Charlotte and Emily Brontë at School in Brussels

Talk given by Maureen Peeck in Brussels on April 18, 2008 to the Brussels Brontë Group, the Belgian branch of the Brontë Society, on the occasion of the Annual Brontë Weekend.
The English text used for the essays discussed is :
The Belgian Essays: Charlotte and Emily Brontë, edited and translated by Sue Lonoff, Yale University Press, 1996.

One of the best things that happened to Charlotte and Emily Brontë when they went to Brussels in 1842 was that they encountered what must have been one of the best teachers working in Brussels at that time – Monsieur Heger. Charlotte was 25 and Emily 23 years old, so they were a bit old to be going to boarding school. Nevertheless, M. Heger’s teaching methods were perfectly in tune with their stated aim in coming to Brussels which was primarily to learn French. This, with his help they did. His method was to present them with good examples of French style, be it literature, history or philosophy and have them write essays (or devoirs) in a similar style, either on the same topic or one like it. He believed that by imitating or, as he called it, “emulating” masters of the language they would learn French and also improve their own writing style. (Presumably he didn’t know that the two were extremely experienced writers already!) This system suited Charlotte down to the ground and she revelled in the opportunity she had been given to impress her teacher and show off her knowledge. Emily was a different case: she didn’t “draw well at all” with M. Heger (as Charlotte said) and didn’t want to co-operate in the venture, believing that imitation would spoil any originality that the pupil might possess. But having come to Brussels, with however much trepidation, to learn French she could hardly refuse to do her homework. And she made huge strides in French.
It becomes clear that Heger soon realised that both young women were extraordinarily gifted and he adapted to each of them in his own way, but without relinquishing his teaching methods. Thus, he would often simply correct Emily’s French but give little other comment, evidently recognising her independence of spirit, whereas he would go into enormous detail in the case of Charlotte, making suggestions and helping her improve her arguments, recognising her need to bow to his authority. So Emily was left more or less free to state her case as she wanted without too much interference from her teacher. And that teacher must sometimes have been quite surprised at what he had on his hands. Later, he even went so far as to say, in that very famous statement, that Emily “should have been a man (!) – an explorer”.
In all there are 28 surviving essays, 19 by Charlotte and 9 by Emily. This evening I just want to mention two of Emily’s essays, namely “The Cat” (“Le Chat”), dated May 15 1842 and “The Butterfly” (“Le Papillon”), dated August 11 1842. These are two of the most famous of Emily’s essays. Please note I will be quoting from the essays in the English translations.
The speaker in “The Cat” begins by stating that she really likes cats. We can guess that the example Emily was supposed to be imitating was something along the lines that cats are to be despised on the grounds that they are so utterly selfish and never have the slightest interest in being loyal or affectionate to their masters or mistresses in return for the care and affection they receive; and, moreover, they are despicable because they are prepared to kill other creatures, like mice, for pleasure. What Emily does is give the essay the twist she wants by bringing human beings into the argument – and not to their advantage, which would have been the conventional thing to do. I paraphrase: Although the cat differs is some physical points, it is extremely like us in disposition. There are those who would say that a cat’s excessive hypocrisy, cruelty and ingratitude only bears comparison with wicked humans. Well, replies the speaker, in that case this will include the whole human race. Now I quote: “Our education develops one of these qualities in great perfection, the others flourish without nurture.” So in Emily’s essay hypocrisy is the one we are taught, cruelty and ingratitude come naturally. Here ingratitude means “not appreciating, or being inclined to return kindness.” This is the dictionary definition. I quote again: “A cat, in its own interest … instead of tearing what it desires from its master’s hand, approaches with a caressing air … and advances a paw whose touch is as soft as down. When it has gained its end … it resumes its true character … and that artfulness … is called hypocrisy. In ourselves, we give it another name, politeness, and he who did not use it to hide his real feelings would soon be driven from society.” And so the essay goes on, expatiating on the cat’s and man’s cruelty and ingratitude. Not quite what M. Heger had in mind, one would have thought.
This satirical and sardonic essay with its Byronic misanthropic pose ends with a statement that cats can’t really help being what they are, and that it was all Adam’s fault in the first place for getting the animals thrown out of paradise along with himself. And possibly this speaker likes cats more than humans.
The theme here outlines in a nutshell one we often come across in Emily Brontë’s work: namely that beneath the veneer of civilization people are “all for ourselves in the end,” as Nelly Dean puts it in Wuthering Heights. In this pessimistic view of humankind everyone is to a larger or lesser degree hypocritical, cruel and ungrateful, so how then dare we accuse others of these vices?

