New novel about the Brontës’ time in Brussels: "Si j’avais des ailes", by Nathalie Stalmans

In recent years there has been no shortage of biographical fiction about Charlotte and Emily Brontë, but we had to wait until 2013 and Jolien Janzing’s De Meester for a novel focusing on their Brussels experience. Now, in Nathalie Stalmans’ Si j’avais des ailes, ‘If I had wings’ (Genèse Édition, released on 18 January 2019), once again we have the opportunity to view the Brontës’ stay in Brussels in 1842-43 through the eyes of an author based in Belgium, this time a francophone Belgian writer.

Villette and Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels: talk on 14 October 2017

John Sutherland was scheduled to visit us for a talk about Brontë puzzles but unfortunately had to cancel due to illness. We hope to enjoy his talk at a later date.

Helen talking about Villette

Instead, Helen MacEwan entertained us with a talk, Villette as vignettes of 1840s Brussels, introducing us to the Brontës’ Brussels. It contained quotations from writings by Belgian and foreign observers of Brussels, including guide books and travel books by visitors to the city. Among other aspects, it looked at the musical performances and paintings on which Charlotte must have based the descriptions in the novel. The talk was interspersed with readings in which Paul and Ola entertained us with details of Brussels at that period, helping us to visualise the city in which Charlotte and Emily walked.

Paul and Ola resting in-between performances

The talk gave a preview of Helen’s next book, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë’s Troubled Brussels Legacy, to be published next month. Here is the book description.

‘Charlotte Brontë’s years in Belgium (1842-43) had a huge influence both on her life and her work. It was in Brussels that she not only honed her writing skills but fell in love and lived through the experiences that inspired two of her four novels: her first, The Professor, and her last and in many ways most interesting, Villette. Her feelings about Belgium are known - her love for her tutor Heger, her uncomplimentary remarks about Belgians, the powerful effect on her imagination of living abroad. But what about Belgian views of Charlotte Brontë? How have Belgian commentators responded to her portrayal of their capital city and their society? Through Belgian Eyes explores a wide range of responses from across the Channel.

In the process, it examines what The Professor and Villette tell Belgian readers about their capital in the 1840s and provides the Brussels background to the novels. B russels has inspired few outstanding works of literature, and the makes Villette, considered by many to be Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, of particular interest as a portrait of the Belgian capital a decade after the country gained independence in 1830, and just before the city was transformed out of all recognition from the ’villette’ (small town) that Charlotte knew. Her view of Brussels is contrasted with those of other foreign visitors and of the Belgians themselves.’

It sounds like an interesting read. A highly enjoyable Saturday morning that helped to fill in our picture of the Brontës’ Brussels.

“Solitude in the midst of numbers” –on loneliness in Brussels

Among the obscure, plain heroines created by Charlotte Brontë, none is as autobiographical as Lucy Snowe of Villette, and none is as utterly lonely. Reserved and secretive, she deliberately keeps her distance both as a narrator and character in her own story, as if she wanted to prevent anyone getting a glimpse of her true feelings. Much like Charlotte during her second stay in Brussels, she is a solitary figure in Mme Beck’s pensionnat, rejecting the company of teachers and pupils, but at the same time longing for true friendship, one that provides a sense of safety and belonging. Both Lucy and Charlotte would be eventually overpowered by the loneliness in Villette / Brussels, but what makes their common story so extraordinary is that they would not let it destroy them completely: they would reclaim their lives and turn their time in the city into something fruitful.

Charlotte’s real-life relationship with loneliness seems ambiguous at best. As a young teacher at the Roe Head school, she would deliberately drift off into a solitary state, closing her eyes on the reality crowded with pupils, and step over to an imaginary world. She wrote most of Jane Eyre in isolation, too, overseeing her father’s recovery from surgery in half-darkness. In those instances, calm and solitude would usher in creativity. But there is also a different, hostile kind of loneliness resulting from a painful conviction of being different and misunderstood. The worst kind of loneliness, possibly, which cannot be remedied in company, but could even be exacerbated if the people present are of the alien kind. For the most part of her life, Charlotte would complain about not being like others, referring to the passionate storms tearing at her soul and thunderous ambition pushing her beyond the prescribed domestic existence. This forcible alienation and lack of understanding  were difficult in themselves, but also carried another threat, possibly the most feared by Charlotte – monotony and inaction, characteristic of the passive life of old maids in her novels. This dichotomy of solitudes is expressed in the first letter to Monsieur Héger from Haworth. In the relative seclusion of the Parsonage, she writes, “one’s brain is always active – one longs to be busy”, which is why she draws up plans for setting up the Brontë school for young ladies and envisages writing a great novel to impress her Master. But later in the same letter, she confesses that she “fear[s] nothing so much as idleness – lack of employment – inertia – lethargy of the faculties – when the body is idle, the spirit suffers cruelly” (Selected Letters 51).

