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Updated: June 16, 2025
In the thirteenth century, the Rue d'Isabelle was called the Fosse-aux- Chiens; and the kennels for the ducal hounds occupied the place where Madame Heger's pensionnat now stands.
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.
"My countrywoman, on examination, turned out to be the English teacher at Madame Beck's pensionnat. She was perfectly unconscious, perfectly bloodless, and nearly cold. "'What does it all mean? was my inquiry. "He communicated a curious account; that you had been to him that evening at confessional; that your exhausted and suffering appearance, coupled with some things you had said "
There is no sign in the beginning that this detestable Lucy is to be heroine. The child Polly had a suffering and passionate heart, for all her little air of fastidiousness and inaccessibility. It is the suffering and passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe and "the Parisienne".
She has passed with the splendour of Charlotte's vision of the world. The world in Villette is narrowed to a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the heart of one woman. And never, not even in Jane Eyre, and certainly not in Shirley, did Charlotte Brontë achieve such mastery of reality, and with it such mastery of herself.
Those two were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to make it suffer. That was their tragedy.
But in Villette there are none of these battlings and rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsidences. Charlotte Brontë's imagination, and her sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There are few novels in which an imagination so supreme is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may be said that Charlotte Brontë never achieved positive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoiselles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as the Maison Vauquer in Père Goriot. It is a return to the method of experience with a vengeance. Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that for all but sixty years Villette has passed for a roman
We will not deal in this gear. Let us be honest, and cut, as heretofore, from the homely web of truth. Homely, though, is an ill-chosen word. What I see is not precisely homely. A girl of Villette stands there a girl fresh from her pensionnat. She is very comely, with the beauty indigenous to this country. She looks well-nourished, fair, and fat of flesh.
To put the clock back a few years a very few, I am sure and re-enter one of those charming pensionnats de jeunes filles with which Paris abounds " Tuppence interrupted him. "A pensionnat?" "Exactly. Madame Colombier's in the Avenue de Neuilly." Tuppence knew the name well. Nothing could have been more select. She had had several American friends there. She was more than ever puzzled.
The next day I quitted the pensionnat. In half an hour my clothes were arranged in a commode, my books on a shelf, and the "flitting" was effected. I should not have been unhappy that day had not one pang tortured me a longing to go to the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges, resisted, yet irritated by an inward resolve to avoid that street till such time as the mist of doubt should clear from my prospects.
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