In the second essay, “The Butterfly,” a different position is taken up, one more in keeping with a Christian world view. Again there is a dramatic situation, this time with an individual recounting an event in his or her life. It begins with the speaker again expressing a jaundiced view of the world: “All creation is equally mad, behold those flies playing above the brook; the swallows and fish diminish their number every minute. These will become in their turn the prey of some tyrant of air or water; and man for his amusement or his need will kill their murderers. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of the death of others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.” (Note here how nature and mankind are all of a piece; as in “The Cat” man is not pictured as a higher being than animals.) In this despairing mood she then crushes a caterpillar underfoot, thus preventing it from ever becoming a beautiful butterfly. Having thus shown herself to be as cruel as any other creature, and moreover having the audacity to question God’s intentions, she sees a butterfly emerging from the forest and is suddenly granted a moment of vision. An inner voice tells her: I quote “As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. …. God is the god of justice and mercy; then surely … every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest ….. ” So here one can say that the wickedness, and thus the suffering it entails are all part of the divine plan. In this view there will be no hell, and there will be no doomed men and women because God will have mercy on all. For Emily Brontë the most divine of virtues was that of forgiveness. In the poetry we see time and again a wicked man whom men say even God will not forgive, being saved by the love of a woman who is prepared to forgive him. And think of the wolfish Heathcliff, a man portrayed as not that different in kind from an animal or any natural force. He has no desire for the kind of heaven described in “The Butterfly,” yet he too, we are led to feel, deserves his kind of heaven. The crucial doctrine as proposed in “The Butterfly” is that of Universal Salvation. This was the view held by some of the dissenting Christian faiths with which Emily and Charlotte would have been familiar. It is not that of the Anglican faith in which the Brontës were nominally brought up. And certainly not of the Catholic Church, so one can’t help feeling that Emily was out to shock or at least provoke the Catholic M. Heger.
Emily Brontë did not suspend her own agenda just because she was abroad. She continued to write poetry – she wrote at least three poems – and, as we see, used the essays to work on her own ideas. She does not express the conventional view of nature giving us a glimpse of God’s greatness, nor the notion that human beings are superior to and separate from animals.
Imagine this woman writing such essays in a respectable Catholic pensionnat for jeunes demoiselles. The way she interpreted what Heger wanted her to do must have seemed to him to transgress what was appropriate for a woman to write about and it is perhaps for this reason that, being at a loss, he said she ought to have been a man!

Ongoing Brussels research

Eric Ruijssenaars has written this report on recent research done by him on Brontë connections in Brussels, with the help of other members of the Brussels group.

Despite having done research on the Brontës and Brussels for almost two decades now it was only two years ago that I started to concentrate on the burial places of Martha Taylor and Julia Wheelwright, the friends of Charlotte and Emily in Brussels in 1842, who died there that year.

The girls were buried in the only Protestant cemetery in (Greater) Brussels, then in the suburb of St.-Josse-ten-Noode. Charlotte often walked to this cemetery in 1843. It features in The Professor, as the place where William Crimsworth and Frances Henri met again after their separation. Here also a number of British soldiers who died of their wounds after the battle of Waterloo lay buried. The Protestant cemetery was actually part of a larger cemetery.