'Villette' rocks Brussels, or was there really a scandal in the city?

It has been suggested, or rumoured, that there was a sort of scandal in Brussels following the publication of Villette. The big question is of course whether this can be true, and what it would have been like. In this article I hope to get somewhat closer to answering this question. In the previous articles I wrote about the editions that would have brought the novel to Brussels. We can assess the likelihood of a scandal with the help of some of this new information. It can allow us to say more on when it might have happened, for example.

Marion Spielmann, in an article in The Times of 17 August 1933, ‘After the Brontës – Life in the Pensionnat Heger,’ stated that “the Hegers were socially prominent in Brussels, and when the French translation of “Villette” appeared there was at least the raw material of a scandal in its love-story and its recognizable portraits of professor and governess.” Albert Colin, whom we also saw in the revenge article, wrote that, nevertheless, “the calumnies of the writer had no effect on the prosperity of the house, which was guaranteed from every attack by the excellence of its instruction and its clearly established lofty moral tone.”

When?
It is tempting to link the publication of the 1855 La maîtresse d’Anglais to the Hegers, and Brussels in general, learning about Villette, as Spielmann does. However, I would say it is likely that they had their first Villette visitors before the Revue Britannique started publishing La maîtresse in March 1855. Right from the beginning it was clear that the novel was situated in Brussels, as is shown by the review of it in The Athenaeum of 12 Feb 1853: “‘Villette’ is a narrative of the heart-affairs of the English instructress and the Belgian professor of literature in a school in Brussels.” On the same day it said in The Spectator that “Villette is Brussels, and Currer Bell might have called her new novel ‘Passages from the Life of a Teacher in a Girls’ School at Brussels, written by herself.’” Charlotte really made it very easy too to find out that the pensionnat was the Pensionnat Heger.

Brontë proposal

On Sunday morning the UK Brontë Society group were not too exhausted by the long afternoon at Waterloo the previous day to enjoy a guided walk by Jones Hayden around the site of the Pensionnat Heger and other places known to Charlotte and Emily around Place Royale.

The group was joined by a couple for whom our Brontë tour was part of rather a special weekend, Guy and Evy from Menen near Ypres. Guy is head of the Menen tourist office, Evy a researcher at the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917. Guy had planned a romantic break for the two of them in Brussels which he called a ‘proposal weekend’; he was going to ask Evy to marry him, and knowing her interest in the Brontës, he booked our tour as part of the programme he had put together to impress her.

Evy writes:

‘The proposal weekend and the Brontë walk was a surprise organised by Guy, I just knew when to pack my bags, destination unknown.

‘I have always been interested in 19th century English literature, especially the Brontës, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, etc. - how these authors stood up for themselves in a male-dominated society and pursued their passion for writing. And of course the love stories with sometimes unrequited love.

‘What I particularly enjoyed about the walk was finding out more about Charlotte’s and Emily's stay in Brussels. I was surprised that they had been near places I once just passed without knowing the Brontës walked there once and without noticing the memorial plaque where the Pensionnat Heger once was. It changed my view of that part of Brussels. I knew they had stayed in Brussels for a while to teach and that Charlotte returned to Haworth after her love was unanswered. But I wasn't aware of all the details of their stay and the exact places that are connected to the Brontës. About five years ago, I visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth and I am still very impressed by the visit and the journey to Haworth and Yorkshire.’

Both agree that they will always remember the tour as a wonderful part of a wonderful weekend. They have joined the Brussels Brontë Group and we look forward to seeing them back here soon. (Evy said ‘Yes’, by the way.)

The Hotel Cluysenaar

The Hotel Cluysenaar, on Rue Royale, which later became the Astoria Hotel, is more than likely the original model for the Hotel Crécy in Villette. This is how Charlotte describes it (Vashti chapter): “It was 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”.

Hotel Cluysenaar, ca. 1840

The hotel was built in 1838 by the architect J.P.Cluysenaar (1811-1880) born in Kampen in the Netherlands. Other well known works in Brussels by Cluysenaar include the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, the Conservatoire Royal (the new one built in the 1870s) and the kiosk in the Parc Royal, the latter also being mentioned by Charlotte in Villette (chap.38). Cluysenaar not only built the hotel but also owned it; financial troubles, however, forced him to put it up for sale in 1843.

In its early days, the Hotel Cluysenaar was a much-publicised residence, attracting a wealthy and mainly foreign clientele. As Charlotte suggests, it was indeed more a set of well-furnished apartments than a hotel. A precise description of the hotel as Charlotte would have known it is found in the l'Observateur belge (15 September 1843). Here we learn that the ground floor consisted of five shops, three apartments, a courtyard and five stables. Six imposing staircases led to an entresol containing five large apartments, and to the three main upper floors, each holding ten apartments.