PART II
SOME REMINISCENCES OF THE
REAL MONSIEUR AND MADAME HEGER
THIS SECOND PART IS
DEDICATED TO
MY BROTHER
THE LATE ABBÉ AUSTIN RICHARDSON
WHO DIED SUDDENLY, 20TH AUG. 1913
Dearest, before you went away
And left me here behind you,
How often would you talk to me,
And I, too, would remind you
Of stories in this book retold,
That for us two could ne'er grow old;
Of scenes that we could live through yet,
Just you and I,—and not forget:
And now I feel, since you are gone,
I wrote this book for you alone.
CHAPTER I
THE HISTORICAL DIFFICULTY: TO DISENTANGLE FACT
FROM FICTION
The purpose of the First Part of this study was to show that with the knowledge of the Secret of Charlotte Brontë, brought to us by Dr. Paul Heger's generous gift of these pathetic and beautiful Love-letters, the 'Problem of Charlotte Brontë,' as so many very clever but inattentive psychological critics have stated it, has lost all claim to serious attention.
The basis of the 'Problem' was the alleged 'dissonance' between Charlotte's personality and her genius—between her dreary, desolate, dull, well-tamed existence, uncoloured, untroubled by romance (as Mrs. Gaskell painted it), and the passionate atmosphere of her novels, where all events and personages are seen through the medium of one sentiment—tragical romantic love.
We now know that the dissonance did not exist; that from her twenty-sixth year downwards, Charlotte's life was, not only coloured, but governed by a tragical romantic love: that, in its first stage, threw her into a hopeless conflict against the force of things and broke her heart: but that, because the battle was fought in the force, and in the cause, of noble emotions, saved her soul alive; and called her genius forth to life: so that it rose as an immortal spirit from the grave of personal hopes.
Understanding this, we know that there is no 'Problem' of Charlotte Brontë: but that her personality and her genius and her life and her books were all those of a Romantic. But although there is no psychological Problem, a difficulty that concerns the historical criticism of Charlotte's life and her books does remain. And this difficulty has to be faced and conquered, not by speculations nor arguments, but by methods of enquiry.
When we study Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece Villette in comparison with what we now know about the romance in her own life, we recognise two facts: the first is that, in this work especially, she has painted with such power the emotions she has undergone that her words become feelings that lift and ennoble the reader's sensibility: and thus serve him—in the way that it belongs to Romantics to serve mankind.
But the second fact we discover is that,—again, in this book particularly,—historical personages and real events are used as the materials for an imaginary story, in a way that has produced critical confusion: and what is graver still—has caused false and injurious opinions to be formed about historical people. And the difficulty we have to face is, not what amount of blame belongs to Charlotte for misrepresenting historical facts, nor even need we ask ourselves what reason she had for thus misrepresenting them. Because the reason becomes plain when we take the trouble to realise that the motive the writer of this work of genius had in view was one that concerned her own personal liberation from haunting memories, rather than any motive concerning the impressions she might produce.
There can be no doubt that Charlotte's motive in Villette, judged as a method of personal salvation, was not only a permissible, but a noble one. It is the one that Pater attributed to Michael Angelo: 'the effort of a strong nature to attune itself to tranquillise vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal sentiments':—'an effort to throw off the clutch of cruel and humiliating facts by translating them into the imaginative realm, where the artist, the author, the dreamer even, has things as he wills, because the hold of outward things' (such a stern and merciless one in the case of Charlotte Brontë!) 'is thrown off at pleasure.'
But, judged as a literary and historical method, was Charlotte Brontë's manner of treating the real Director and Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle a justifiable or fair one? Can she be held without fault in this; that in Paul Emanuel and in Madame Beck she painted Monsieur and Madame Heger in a way that rendered them visible to every one who knew them; and then placed them in fictitious circumstances that altered the character of their actions and feelings, in such a way as to misrepresent their true behaviour? It seems to me that we must admit that the authoress of the Professor and of Villette adopted an unjust literary and historical method in so far as these real people are concerned: and that in the case of Madame Heger especially, passion and prejudice betrayed her: and rendered her guilty of a fault that must be recognised as a very grave one. But when this fault has been recognised and admitted, it seems to me a conscientious critic's duty does not compel him to scold this woman of genius for having the passions of her kind. A great Romantic is not an angel: and in this case the main facts about Charlotte are not her shortcomings as a celestial being, but her transcendent merits as an interpreter of the human heart. For my own part, I confess that after reading Charlotte's Love-letters, I am in no mood to look for faults in her, nor even to lend much attention to some faults that, without looking for them, one is bound to recognise. For what a thankless and unseemly, as well as what an unprofitable, sort of criticism is that represented in ancient days by the youngest amongst Job's Friends, who had such a delightfully expressive name, Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram! Elihu's criticism of Job (the man of genius, plunged into dire misfortune, not by any fault or folly of his own, but by the will of the Higher Powers, who desired to prove his virtue and to call forth his genius), is exactly the same method of criticising men and women of genius in the same case as Job, practised by Elihu's intellectual descendents, Buzites of the kindred of Ram, in all countries and in every age, down to England in the twentieth century. The fundamental doctrine of this critical method was, and is, that 'great men are not always wise,' and that it is the vocation of smaller men to teach them wisdom, without 'respecting their persons or giving them flattering titles' (truly, as a matter of fact, by calling them names—knaves, hypocrites, sentimental cads, blackguards, etc.). In other words, the rule with these Buzites is that the main purpose of criticising great people is to find fault with them; to surprise them in their 'unwise' moments, to concentrate attention upon the faults they may, or may not, have committed in these moments; and to build upon these occasional real, or imaginary, faults, psychological and pathological theories about the madness, wickedness, or folly of people capable of them. And to conclude that there is 'very much to reprobate and a great deal to laugh at' in these men and women of genius—and that the fact that they had genius, and that as witnesses to the 'instinct of immortality in mortal creatures' they have served and honoured mankind, and also have bequeathed to us treasures of ideal beauty, is a mere accident, and may be left unnoticed.