This cemetery was closed in 1877, at the same as a large new cemetery at Evere was opened.

In 1885 it was visited by Theodore Wolfe, who wrote the following report.

“Our way to the Protestant cemetery, a spot sadly familiar to Miss Brontë, and the usual termination of her walks, lay past the site of the Porte de Louvain and out to the hills a mile or so beyond the old city limits. From our path we saw more than one tree surrounded farmhouse which might have been the place of M. Paul’s breakfast with his school, and at least one old-fashioned manor-house with green-tufted and terraced lawns, which might have served Miss Brontë as the model for ‘La Terrasse’, the suburban home of the Bretons … From the cemetery are beautiful vistas of farther lines of hills, of intervening valleys, of farms and villas, and of the great city lying below. Miss Brontë has well described this place: ‘Here, on pages of stone, of marble, and of brass, are written names, dates, last tributes of pomp or love, in English, French, German and Latin‘. There are stone crosses all about, and great thickets of roses and yew trees, ’cypresses that stand straight and mute, and willows that hang low and still’; and there are ‘dim garlands of everlasting flowers’.

Here ‘the Professor’ found his long sought sweetheart kneeling at a newly made grave, under these overhanging trees. And here we found the shrine of poor Charlotte Brontë’s many weary pilgrimages hither, the burial-place of her friend and schoolmate Martha Taylor, the Jessy York of Shirley, the spot where, under ‘green sod and a gray marble headstone, cold coffined, solitary, Jessy sleeps below’.

On 25 November 1887 The Times wrote: “British tombs in old cemetery of the Quartier Leopold (Rue du Noyer), Brussels - Notice having been given by the Municipality of Brussels that this cemetery is shortly to be cleared.” It went on to explain how relatives could ensure a ‘concession’ at the Evere cemetery. From the registers there we know the Taylor and Wheelwright families did not reply.

The place was visited by Herbert Wroot around 1900. In his Persons and places. Sources of the Brontë novels he writes that the cemetery “has been cut up and built upon,” and, “at the demolition of the cemetery, the bodies and the memorials of the dead were removed to the great cemetery of Evere.”

In October a group of nine Brontë Brussels Group members visited this place. The ground of the former cemetery is now partly occupied by a fairly modern apartment building, with grass lawns on either side. The Protestant part of the cemetery lay close to the Rue du Noyer, we know from a detailed plan.

Unfortunately the vistas Wolfe mentions have completely disappeared.


The site of the former cemetery, taken from Rue du Noyer

We then went on to Evere, hoping of course to find the gravestones of Martha and Julia. The question is, can they be found?

Two years ago I had an interview with Marcel Celis. As an archaeologist he has been digging in the remain of the old Isabella quarter, in the vicinity of the Place Royale. He is also the founding member of Epitaaf, which takes care of the funerary heritage of Brussels. He was able to tell me that the gravestones of the old cemetery can be found in lanes 14, 15 and 17 of the cemetery of Evere.

So there we were, armed with brushes, as on a visit earlier in the year I had seen lots of graves covered by moss. It proved to be hard work. Occasionally there’s also a layer of earth on the stones. We did most of lane 15, without success.

Unfortunately some inscriptions can no longer be read so we may never find the gravestones, but this field research will go on in 2009. In April there will be a new excursion.

It seems certain that the bodies of the girls were put in a mass grave at Evere cemetery, since their relatives did not apply for a ‘concession’ there. It also seems certain that the gravestones were transported to Evere and therefore that they could possibly be found somewhere there.


Evere cemetery (Brussels), lane 15

Since the October excursion I have been greatly assisted by Renate Hurtmanns, who paid several more visits to Evere cemetery, as you can see from her report below, with the latest on this research.

She has also helped me in transcribing letters written by Louise Heger, the daughter of Monsieur and Madame Heger. Some time ago I discovered that the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has a large very interesting collection of letters written by her, including many she wrote to her parents, sisters and brother that give a valuable new insight into the family.

