like. Knowing me as you do, you will think this odd, but when people are by themselves they have singular fancies … a little wooden door inside the grating opened, and I saw the priest leaning his ear towards me. I was obliged to begin, and yet I did not know a word of the formula with which they always commence their confessions. It was a funny position. I felt precisely as I did when alone on the Thames at midnight. I commenced with saying I was a foreigner and had been brought up a Protestant. The priest asked if I was a Protestant then. I somehow could not tell a lie, and said ‘yes'. He replied that in that case I could not ‘jouir du bonheur de la confesse'; but I was determined to confess, and at last he said he would allow me because it might be the first step towards returning to the true church. I actually did confess – a real confession. When I had done he told me his address, and said that every morning I was to go to the rue du Parc – to his house – and he would reason with me and try to convince me of the error and enormity of being a Protestant!!! I promised faithfully to go. Of course, however, the adventure stops there, and I hope I shall never see the priest afain.
⁴⁰

That Charlotte should not only have been driven to visit a hated Catholic priest but also that she should have made ‘a real confession' to him is an indication of her desperate state of mind. All her instincts told her that her growing obsession with a married man was totally reprehensible and she obviously needed to talk to someone, if only to get the guilty secret off her
chest. With no one close at hand in whom she could confide, the anonymity of the Catholic confessional suddenly had an unexpected appeal. Standing condemned in her own eyes, Charlotte could not bring herself to make a similar ‘real confession', even to Emily, to whom she gave no indication at all of what she had actually said to the priest. Though the confession must in itself have provided some relief, Charlotte's immediate reaction was a sense of shame. Almost as an afterword, she told Emily, ‘I think you had better not tell papa of this. He will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic.'
⁴¹

The incident was to be replicated in almost exactly the same terms in
Villette
, the most autobiographical of Charlotte's novels. These are Lucy Snowe's reasons for visiting the confessional:

I said, I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a pressure of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer endure the weight.
⁴²

Lucy Snowe, like Charlotte herself, had no intention of taking up the priest's suggestion that she should visit him. Interestingly, the reason for this was that she feared that his sympathy and comfort might really have tempted her to turn Catholic.

The probabilities are that had I visited Numéro 3, Rue des Mages, at the hour and day appointed, I might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of Crécy, in Villette.

If Charlotte herself came so close to conversion in her hour of need, this might explain her subsequent virulent antipathy to everything Catholic and particularly her abhorrence of the Catholic priesthood. Hers was the hatred of one who had been severely shocked by her own receptiveness to temptation and, as the years went by, it became easier to blame the tempter than her own weakness in being tempted. At the time, however, Charlotte, like Lucy Snowe, was grateful to the priest. ‘He was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!'
⁴³

What no one but Charlotte herself could decide was what she ought to do. Morally, there was no doubt that she ought to remove herself from the Pensionnat Heger, but she could not do so without admitting that the
Brussels experiment had been a failure. It had not lived up to her expectations; it had not become a dramatic escape route from her earlier career though she could now place a higher price on her teaching services. Her dilemma was summed up in a letter to Emily at the beginning of October.

I should like uncommonly to be in the dining-room at home, or in the kitchen, or in the back kitchen. I should like even to be cutting up the hash, with the clerk and some register people at the other table, and you standing by, watching that I put enough flour, not too much pepper, and, above all, that I save the best pieces of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper; the first of which personages would be jumping about the dish and carving-knife, and the latter standing like a devouring flame on the kitchen floor. To complete the picture, Tabby blowing the fire, in order to boil the potatoes to a sort of vegetable glue! How divine are these recollections to me at this moment! Yet I have no thought of coming home just now. I lack a real pretext for doing so; it is true, this place is dismal to me, but I cannot go home, without a fixed prospect when I get there; and this prospect must not be a situation; that would be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire.

Rather wistfully, Charlotte asked Emily if she and their father really wanted her very much to come home: ‘I have an idea that I should be of no use there – a sort of aged person upon the parish.'
⁴⁴
If Charlotte had hoped that her dilemma would be resolved for her by a summons back home, she was mistaken. Her family could not or would not take the decision for her. So she tried, somewhat half-heartedly, to give her notice to Madame Heger:

If it had depended on her I should certainly have soon been at liberty but Monsieur Heger – having heard of what was in agitation – sent for me the day after – and pronounced with vehemence his decision that I should not leave
–
⁴⁵

