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Updated: June 16, 2025
Then up again anywhere but to the pensionnat out to the cemetery where Martha lay out beyond it, to the hills whence there is nothing to be seen but fields as far as the horizon. The shades of evening made her retrace her footsteps sick for want of food, but not hungry; fatigued with long continued exercise yet restless still, and doomed to another weary, haunted night of sleeplessness.
I felt sure now that I was in the pensionnat sure by the beating rain on the casement; sure by the "wuther" of wind amongst trees, denoting a garden outside; sure by the chill, the whiteness, the solitude, amidst which I lay. I say whiteness for the dimity curtains, dropped before a French bed, bounded my view. I lifted them; I looked out.
A brass-plate embellished the great porte-cochere: "Pensionnat de Demoiselles" was the inscription; and beneath, a name, "Madame Beck." I started. About a hundred thoughts volleyed through my mind in a moment. Yet I planned nothing, and considered nothing: I had not time. Providence said, "Stop here; this is your inn."
The other class-rooms, used for less advanced pupils, are smaller. In one of them, the third, Miss Bronté had ruled as monitress after her return from Haworth. The large dormitory of the pensionnat was above the long class-room, and in the time of the Brontés most of the boarders about twenty in number slept here.
They visited Louis Philippe at the Chateau d'Eu; they visited King Leopold in Brussels. It happened that a still more remarkable Englishwoman was in the Belgian capital, but she was not remarked; and Queen Victoria passed unknowing before the steady gaze of one of the mistresses in M. Heger's pensionnat.
Facing us, at the extremity of the park, was the unpretentious palace of the king, in the small square across the Rue Royale at our right was the statue of General Béliard, and we knew that just behind it we should find the Rue Fossette and Charlotte Bronté's pensionnat, for Crimsworth, "The Professor," standing by the statue, had "looked down a great staircase" to the door-way of the school, and poor Lucy, on that forlorn first night in "Villette," to avoid the insolence of a pair of ruffians, had hastened down a flight of steps from the Rue Royale, and had come, not to the inn she sought, but to the pensionnat of Madame Beck.
I cannot shake it off. Believe me, very merrily, vivaciously, gaily, yours, The grandes vacances began soon after the date of this letter, when she was left in the great deserted pensionnat, with only one teacher for a companion.
I beg; I scold; I make my escape. It is quite a pleasant day. With the aid of a cab and the help of almighty God, I trust to be able to fulfil my purpose. There is the wall on which is painted in great blue letters the words "Pensionnat de Demoiselles tenu par Mademoiselle Virginie Prefere." There is the iron gate which would give free entrance into the court-yard if it were ever opened.
That was particularly marked after he had, with our elder brother, been placed at school, the Pensionnat Roediger, at Châtelaine, then much esteemed and where I was supposedly to join them on my complete recovery: I recall sociable, irrepressibly sociable sorties thence on the part of the pair as promptly breaking out, not less than I recall sociable afternoon visits to the establishment on the part of the rest of us: it was my brothers' first boarding school, but as we had in the New York conditions kept punctually rejoining our family, so in these pleasant Genevese ones our family returned the attention.
I remember this well; for, having sat up late that evening, correcting devoirs, and feeling weary and a little oppressed with the closeness of my small room, I opened the often-mentioned boarded window, whose boards, however, I had persuaded old Madame Pelet to have removed since I had filled the post of professor in the pensionnat de demoiselles, as, from that time, it was no longer "inconvenient" for me to overlook my own pupils at their sports.
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