There are also some reminiscences among the papers, among them the document below. It’s the only thing about Charlotte Brontë in these papers.


One of Louise Heger's letters at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Documentatiecentrum voor Vlaamse Kunst)

On this page she describes how one morning in 1913 she heard men selling the newspaper Le Petit Blue shouting about the ‘love affair’ of Monsieur Heger. She and her brother Paul had just given the letters Charlotte wrote to Monsieur to the British Museum, after which they were published in The Times.

In Ghent I made an exciting find, in a book about female Belgian 19th century artists: one of the paintings Charlotte describes in Villette (in the Salon chapter), La vie d’une femme. I hope to have it published, in colour, in Brontë Studies in 2009.

Furthermore, we are able to give you a picture of the house where Monsieur Heger died. Last year I reported to you on this blog it had been demolished. Earlier this year Mr. Willaert, who had seen that article, sent us this picture.

He explained that no buyer could be found for the house and that finally, after it had fallen into disrepair (as can be seen in the picture), the city of Brussels ordered its demolition because it had become a danger for passers-by.


The house where M. Heger died

So this has been another fruitful year for the research on Brussels and the Brontës. And there’s still plenty to do in the coming years.

Eric Ruijssenaars

The following reports were written by Sheila Richardson and Renate Hurtmann, who joined the cemetery excursion in October.

Report by Sheila Richardson: Martha Taylor

Martha Taylor, a friend of Charlotte Brontë died in Brussels and was buried in the Protestant cemetery there. Charlotte writes in her letters home of walking to visit her grave sometimes on a Sunday. When the graveyard was due to be built over the graves were moved to the new Brussels cemetery at Evere.

A small group from the Brussels Bronte Group visited Evere to look for Martha’s grave. This is a very pretty graveyard, like the original one described by Charlotte, with winding paths under a variety of trees and little open glades, bathed in the autumn sunlight on the day we went. As the graves were under the trees they were covered with moss, so we took brushes and cleared enough of each one to get an idea of who was buried there. Some were sad, the young children of English families buried far from home. One was for a soldier killed at Waterloo. The British Ambassador had placed a poppy wreathe there and there were slightly faded red roses in memory of some later soldiers. Unfortunately we did not find Martha’s grave. It might be that her parents were not aware that the graves were to be moved and therefore did not contribute to the cost. She may have been reburied in a common grave or an unmarked one.

One of our group had researched the internet and found a statement in “The Haworth Village” site that said that both Mary and Martha Taylor were buried at Gomersal, the Taylor’s home village in Yorkshire. We were a little doubtful about the accuracy of this. Looking further on the internet I found that The Red House where the Taylors lived and described by Charlotte Bronte as Briamains in Shirley is now a museum.
The secretary there, Helga Hughes, confirmed what we had suspected – that Martha remains buried in Brussels. The Haworth Village Site had not checked their information with her but she would now see that it was corrected. If you have come across the Haworth Site and been confused by this, I think it has now been clarified.

The description of the Red House sounds delightful. It looks very much as it would have done in Charlotte’s day, from the elegant parlour including the stained glass windows described in Shirley to the stone flagged kitchen floor. Also the 19th century garden has been carefully recreated with old fashioned roses and some forgotten plants.

The Barn has an exhibition of things that belonged to Charlotte and shows her connection with the area and the friends she developed there.

Viewing details are on the site “Venue details - Red House Museum”.

Report by Renate Hurtmann: Research on Brussels cemetery in Evere

I returned to the Evere cemetery because Eric had informed me about the existence of loose old gravestones lying against the cemetery wall somewhere, among which could possibly be those of Martha Taylor and Julia Wheelwright.

He also wanted me to go to lanes 14 and 17 and find out if there are also graves from English people who died before 1877 (the year of the closure of the Protestant cemetery). If not, this would strongly indicate that the old gravestones went only to lane 15 - where we had already started cleaning some of them on the occasion of our cemetery excursion.