But let not my portion ever be with these fault-finders, who 'darken counsel by words without knowledge,' as the original Elihu was told, 'out of the Whirlwind,' by the Supreme Critic; 'in whose stead' the son of Barachel had arrogated to himself the right to scold and scoff at Job; and to tell him that his misfortunes were all the result of his bad character and of his uncontrolled emotions. I refuse, then, to recognise as a question of vital importance Charlotte's forgetfulness of historical exactitude in Villette; and I do not myself understand how any one (except a Buzite) who has read these Letters given to us by Dr. Paul Heger, and especially the last one, that received no answer, can help feeling that the suffering the writer of the Letters must have undergone, in the unbroken silent solitude that followed her unanswered appeal, must have made the hold upon her memory of 'outward things' so hard to bear, that to break that hold, to live in the realm of imagination free from it, having things as she would, justified almost any method of self-liberation.
Still the fact of the critical confusion of the personages in the novel with the historical Director and Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle does create difficulties in the way of forming right opinions. And to remove them, we have to follow the plan already recommended,—to make sure of our facts, before calling in the aid of psychological arguments. And in this case, to see the position clearly, we must disentangle from the imaginary story in Villette the real personages and events woven into the fabric of a parable where, as I have said, they appear amongst fictitious circumstances and produce consequently false impressions. In other words, we have to recover a clear knowledge of the true Monsieur Heger before we can determine where 'Paul Emanuel' resembles, and where he differs from, the Professor, whom Charlotte loved: but who never showed any particle of love for Charlotte, such as Paul Emanuel bestowed on Lucy Snowe. And then we have to re-establish in her true place, as Monsieur Heger's wife and the mother of his five children, the true Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle—who must be contrasted, rather than compared, with the crafty, jealous and pitiless Madame Beck of the novel, selfishly and cruelly interfering with the true course of an entirely legitimate and romantic attachment between her English teacher and her cousin, the Professor of literature. And the relative positions of these two Directresses clearly seen, we have to ask ourselves, Whether the real Madame Heger is proved to have had the base and detestable character of the hateful Madame Beck? and whether she really was, in any voluntary or even involuntary, way, the direct cause of poor Charlotte's anguish, suspense and final heart-break? And whether, given the positions and the different views of life and sense of duty of the different people whose destinies become entangled in this tragical romance, we can find fault with any person concerned in these events,—unless, indeed, we follow Greek methods, and drag in the Eumenides? Or, else, suppose it a parallel case with Job's: and decide that it was the will of the Higher Powers to prove Charlotte's virtue and to call forth her genius? But in so far as mere mortals are concerned, we have to see whether anything else could have happened, and whether poor Charlotte was not bound to break her heart?
So that the purpose of the Second Part of this study of the 'Secret of Charlotte Brontë' really lies outside of the 'Secret' itself, and becomes an effort to know 'as in themselves they really were,' and independently of their relationships with Charlotte, the Professor whom she loved (probably much more than he deserved), and the Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle—whom she certainly hated, without any reasonable cause for this hatred, although this hatred had a natural cause—that if only we will use psychology for the purpose of penetrating facts, and not for playing with such fictions as that it was 'no serious grief to Charlotte that Monsieur Heger was married' we may easily discover. After all, one must not ask for entire 'reasonableness' from Romantics, who see personages and events through the medium of one great Passion. And one must not demand from them absolute impartiality, when judging the impediment that divides them from the object of this passion.
We are not judges then in this case, but enquirers into the facts of the personality and true characters of the Director and Directress of the Bruxelles school and of their environment, as the influences that so largely created the Romantic atmosphere where Charlotte's genius lived and moved and had its being. And, by the special circumstances of my own life, I am able to assist in a way that is not (so I am tempted to believe) possible to any other living critic. The difficulty that stands in the way of most modern investigators is that long ago the historical people with their environment 'have become ghostly.' Long ago, for most readers of Villette, the once famous Pensionnat de Jeunes Filles in the Rue d'Isabelle, with its memory-haunted class-rooms, with its high-walled garden in the heart of a city whose voices reached one, as from a world far away, and 'down whose peaceful alleys it was pleasant to stray and hear the bells of St Jean Baptiste peal out with their sweet, soft, exalted sound,' have vanished out of life. Yes—but out of my life they have not vanished! For me—the historical Monsieur and Madame Heger exist quite independently of all associations with the imaginary personages Paul Emanuel and Madame Beck. For me—the old school, the class-rooms, the walled garden, with its ancient pear-trees that still 'faithfully renewed their perfumed snow in spring and honey-sweet pendants in autumn,' remain—as they were planted vivid images and visions in my memory half a century ago, when, as a schoolgirl, I knew nothing about Charlotte Brontë nor Villette: but when I sat, twenty years after Charlotte, in the class-rooms where she had waited for M. Heger, on the eve of her departure from Bruxelles, myself an attentive pupil of her Professor, and a witness, half terrified, and half exasperated, of his varying moods. And when, too, I saw, rather than heard, Madame Heger, moving noiselessly, where M. Heger's movements were always attended with shock and excitement; only to me, Madame Heger appeared always a friendly rather than an adverse presence—an abiding influence of serenity that reassured one, after sudden recurrent gusts of nerve-disturbing storms.
And I would point out that the value of my testimony about the personal impressions I derived, quite independently of any knowledge of Charlotte Brontë's residence in what was for me my school, and of her enthusiasm for my Professor, or her dislike of my schoolmistress, is enhanced both by the resemblances and by the differences of our several points of view. Thus—like Charlotte—I was an English pupil and a Protestant in this Belgian and Catholic school. Like her—my vocation was to be that of a woman of letters. And although, when she was brought under M. Heger's influence, she was a woman of genius, already well acquainted with good literature, and not without experience as a writer, whereas I was only an unformed girl, with very little reading and no culture: and merely by force of an inborn desire to follow a certain purpose in life that filled me with happiness, even in anticipation, justified in supposing that I had a literary vocation at all, and although no doubt I have not turned my advantages to account as Charlotte did, yet I myself owe to M. Heger, not only admirable rules for criticism and practice, that have always claimed and still claim my absolute belief, but also I owe to him, as she did, a full enjoyment of beautiful thoughts, beautifully expressed, and of treasures of the mind and of the imagination, that, lying outside of the recognised paths of English study, I might never have found, nor even have recognised as treasures, had I not been cured of insularity of taste by M. Heger.
