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Updated: June 16, 2025
Not all, perhaps, who had shone brightly arrayed at that concert could say the same; for not all had been satisfied with friendship with its calm comfort and modest hope. Yet three days, and then I must go back to the pensionnat.
I saw a man a burgher an entire stranger, as I deemed him for one moment, but the next, recognised in him a certain tradesman a bookseller, whose shop furnished the Rue Fossette with its books and stationery; a man notorious in our pensionnat for the excessive brittleness of his temper, and frequent snappishness of his manner, even to us, his principal customers: but whom, for my solitary self, I had ever been disposed to like, and had always found civil, sometimes kind; once, in aiding me about some troublesome little exchange of foreign money, he had done me a service.
M. Pelet read, I suppose, the expression of my eye; he explained: "La fenetre fermee donne sur un jardin appartenant a un pensionnat de demoiselles," said he, "et les convenances exigent enfin, vous comprenez n'est-ce pas, monsieur?"
The "great mansion," with its quadrangular form; the spacious saloon once used for the archducal balls, where the dark, grave Spaniards mixed with the blond nobility of Brabant and Flanders now a schoolroom for Belgian girls; the cross-bow men's archery-ground all are there the pensionnat of Madame Heger.
The rest she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological interest in M. Héger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with her soul alive.
In another hour all the dwelling-house, and all the pensionnat, were dark and hushed. I too was in bed, but not asleep. To me it was not easy to sleep after a day of such excitement.
At this juncture a portly, ruddy-faced lady of middle age and most courteous of speech and manner appeared, and, addressing us in faultless English, introduced herself as Mademoiselle Héger, co-directress of the pensionnat, and "wholly at our service."
At that time, I was not: I used to rise each morning eager to shake off his yoke, and go out with my portmanteau under my arm, if a beggar, at least a freeman; and in the evening, when I came back from the pensionnat de demoiselles, a certain pleasant voice in my ear; a certain face, so intelligent, yet so docile, so reflective, yet so soft, in my eyes; a certain cast of character, at once proud and pliant, sensitive and sagacious, serious and ardent, in my head; a certain tone of feeling, fervid and modest, refined and practical, pure and powerful, delighting and troubling my memory visions of new ties I longed to contract, of new duties I longed to undertake, had taken the rover and the rebel out of me, and had shown endurance of my hated lot in the light of a Spartan virtue.
She gave us her card, and explained that, whereas this establishment had formerly been both a pensionnat and an externat, having about seventy day-pupils and twenty boarders when Miss Bronté was here, it is now, since the death of Madame Héger, used as a day-school only, the pensionnat being at some little distance, in the Avenue Louise, where Mademoiselle is a co-directress.
When she reappears at the Pensionnat it is with "flame in her soul and lightning in her eyes". She reminds M. Paul "of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in". "'You look, said he, 'like one who would snatch at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust."
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