I did indeed find some graves in lane 14 as well as in lane 17 of English people who died before 1877, which means that they had been transferred from the Protestant cemetery to the one in Evere.

Unfortunately - especially in lane 14 - there are lots of old gravestones in an awful state - completely sunken or covered by thick layers of earth, moss and ivy under which the inscriptions are often very difficult to decipher or have completely faded away after more than 150 years and there are also graves without any inscription at all.
On the other hand, we know now at least for sure that we shall have to look for the old graves in the three lanes and not only in lane 15 !

Below you will find details of my findings:

1. Discovery of the loose old gravestones
Following the guardian’s description, I followed the long lane on the left when you enter the cemetery by the main gate, walking alongside the cemetery wall until I came to three little houses standing behind the cemetery wall. On the cemetery wall to the right-hand side of these cottages I found the tombstones in question, (46 in total) which I checked one by one. They are all but two legible, and even on the two on which the inscriptions have faded, I could decipher the word "begraven" (buried), which means that they come from Belgian graves, as all the others. There is not one single gravestone with an English inscription or name, which means that we can definitely give up the hope that Martha's and Julia's gravestones are among them!

2. Lane 14
At the end of lane 14 I found 2 English graves with people having died before 1877 (so certainly people who were buried beforehand on the Protestant cemetery), i.e.

- Harriet Mary Anne
the beloved child of The Rev. Reginald Smith
died in Brussels in 1837

- Catherine
eldest daughter of Ben Mosley
died in Brussels on 17 March 1853

3. Lane 17
On the right hand side of lane 17, I found 2 English graves which correspond to what we are looking for:

- Charlotte Fano
died in Brussels on 25 April 1850

Underneath was written “concession à perpétuité” – an inscription which I didn’t find on the other gravestones. Would that perhaps indicate that all the graves from the Protestant cemetery in St. Josse had been transferred to Evere (and not only those with a “concession”, i.e. burial places having been paid for, as the cemetery administration had told me on the occasion of a former inquiry)?

- Name not legible
died in Brussels on 19 September 1851

There are other English graves, but the date of death was not legible!

In “Pelouse 17” (the lawn section of lane 17), I came across a British grave of 2 families, i.e. the Brain and Triest family. I couldn’t read all, but this certainly:

- George Brain died in Brussels in October 1855
- Thomas A. Brain died in Brussels in October 1859
- Richard Farmer Brain died in Brussels in August 1871
- Betsy Triest died in Brussels in August 1876

The old burial registers still available at the Evere cemetery administration – which I consulted from 1877 till 1890 – unfortunately this didn’t bring us one step further because they only consist of lists of people who died from 1877 onwards, i.e. from the time when the Evere cemetery was opened.

There is no trace whatsoever of burial lists with regard to the persons whose graves had been transferred from the Protestant cemetery to Evere. However there might still be another possible source - the city archives of St. Josse - where I shall hopefully find out more at the beginning of 2009!

Brussels Brontë Group Christmas Lunch

On Sunday 7 December 30 members of our group met for lunch at Restaurant L'Eperon d'Or. The Brontë group has eaten here before. The last time was during our Brontë weekend in April when the chef almost single-handedly prepared an impressive Victorian banquet for about 60 people devised by the Centre de Gastronomie Historique de Bruxelles. Our Christmas lunch was a simpler affair but as always in this restaurant, delicious and very good value for money. The service is friendly and there's something Victorian about the décor, appropriate for our group!

It was a lovely way to round off the year and we'll be returning to this restaurant in 2009.