So that upon this point I am able to say of M. Heger what Charlotte said: he was the only master in literature I ever had; and up to the present hour I esteem him, in this domain of literary composition, the only master whose rules I trust.
But if my judgment of M. Heger, as a Professor, coincides with Charlotte's, my judgment of him, outside of this capacity, does not show him to me at all as the model of the man from whom she painted Paul Emanuel. In other words, I never found nor saw in the real Monsieur Heger the lovableness under the outward harshness,—the depths of tenderness under the very apparent severity and irritability,—the concealed consideration for the feelings of others, under the outer indifference to the feelings of any one who ruffled his temper; nor yet did I ever discover meekness and modesty in him, under the dogmatic and imperious manner that swept aside all opposition. In fact, I never found out that M. Heger wore a mask. But, irritable, imperious, harsh, not unkind, but certainly the reverse of tender, and without any consideration for any one's feelings, or any respect for any one's opinions, thus, just as he seemed to be, so in reality, in my opinion, M. Heger actually was. And what one must remember is that Charlotte's point of view, from which she formed the opinion that M. Heger was tender-hearted, and modest and meek, was the point of view of a woman in love; and this standpoint is not one that ensures impartiality.
My own point of view, between 1859 and 1861, was that of an English schoolgirl, under sixteen, of a Belgian schoolmaster, over fifty, who in his capacity of a literary Professor, was almost a deity to her; but who, outside of this capacity, was not a lovable, but a formidable man: a 'Terror,' in the sense children and nursery-maids give the term; that is to say, some one who is sure to appear upon the scene when one is least prepared to face him, and who is constantly finding fault with one. Now a 'Terror,' in this popular sense of the term, although he is not a lovable, is not necessarily a hateful personage. There may belong to him an interest of excitement, and even a secret admiration for his cleverness in fulfilling his role of taking one unawares and finding something in one to quarrel about. And most certainly this interest of excitement, and even of a sense of amusement, entered into my sentiment for M. Heger, whom I recognised as a double-being, an admirable literary Professor, but an alarming and irritating personality. But although I never hated him, I yet had some special grievances against this 'Terror,' not only because he had a trick of surprising me in weak moments, and of finding out my worst sides, but also because he was really, in my own particular case, unjust; and full of prejudice and impatience against my nationality, and personal idiosyncrasies that were not faults; and that I couldn't help. Thus he stirred up in me rebellious protests, that could not be uttered; because how was an English schoolgirl of fifteen to protest against the injustice of a Belgian 'Master,' in his own country, and his own school: who was a man past fifty, too; and what was more, in his capacity of literary Professor, if not quite a deity, at least, in my own opinion, the keeper of the keys of palaces where dwelt the Immortals?
And that my opinion of M. Heger's personality, as that of a 'Terror' (in the childish and popular sense) did really show me the man apart from the Professor very much as he really was, is confirmed by the first impression he made upon Charlotte herself before the glamour of romantic love had interfered with her critical perspicacity. Here is the original description of M. Heger, in the early days of her residence in Bruxelles:
'There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken,' she wrote to Ellen Nussey, 'M. Heger, the husband of Madame. He is Professor of rhetoric: a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament, a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of a tom-cat: sometimes those of a delirious hyena: occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above one hundred degrees removed from mild and gentleman-like. He is very angry with me just now, because I have written a translation which he stigmatises as peu correct. He did not tell me so, but wrote the word on the margin of my book and asked me, in very stern phrase, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations, adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable. The fact is that three weeks ago in a high-flown humour he forbade me to use either dictionary or grammar when translating the most difficult English composition into French. This makes the task rather arduous, and compels me every now and then to introduce an English word, which nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it. Emily and he don't draw well together at all.'
I am quoting this view of M. Heger's personality, taken by Charlotte Brontë before she became a partial witness, because, by and by, when I am giving my own reminiscences, it will be found that in 1842 M. Heger was very much the same Professor whom I knew in 1861.
And Madame Heger? Here too my impressions are obtained from a point of view unquestionably more impartial than Charlotte Brontë's. And it will be found that, when the alteration of clear power of vision that personal prejudices make has been realised, my opposite judgment of the Directress of the Pensionnat to the judgment of the authoress of Villette, is not the result of any difference in the facts of Madame Heger's characteristics and behaviour, but in the difference between the standpoints from which we severally judge them.
Charlotte's standpoint was the one of the devotee, of the great spirit who is neither a god nor a mortal, but the 'Child of plenty and poverty, who is often houseless and homeless'—and who cannot well see 'as in herself she really is,' the Mistress of the house; who prudently, not necessarily with cruelty, closes the doors of her home against intruders—that standpoint also is not one conducive to impartial judgments.
My own point of view was that of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, who saw in Madame Heger an embodiment of two qualities especially, that, perhaps because I did not possess them and could never possess them (passionate as I was by nature and with strong personal likings and dislikings), inspired me with a sentiment of reverence and wonder, as for a remote perfection, that, though unattainable, it did one good to know existed somewhere; just as it does one good, with feet planted on the earth, to see the stars. The qualities I saw in Madame Heger were serene sweetness, a kindness without preferences, covering her little world of pupils and teachers with a watchful care. Tranquillité, Douceur, Bonté: the French words express better than English ones the commingled qualities I felt existed in Madame Heger as she moved noiselessly (as Charlotte Brontë has described), whilst the more brilliant and gifted Professor's movements were always stormy.