Charlotte could not overlook so decided an intervention: at the very least it was proof that Monsieur Heger still held her in high regard and that was more important to her at this juncture than her personal pride or inclination. Perhaps thinking that he had neglected his former pupil, Monsieur Heger renewed his lessons with her. Discovering, from a chance remark, that her knowledge of arithmetic ‘would have disgraced a charity-schoolboy', he started her on a course in the subject.
⁴⁶
If Charlotte's experience reflected that of Lucy Snowe, it was not an altogether happy one, her master
becoming increasingly severe and sarcastic as her abilities improved. The intention was to provoke her to greater effort but, in Charlotte's low state of mind, the effect was simply to discourage her and the lessons were soon given up. She was still producing the occasional essay for Monsieur Heger, but even this seems to have been a declining interest, her last surviving one dating from 17 October 1843.
⁴⁷

Charlotte's loathing of Madame Heger increased as she felt herself apparently losing her husband's goodwill. ‘Madame Heger is a politic – plausible and interested person – I no longer trust to her', she told Ellen, adding in a note written the day after in her
General Atlas of Modern Geography
,

Brussels – Saturday Morning Octbr 14th.1843, – First class – I am very cold – there is no fire – I wish I were at home with Papa – Branwell – Emily – Anne & Tabby – I am tired of being amongst foreigners it is a dreary life – especially as there is only one person in this house worthy of being liked – also another who seems a rosy sugar-plum but I know her to be coloured chalk.
⁴⁸

In this increasingly fraught and unpleasant situation, the only person who seems to have been prepared to offer Charlotte unequivocal advice was Mary Taylor. She repeatedly told her that she should leave Brussels; suggesting that she should join her in Germany and even offering to share her pupils with Charlotte so that she could be guaranteed a living. Though Charlotte claimed that she could not possibly take advantage of Mary's ‘disinterested generosity, quite peculiar to herself', the real reason she refused seems to have been an aversion to teaching boys; ‘opinion & custom run so strongly against what she does … if her pupils had been girls it would be all well – the fact of their being boys (or rather young men) is the stumbling block'.
⁴⁹

Even though Charlotte would not join her, Mary Taylor persisted in urging her to leave Brussels. By the end of the year even Charlotte had become convinced that this was a necessity. On 19 December she wrote a short and businesslike note to Emily which revealed nothing of what the decision had cost her.

Dear E.J.

I have taken my determination. I hope to be at home the day after New Year's Day. I have told Mme [Heger]. But in order to come home I shall be obliged to draw on my cash for another £5. I have only £3 at present, and as
there are several little things I should like to buy before I leave Brussels – which you know cannot be got as well in England – £3 would not suffice. Low spirits have afflicted me much lately, but I hope all will be well when I get home – above all, if I find papa and you and B. and A. well. I am not ill in body. It is only the mind which is a trifle shaken – for want of comfort.

I shall try to cheer up now. – Good-bye.

C.B.
⁵⁰

Charlotte's desperation can be measured by the fact that she made no excuses for returning home and, more significantly, that she had no prospective employment lined up in England.

The task of saying goodbye to her few friends in Brussels was soon accomplished. Laetitia Wheelwright was given a scrap of paper inscribed in Flemish and French, ‘Think of me and I will always think of you.' On Christmas Day Charlotte dined for the last time with the Jenkins family, where she was also able to say her farewells to Abraham Dixon, Mary Taylor's uncle and father of her own friend, Mary.
⁵¹
The most difficult leave-taking was the last: saying goodbye to the Hegers for what all knew would be a final separation. Charlotte later told Ellen:

I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with Monsr Heger cost me – It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true and kind and disinterested a friend –
⁵²

Monsieur Heger gave Charlotte a diploma, sealed with the seal of the Athenée Royal, testifying to her teaching abilities. He also suggested that she should take one of his daughters to England as a pupil, an offer Charlotte refused ‘as I knew it would not be agreeable to Madame –'.
⁵³

Her low opinion of the phlegmatic nature of her Belgian pupils was somewhat confounded by the degree of regret they expressed at her departure – a feeling she did not reciprocate.
⁵⁴
On Sunday, 31 December, the last day of the old year, Charlotte took her final leave of Brussels. The experiences of the last two years, both intellectually and emotionally, had marked her for life. She had successfully undergone the rigours of an academic discipline imposed by Monsieur Heger, emerging as a better and more powerful writer. And she had fallen in love for the first time – with a man who was the antithesis of everything that she had previously valued. Monsieur Heger was as far removed as it was possible to be from Zamorna:
small, ugly, short-tempered and, above all, Catholic, he shared only his married state with the hero who had dominated Charlotte's imagination for so long. Her unrequited passion for him was to alter permanently and radically her vision of what the male hero should be. The future creator of Mr Rochester and Paul Emanuel was born.