My Discovery of the Brontë Sisters' Universe

The Brontë Sisters' works are part of universal literature and everybody has heard about them at some time. A long time ago when I was younger I discovered at school the finest pieces of the Brontës and other English writers such as Dickens or Thackeray and I became interested in them. The first book I read of the Brontë Sisters was Wuthering Heights. I loved it immensely due to the accurate descriptions of the landscape and the passions related. This one was the only Brontë novel I read before arriving in Brussels five years ago. At that time I had found by chance an article about Emily and Charlotte Brontë's Brussels experience and how that influences their novels, even their lives in the case of Charlotte Brontë. The article I refer to ("A Foreign Affair" by Derek Blyth") was published in the Brussels English-speaking magazine “The Bulletin”.

By reading that article I was really impressed by the fact that Emily and Charlotte lived in Brussels for a couple of years so as to learn French in a Belgian boarding school. As a result of her Brussels experience Charlotte wrote a magnificent novel titled “Villette”. I can assert that it stoked up the fires for my initiation to the Brontës' universe and motivated me to read “Villette” and to look for articles and other publications related to them. I was fascinated to learn about their tragic lives and how their personal experiences shaped these wonderful masterpieces of universal literature, despite the fact that they were women writers and at that time writing was only allowed to men. For instance I didn’t know that they were obliged to hide their names for fear that they would be criticised by Victorian society. I was amazed to find out that their pseudonyms Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell corresponded to their names' first letters. As I have said “Villette” was my initiation in finding out about the Brontës on my own until I got in touch with the Brussels Brontë Group. And how did it happen? Once again I have to refer to an article which I was handed. The article in question is about readers clubs in Brussels. I was impressed of the existence of a group which focuses on English 19th century literature, particularly the Brontës, and I made up my mind to write to them to get more information about their activities and the likelihood of partaking in them. I was accepted and I have written this small article for the group as a contribution and a commitment to involving myself in its activities. We aim to keep the Brontë heritage alive and spread it.

Óscar Rodríguez

Cathy and Heathcliff in Brussels

On Saturday 18 October, exactly a year after organising its first talk, the Brussels Brontë Group once again brought the Brontës to a Brussels audience. The talk hosted by us last year was on the theme of Charlotte's anguished letters to M. Heger. A journalist in a Brussels magazine announcing that event, getting a little carried away himself, invited people to "close their eyes and let themselves be swept along by this torrent of passion". This year we again invited our audience to be swept along by a torrent of passion, but with their eyes open not closed, gazing at a screen on which they could watch Heathcliffs and Cathies from various film versions (the 1939 Olivier one, the 1970 one with Timothy Dalton and the 1991 version with Ralph Fiennes) chasing each other over the moors.

The film clips were shown to illustrate a talk by Patsy Stoneman called What everyone knows about Wuthering Heights: the novel and its film adaptations. She pointed out that many people are not quite sure whether they've read the novel or not, as it permeates our consciousness. Her comparison of scenes in the films with the corresponding passages in the novel revealed how often we, the readers, supply in our imaginations scenes (such as those between the lovers on the moors) not actually described in the novel.

Patsy Stoneman's talk, which was received enthusiastically, was the first in our new venue in a university in central Brussels, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis. We have for some time been looking for a suitable venue and were delighted when some of the English lecturers at this university who support our events offered us the use of a room which is ideal for our purposes. The staff bent over backwards to make us welcome and help with all the practical aspects of the organisation, and staff and students from the English language department, who had prepared for the talk beforehand, attended the event. In all over 80 people were present.

After the talk we wound up with some music before partaking of the refreshments offered by the university. The music was supplied by a Dutch member of our group, Veronica Metz, who is the lead singer of Anois (www.anois.nl), a Celtic band which is recording an album of Emily Brontë's poems that she has set to music. With recorded accompaniment, she sang four songs to haunting melodies a little reminiscent of Enya's. Another member, Marina Saegerman, had prepared a display of her calligraphy versions of Emily's poems.

We are looking forward to our next event to be held in the same venue, a Brontë weekend in April when Stevie Davies will be talking to us, also about Emily Brontë. Having hitherto concentrated more on Charlotte because of the influence of Brussels on her we are devoting this year to Emily, who of course also spent time in this city although there is less evidence of it in her work!