When relating these reminiscences of Monsieur and Madame Heger and of the old school and garden, as I myself treasure them, and quite independently of their associations with Charlotte Brontë, I shall not be losing sight of the purpose that justifies this record (as an endeavour to disentangle fact from fiction) if, in so far as the facts that concern my own experiences are concerned, I ask now to be allowed to relate them in a different tone—that is to say, not any longer in the tone of a literary critic, nor as one supporting any thesis or argument, but simply as a story-teller 'who has been young and now is old.' And who, before the darkening day has turned to night, calls to remembrance scenes and personages long since vanished out of the world, but still alive for me, bathed in the light that shines upon the undimmed visions of my youth—although to almost every one else now alive these scenes have become 'as it were a tale that is told.'
CHAPTER II
MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S PROFESSOR
'Madame,—quelquefois, donner, c'est semer'—Speech made to my Mother by M. Heger.
In 1859 this memorable thing happened:—I was introduced by my mother to M. Heger as his future pupil. I was fourteen years of age: but I remember everything in connection with this event as though it had happened yesterday. We were staying at Ostend, where my mother had taken my brother and myself for a long summer holiday, because she believed we had been previously overworked at our former schools, from which she had removed us. She was convinced that we both of us stood in need of sea-air, exercise and healthy recreation, before we could take up our studies again, after the strain we had undergone. Upon this point my brother and I were entirely of one mind with our mother.
But after a holiday of three months, we had also begun to feel, with her, that this state of things could not go on for ever, and that—as she expressed it—'something had to be done with us.' What was done with us was the result of circumstances that I cannot but regard as fortunate, in my own case at any rate. They brought into my life, at a very impressionable age, influences and memories that have always been, and that are still, after more than half a century, extraordinarily serviceable and sweet to me.
The first of these fortunate circumstances was the renewal (due to an accidental meeting at Ostend) of my mother's friendship with a relative whom she had lost sight of for a great many years; who had married a Dutch lady and settled in Holland. The eldest daughter of these re-discovered cousins was an exceptionally charming girl of nineteen; and upon enquiry my mother found out that she had been educated at a school in Brussels, situated in the Rue d'Isabelle, and kept by a certain Madame Heger. How it came to pass that, only four years after the publication of Villette, and two years after Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, it did not occur to my mother to identify this particular Brussels school with the one where the Director was the fiery and perilously attractive 'Professor Paul Emanuel' and where the Directress was painted as the crafty and treacherous 'Madame Beck,' I really cannot say; but, so it was. There can be no doubt that it was solely because the account rendered by her delightful young kinswoman of the school where she had spent three years was thoroughly satisfactory to my mother, and because the unaffected and accomplished girl herself was an excellent proof of the happy results of the education she had received, that my mother made up her mind that the best thing that could be 'done with me,' was to send me to Madame Heger's school. She had entered into correspondence with this lady, and the plan had developed into a further arrangement, that my brother was to be placed with a French tutor recommended by Madame Heger, and who was the Professor of History at her establishment. All these conditions were very nearly settled, when M. Heger came to visit my mother at Ostend; to talk matters over and to make final arrangements.
Of course from the point of view of my own humble interest I recognised that the visit of this Brussels Professor was an event of great importance. I was fully conscious of this, because my cousin had told me a great deal about M. Heger, explaining that he was the ruling spirit in the Pensionnat; that he was rather a terrible personage; and that if he took a dislike to one,—well, he could be very disagreeable. I had received so much advice upon this particular subject from my cousin that I had talked the matter over very seriously with my brother afterwards, and asked him what he thought I ought to do in order to avoid the misfortune of offending M. Heger. My brother's advice was sound:—'Don't let the man see you are afraid of him,' he said, 'and then, whatever you do, don't show off.'
Keeping these counsels in mind, after M. Heger's arrival, I sat upon the extreme edge of the rickety sofa that filled the darkest corner in the little salle-à-manger of our Ostend apartments over the Patissier's shop in the Rue de la Chapelle—I remember the very name of the Patissier; it was Dubois—watching and listening eagerly to the conversation of the Professor with my mother, who, strange to say, did not seem to be in the least afraid of him; nor to recognise that he was in any way different to ordinary mortals! And I must say, looking back to that September afternoon to-day, and realising our attitude of mind, my mother's and mine, towards this interesting personage to us, but interesting solely in his character of my future teacher, there does seem to me something amazing—so amazing as to be almost amusing—in our total unconsciousness of his already well-established real, or rather ideal claims as a personage immortalised in English literature, by an illustrious writer who, four years before my birth, had been his pupil; and whose romantic love for him, whilst it had broken her heart, had served as the inspiration of her genius; so that her literary masterpiece was precisely a book where the very school I was going to inhabit was painted, with extraordinary veracity, in so far as outward and local points of resemblance were concerned.
As for my own ignorance of all these circumstances there is nothing strange in that. Fifty-four years ago a schoolgirl of my age was not very likely to have read Villette. But what one may pause to inquire is whether if by any accident the book had come into my hands, and thus revealed to me my true position, should I have gone down on my bended knees to my mother, or to express the case more exactly, should I have flung my arms round her dear neck, and prayed, 'Don't send me to this school; I am afraid of Professor Paul Emanuel; I loathe Madame Beck; I shall never make friends with these horrid Lesbassecouriennes?' Well, really, I don't think I should have done anything of the sort! At fourteen one adores an adventure. It seems to me probable that the excitement of going to the same school, and learning my lessons in the same class-rooms, and treading the paths of the same garden, and being instructed by the same teachers as a writer of genius, who had left these scenes haunted by romance, would have made me hold under all apprehensions of the Lesbassecouriennes as school-fellows, of the perfidious Directress with her stealthy methods of espionage, of the explosive, nerve-wrecking Professor, always breaking in upon one like a clap of thunder. Yes; but though held under, the apprehension would have troubled my inner soul a good deal all the same; and this would have been a pity. Because, in so far as the real Directress and real Belgian schoolgirls whom I was going to know in the Rue d'Isabelle went, these apprehensions would have been superfluous and misleading.
But now if there were no danger of my finding in the real Pensionnat any spiritual counterparts of either the fictitious Madame Beck, or of the perverted Lesbassecouriennes pupils, was it equally certain that, if I had read Villette, I should not have recognised and been justified in recognising in Monsieur Heger the original model and living image of that immortal figure in English fiction, 'the magnificent-minded, grand-hearted, dear, faulty little man'—Professor Paul Emanuel?
