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Updated: June 15, 2025
Over that First Class she was surveillante at all hours; and henceforward she was called Mademoiselle Charlotte by M. Heger's orders. She continued her own studies, principally attending to German, and to Literature; and every Sunday she went alone to the German and English chapels. Her walks too were solitary, and principally taken in the allee defendue, where she was secure from intrusion.
But as the inevitable moment of separation from people and places, among which she had spent so many happy hours, drew near, her spirits gave way; she had the natural presentiment that she saw them all for the last time, and she received but a dead kind of comfort from being reminded by her friends that Brussels and Haworth were not so very far apart; that access from one place to the other was not so difficult or impracticable as her tears would seem to predicate; nay, there was some talk of one of Madame Heger's daughters being sent to her as a pupil, if she fulfilled her intention of trying to begin a school.
Nothing could be less like a furnace than the atmosphere of The Professor. From the first page to the last there is not one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The bloodless thing comes coldly, slowly tentatively, from the birth. It is almost as frigid as a devoir written under M. Héger's eye.
Read the list of works, appalling in their length, which this child produced in a period of fifteen months; consider that she produced nothing but melancholy letters during her "sojourn in Brussels"; and compare M. Héger's academic precepts with her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance of her style when she has shaken him off, and her genius gets possession of her.
The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily left England for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point in Charlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.
She will stay some months longer "till I have acquired German". And at the end: "Everybody is abundantly civil, but homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot shake it off." That was in September, in M. Héger's absence.
The marginal comments, I need hardly say, are M. Heger's; the words in italics are Charlotte's, for which he substitutes a better form of expression, which is placed between brackets. "Le 31 Juillet, 1842.
The very building they occupied as pupils, in Madame Heger's pensionnat, had its own ghostly train of splendid associations, marching for ever, in shadowy procession, through and through the ancient rooms, and shaded alleys of the gardens.
After he had read De la Vigne's poem on Joan of Arc, she chose the "Vision and Death of Moses on Mount Nebo" to write about; and, in looking over this devoir, I was much struck with one or two of M. Heger's remarks.
J'ai vu une fois Madame Heger, qui a quelque chose de froid et de compasse dans son maintien, et qui previent peu en sa faveur. Je la crois pourtant aimee et appreciee par ses eleves." There were from eighty to a hundred pupils in the pensionnat, when Charlotte and Emily Bronte entered in February 1842. M. Heger's account is that they knew nothing of French.
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