We shall perhaps be able to decide this question better at the end of these reminiscences than here. But what must be realised is, that the very fact that lends some general interest to my mother's first impressions and my own about M. Heger is chiefly this: that it expresses observations made from a purely personal standpoint; out of sight of any literary views about 'Paul Emanuel,' or historical judgments upon his relations with Charlotte Brontë. The perfectly simple purpose we had in view was to see clearly what sort of a Professor M. Heger was going to prove, and whether I was going to do well as his pupil, and get on satisfactorily, amongst these foreign surroundings.
My mother formed a most favourable opinion of our visitor, and decided that I was fortunate in obtaining such a Professor. What had especially impressed her was a sentence delivered by M. Heger, with a masterly little gesture, that, as she herself said, entirely won her over to his opinions upon a question where elaborate arguments might have left her unconvinced. And I may observe here, that this belonged to M. Heger's methods, not so much of arguing, as of dispensing with arguments. His mind was made up upon most subjects, and as he had got into the habit of regarding the world as his class-room, and his fellow-creatures as pupils, he did not argue; he told people what they ought to think about things. And in order to make this method of settling questions not only convincing, but stimulating, to his most intelligent pupils, he held in reserve a store of these really luminous phrases, that he would use as little Lanterns, flashing them, now in this direction, now in that, but always with a special and appropriate direction given to the illuminative phrase, so that it lit up the point of view upon which he desired to fix attention. The particular sentence that conquered my mother's admiration and acquiescence in M. Heger's point of view was the one I have made the heading of this chapter. Here was how he contrived to introduce it. After discussing the plan of my studies, and the arrangements for my being taken to the English church by my brother every Sunday, and allowed to take walks with him upon half-holidays (to all of which of course I listened with passionate attention), they passed on to discuss the terms asked by the tutor whom the Hegers had recommended. My mother had been told by her Dutch cousin that they were exorbitant terms; and, as a matter of fact, I believe they were exactly twice the amount charged by the Hegers themselves: 'I am not a rich woman,' my mother had said, apologetically, 'and I have put aside a fixed sum for my children's education; I doubt if I can give this.' ... Then did the Professor see, and seize, his opportunity: 'Madame,' he said, with a gesture, 'quelquefois, donner, c'est semer.' My mother, dazzled with this prophetic utterance, remained speechless and vanquished. In the evening of the same day I heard her quote to the Dutch cousin, who did not approve of her consent to these charges, 'what that clever man, Professor Heger) said so well,' as though it had been unanswerable. In the course of the next two years I often heard the same luminous phrase used, with equal appropriateness, to light up other propositions. (I have heard M. Heger use it in a sense where it became a different formula for expressing a fundamental doctrine of Rousseau, thus, 'Instruire, ce n'est pas donner, c'est semer,' but I never heard the words without going back to the first impression, and to the vision it called up. I would see again the little salle-à-manger in the Rue de la Chapelle at Ostend, I would watch the masterly gesture of the Professor's hand when he delivered his triumphant sentence, that is not an argument, but is worth more; I would see the look of admiration and sudden conviction come into my dear mother's face; I would feel myself sitting upon the little rickety sofa in the dark corner, and I would shudder with the foreknowledge of what was coming, for, woebetide me that I should have to tell it, this first interview did not leave with me the same impression of confidence in M. Heger as my future teacher and guardian that it did with my mother; it left with me, on the contrary, the miserable conviction that the very worst thing that could have happened had happened; that M. Heger had taken a vehement dislike to me, and consequently that all hope of happiness for me in the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle was over and done with.
And the worst of it was, that it was all my own fault; or rather, to be just, it was my misfortune.
For I had had a really very bad time of it, sitting on that rickety little sofa. My mother, who had only too flattering an opinion of me in every way, had meant to say the kindest things about me to M. Heger, and I knew this perfectly. But unfortunately, although she spoke French with the greatest fluency and self-confidence (because as she was a very charming woman, and as Frenchmen are always polite in their criticism of the French of charming English women, she had been very often complimented upon her command of the language),—unfortunately, I say, her French was really English, literally translated; and every one who has experience of what false meanings can be conveyed by this sort of French will realise what I had suffered, because, though I only spoke French badly at this time, I understood the language better than my mother. And this is how I had heard myself described to my future Professor. My mother had wished to say that I was more fond of study and of reading than was good for the health of a girl of my age; but what she actually said was that I was fond of reading things that were not healthy or suitable (convenable) for a young girl. Again, she had meant to say that as I had worked too hard, she had let me run wild a little; and that consequently I might find it difficult to get into working habits again; but that as I had a capital head of my own, and plenty of courage, I should, no doubt, soon get into good ways again. But instead of all these flattering things (that might have been rather irritating too, only a Professor of experience knows how to forgive a parent's partiality), I had heard this fond mother of mine say that her daughter had recently contracted the habits of a little savage; and that it would require courageous discipline, as she was very headstrong, to bring her into the right way again. It will be understood that to sit and listen to all this about oneself was anguish. But, carefully watching M. Heger's face, I had a notion that he had found out there was some mistake. Still I was depressed and bewildered; and in dread of what I was going to say, when the time came, as I knew it must, when he would say something to me, and I should have a chance of answering for myself. And the misfortune was, that when the critical moment came, I wasn't expecting it; because, here, at least, what the author of Villette says of Professor Paul Emanuel was true of M. Heger—everything he did was sudden; and he always contrived to take one by surprise.
It was immediately after he had won his triumph over my mother, and in the moment when I myself was under the spell of admiration for his talent, that he turned upon me, in a sort of flash, smiling down upon me (very red and startled to find him so near), and nodding his head with an irritating look of amusement as his penetrating eyes searched my doleful face. 'Aa-ah,' he said, in a half-playful, but as it sounded to me, more mocking, than kindly tone, 'Aa-ah' (another nod of the head), 'so this is the little Savage I have to discipline and vanquish, is it? And she is headstrong (têtue). Tell me, Mees, am I to be too indulgent? or too severe? (Dois-je être trop indulgent? ou trop sévère?') Now, if only I had made the natural reply, the one obviously expected from me—the one any girl in my position would have made, and which I myself should have made if I hadn't been addressed as 'a little savage,' and if I hadn't been smarting under the sense that he must have the worst possible opinion of me, and that I ought to vindicate my honour in some way,—if only, in short, I had remembered my brother's wholesome advice, 'Don't show off,' that is to say, if only I had said, amiably and nicely, with a timid little smile, 'Trop indulgent, s'il vous plait, Monsieur,' THEN all would have been well with me; M. Heger would have continued to smile; we should have exchanged amiable glances and parted the best of friends.... But of what use are these speculations? What I did reply to his question of whether he was to be too indulgent or too severe was—'Ni l'un ni l'autre, Monsieur; soyez juste, celà suffit' ... and I listened to the broadness of my own British accent, whilst I said it, in despairing wonder! M. Heger's smiles vanished; there came what I took to be a 'look of undying hatred' into his face—it was not perhaps so bad as all that, but ... well, I certainly hadn't conquered his favour. He said something disagreeable about Les Anglaises being over wise, too philosophical for him, which my mother thought was a compliment to my cleverness. But I knew what I had done, and that it could never be undone, henceforth ...
Well, but the case really was not quite so desperate perhaps?
[1] This chapter is reproduced from the Cornhill by the kind permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co.
CHAPTER III
MONSIEUR AND MADAME HEGER AS I SAW THEM;
AND BELGIAN SCHOOLGIRLS AS I KNEW THEM
Let me give here my mother's, and my own, account of the impressions made upon us by M. Heger's personal appearance at this time.
'He is very like one of those selected Roman Catholic Priests,' my mother told her Dutch relatives, 'who go into society and look after the eldest sons of Catholic noblemen. He has too good a nose for a Belgian and, I should say, he has Italian blood in him.'
My own report, to my brother, who made anxious inquiries of me, was less flattering perhaps, but it was not intended to be disrespectful. I always see M. Heger as I saw him then: as too interesting to be alarming; but too alarming to be lovable.
'He is rather like Punch,' I said, 'but better looking of course; and not so good-tempered.'
Let me justify these two descriptions by showing that both of them were based upon an accurate observation of the man himself.
M. Heger, as I remember him, was no longer what Charlotte called him, angrily, in her letter to Ellen Nussey, a little Black Being, and, affectionately, under the disguise of Paul Emanuel, 'a spare, alert man, showing the velvet blackness of a close-shorn head, and the sallow ivory of his brow beneath.' M. Heger in 1859 was still alert, but he was not spare, he was inclining towards stoutness. His hair was not velvet black, but grizzled, and he was bald on the crown of his head, in a way that might have been mistaken for a tonsure; and this no doubt added to the resemblance my mother saw in him to a Priest. He did not look in the least old, however. His brow, not sallow but bronzed, was unwrinkled; his eyes were still clear and penetrating (Charlotte said they were violet blue; and certainly she ought to have known. Still, do violet eyes penetrate one's soul like points of steel?) The Roman nose, that my mother thought too good a nose to be Belgian, and that reminded me of Punch (but a good-looking Punch) was a commanding feature. And the curved chin (also suggesting a good-looking Punch, to a young and irreverent observer), although it indicated humour, meant sarcasm, rather than a sense of fun. But Monsieur Heger had one really beautiful feature, that I remember often watching with extreme pleasure when he recited fine poetry or read noble prose:—his mouth, when uttering words that moved him, had a delightful smile, not in the least tender towards ordinary mortals, but almost tender in its homage to the excellence of writers of genius.
In brief, what M. Heger's face revealed when studied as the index of his natural qualities, was intellectual superiority, an imperious temper, a good deal of impatience against stupidity, and very little patience with his fellow-creatures generally; it revealed too a good deal of humour; and a very little kind-heartedness, to be weighed against any amount of irritability. It was a sort of face bound to interest one; but not, so it seems to me, to conquer affection. For with all these qualities of intellect, power, humour, and a little kind-heartedness, one quality was totally lacking: there was no love in M. Heger's face, nor in his character, as I recall it; and, oddly enough, looking back now to him as one of the personages in my own past to whom I owe most, and whose mind I most admire, I have to recognise that in my sentiment towards M. Heger to-day even, made up as it is half of admiration and half of amusement, there is not one particle of love.
I have said—in connection with my first impression, that 'undying hate' was the sentiment that M. Heger had conceived for me—that really 'it was not so bad as all that.' Still, what happened at this first interview, if it did not determine any deep-rooted antipathy to me, planted from this moment in M. Heger's breast, did indicate, to a certain extent, what the character of our future relationships was to be—out of lesson-hours. In these hours, our relationships of Professor and pupil were ideal. Seldom did an occasional misunderstanding trouble them. Certainly, in my own day, no other pupil entered with so much sympathetic admiration into the spirit of M. Heger's teaching as I did. He saw and felt this; and here I, too, was for him, and as a pupil, sympathetic. But in our personal relationships, there were certain things in me that were antipathetic to M. Heger, and that rubbed him so much the wrong way, that he was constantly (so it still seems to me) unjust to what were not faults, but idiosyncrasies, that belonged to my nationality and my character. First of all, there was my English accent: and here this singular remark has to be made: I never spoke such purely British French to any one as to M. Heger; and this was the result of my constant endeavour to be very careful to avoid the accent he disliked, when speaking to him. The second cause of offence in me was also due to my nationality, or rather to my upbringing. Like all English children of my generation, I had been brought up to esteem it undignified, and even a breach of good manners, to cry in public: and although I was tender-hearted and emotional, I was not in the least hysterical; and except under the stress of extreme distress, it cost me very little self-control not to weep, as my Belgian schoolfellows did, very often, at the smallest scolding; or even without a scolding, and simply because they were bored—'ennuyée.' I remember now my surprise, at first hearing the reply to my question to a sobbing schoolfellow: 'Pourquoi pleures-tu? 'Parce que je m'ennuie.' 'Why?' 'Mais je te le dis parce que je m'ennuie.' Well, but M. Heger liked his pupils to cry, when he said disagreeable things: or, in any case, he became gentle, and melted, when they wept, and was amiable at once. But when one did not weep, but appeared either unmoved, or indignant, he became more and more disagreeable: and, at length, exasperated. A third idiosyncrasy in me that he disliked was not national, but personal. It was due to a sort of incipient Rousseau-ism,—that must have been inborn, because I was never taught it, even in England. And yet there it was, implanted in me as a sentiment, long before I recognised it as an opinion or conviction, that I could express in words! This natural sentiment, or principle, was the belief that 'I was born free: that my soul was my own: and that there was no virtue, wisdom, nor happiness possible for me outside of the laws of my own constitution.' Unformulated, but inherent in me, this fundamental belief in myself as a law to myself, no doubt betrayed itself in a sort of independence of mind and manner very aggravating to my elders and betters, and to those put in authority over me. And especially aggravating to an authoritative Professor, who was, in all domains, opposed to individualism, and the doctrine of personal rights and liberty. Thus in literature M. Heger was a classic; in religion he was a dogmatic Catholic; in politics he was an anti-democrat, a lover of vigorous kings; and by constitution he was a king in his own right: a masterful man, not only a law to himself, but a lord, by virtue of his sense of superiority, to everyone else.
For these reasons, M. Heger and myself—on ideal terms as Professor and pupil—were on bad terms outside of lesson-hours. We could not quite dislike each other; but our relationships were stormy. There were, however, intervals of calm.
I have said that with a good deal of admiration, gratitude, and some amusement, there is no love for M. Heger intermingled with my remembrances of him.
There is, on the contrary, a good deal of love in the sentiment I retain for Madame Heger,—although, as a matter of fact, in the days when I was her pupil I never remember any strong or warm feeling of personal affection for her; nor have I any distinct personal obligation to her, as to one who, like M. Heger, rendered me direct services by her instructions or counsels. Nor yet again had Madame Heger any strong personal liking for me; nor did she show me any special kindness. But her kindness was of an all-embracing character. And so was her liking for, or rather love of, all the inhabitants of the little world she governed: a world that extended beyond the boundaries of the actual walls of the Pensionnat, in any stated year; a world, made up of all the girls who, before that year, and afterwards, through several generations, had been and ever would be, her 'dear pupils'; 'mes chères élèves';—terms that, uttered by her, were no mere formula, but expressed a true sentiment, and a serious and, so it seems to me, a beautiful and sweet idealism. This idealism in Madame Heger, this constant love and care and watchfulness for the community of girls, who, passing out of her hands, were to go out into the world by and by, to fulfil there what Madame Heger saw to be the kind and sweet and tranquil, and sometimes self-sacrificing and sorrowful, mission of womanhood, enveloped the ideal school-mistress with a sort of unfailing benevolence, that became a pervading influence in the Pensionnat, singling out no particular pupils, and withdrawn from none of them.
Here, it seems to me, and not at all in the reasons imagined by Charlotte in the case of Madame Beck, we have the secret of Madame Heger's system of government. I really am not, at this distance of time, able to say positively whether there was, or was not, a surveillance that might be called a system of espionage carried on, keeping the head-mistress informed of the conversation and behaviour of this large number of girls, amongst whom one or two black sheep might have sufficed to contaminate the flock. I was not a faultless, nor a model girl by any means: but I was a simple sort of young creature with nothing of the black sheep in me; and I never remember in my own case having my desk explored, nor my pockets turned inside out. But if even this had been done, it would not have gravely affected me; because neither in my pockets nor in my desk, would anything have been found of a mysterious or interesting character. But I should think it very probable that, in this very large school, a watchful surveillance was kept up; and that if any of these schoolgirls, most of them under sixteen, had attempted, after their return from the monthly holiday, to bring back to school illegal stores of sweets, or a naughty story book, and had concealed such things in their school desks, well, I admit, I think it possible, that the sweets or naughty book might have been missing from the desk next day. And also that, in the course of the afternoon, a not entirely welcome invitation would have been received by the imprudent smuggler of forbidden goods to pay Madame Heger a visit in the Salon? These things took place occasionally I know: and naturally, amongst the girls public sympathy was with the smuggler. But I am not sure, if one takes the point of view of a Directress, if a large girls' school could be carried on successfully, were it made a point of honour that there should be no surveillance, and that pupils might use their lockers as cupboards for sweets, or as hiding-places for light literature.
But, apart from the fact that Madame Heger was, no doubt, both watchful and uncompromising in her surveillance, based upon a firm resolution that nothing 'inconvenient' must be smuggled in, or hidden out of sight, as a source of mischief in the school, there was in her no resemblance to the odious Madame Beck; that is to say, no moral resemblance. In physical appearance, the author of Villette did use Madame Heger evidently as the model for the picture of an entirely different moral person. 'Her complexion was fresh and sanguine, her eye blue and serene. Her face offered contrasts—its features were by no means such as are usually seen in conjunction with a complexion of such blended freshness and repose; their outline was stern; her forehead was high, but narrow; it expressed capacity and some benevolence, but no expanse.... I know not what of harmony pervaded her whole person.'[1]
Taking this portrait from Villette, as it is given of Madame Beck, and comparing it with my own recollections, and also with the photograph I am fortunate enough to possess of Madame Heger at the age of sixty, it seems to me that this is a very accurate physical description of the real Directress of the school in the Rue d'Isabelle; who morally was as unlike the fictitious Madame Beck as truth is unlike falsehood. About the physical resemblance, I may say that, if I had trusted to my own impressions, I should have rejected the assertion that the 'outline of her features was stern.' I never remember associating sternness with Madame Heger; though her supreme quality of serenity imposed a sort of respect that had a little touch of fear in it. Upon re-examining the photograph attentively, however, I find that it is true that the outline of the features is stern; but I do not think that this impression was conveyed by the younger face, remembered with softened colouring; and lit up, as a characteristic expression, by a normal expression of serenity and of kindliness. 'I know not what of harmony pervaded her whole person': that sentence of Charlotte's (used by her of the unspeakable Madame Beck) exactly expresses the impression I still retain of the very estimable and, by myself, affectionately remembered, Madame Heger.
In the same way, as I have said, the apprehensions as to my future companions in this foreign school, that would infallibly have been awakened in me if I had read, before meeting them, the account given by the author of Villette of Belgian schoolgirls, as differing, not only in nationality, but in human nature, from English schoolgirls, would have been groundless. When I call up around me to-day the recollections of my Bruxelles schoolfellows, amongst whom I was the only English girl and the only Protestant, there does not come back to me any painful remembrance that I ever felt myself an alien amongst them. On the contrary, I remember privileges granted me as 'la petite Anglaise,' who was further away than others from home, and must be treated with special kindness. I see around me in this large company of girls, no 'perverted' nor precociously formed young women, whose 'eyes are full of an insolent light, and their brows hard and unblushing as marble.' In brief, I see no 'swinish multitude'—such as insular prejudice, and a disturbed imagination, showed Charlotte; but I see very much the same mixed crowd of youthful faces, fair and dark, pretty and plain, smiling and serious, stupid and intelligent, coarse and fine, sympathetic and unlikeable, that one would get in such a large collection of English schoolgirls; but in all this crowd of my Belgian schoolfellows just what my memory does not show me anywhere, are the 'eyes full of an insolent light, and the brow hard and unblushing as marble,'[2]—that are not characteristics of the schoolgirl in any nation or country I have ever known; and I have been a traveller in my time, and enjoyed opportunities of observing different national peculiarities, that never fell in the way of Charlotte, who spent two years in Bruxelles; but lived the rest of her life in Yorkshire.
As for the hundred (or more perhaps than a hundred) schoolgirls that made up in my day the little world ruled by Madame Heger as the administrator of a system based on the authority of Douceur, Bonté, and les Convenances (in the sense of what was seemly, and opposed to violence and ugliness), amongst them were many girls whom I only knew by name and sight; many of whom I knew slightly better, and whom I rather liked than disliked; a few whom I disliked heartily (very few of these)—and a few whom I loved dearly (very few again)—but amongst these friends, chosen because their hearts were in tune with my own, the difference of nationality and creed did not stand in the way of mutual affection. In some cases, it is true, life, with its exacting claims of duties and occupations and cares, rushed in to divide me afterwards from these companions of my best years; when everything that I am glad, and not sorry, to have been, and to have done, in a long life, was prepared and made possible for me—but at least one of these friendships formed with a Belgian schoolgirl in those days, I may describe as a life-long friendship: because it remains an unaltered sentiment that lives in me to-day, unquenched by the fact that, only a few years ago—after half a century had passed since we met—my girl friend that had been then, a white-haired woman now, died; in the same year, as it strangely happened, that our old school (transformed into a boys' college during the last twenty years of its existence), that had stood in the Rue d'Isabelle until 1909, was swept away, with its beautiful old walled garden and time-honoured pear-trees, that to the end of their lives 'renewed their perfumed snowy blossom every spring.'
I am told a handsome building now replaces the long, plain straggling façade of the historic school—but I have no wish to see it.
[1] Villette, chapter viii.
[2] See Villette, chapter viii.
CHAPTER IV
MY SECOND INTERVIEW WITH M. HEGER.
THE WASHING OF 'PEPPER.'
THE LESSON IN ARITHMETIC
I had been an inmate of the school in the Rue d'Isabelle a fortnight. In this interval I had lived through a great deal. Thanks to attentive self-doctoring and a strict régime, where no luxuries in the way of private crying were allowed, I had pulled myself through the first acute stage of the sort of sickness that attacks every 'new' girl, as the result of being plunged into the cold atmosphere of a strange, and especially of a foreign, school. Now I was out of danger of the peril that had threatened me during about a week, the possible disaster of some sudden access of violent weeping over my sense of desolation, in the sight of these foreign teachers and pupils, that would have seemed to me profoundly humiliating, on patriotic, as well as upon private grounds. For, as the one English girl in this Belgian school, was not the honour of my country, or, at any rate, of the girls of my country, at stake? And then I realised, also, that politeness to the foreigner, as well as duty to myself and my country, forbade any exhibition of vehement home-sickness. Thus, might not these Belgian teachers and girls reasonably take offence, and say, 'Why do you come to school in our country if you don't like it? We didn't ask you to come here. Why don't you go home?'
By these methods, then, of what it pleased me to regard as a sort of philosophy of my own, I had lived through the worst, and if I was not entirely cured of occasional inward sinkings of the heart and the feeling of desolation, I felt I had mastered the temptation to make any public display of them. And having reached this point by my own effort, now help came to me in the shape of a friendly tribute and encouragement from a girl who was a sort of philosopher, also by a rule of her own, which she kindly explained to me, and which I entirely approved of. This girl was fair and small, and had broad brows and clear green eyes under them. Her name was Marie Hazard. She had not spoken to me before, but on several occasions had shown me little kindnesses, and given me nice smiles and nods of greeting. Finally she came up to me in the garden and took my arm:—
'Do you know why I have a friendship for you?' she asked.
'No,' I answered. 'But have you really? I am so glad.'
'Yes,' she proceeded to explain; 'I like you, because you are reasonable, and don't sit down and cry, as, of course, you could if you liked. I have as much heart as another; but it irritates me, and does not touch me one bit, to see some of the pupils here, the big ones too, crying and crying, and why? because they have come back to school, and would rather be at home! Evidently that is the case with all of us. And evidently, what is more, it's going to be the case for ten months. But for some insignificant holidays at the New Year, from now until August, thus it will be with us. We shall be all of us in this school, and we would all of us prefer to be in our homes. But why cry, then? or if one begins to cry, why leave off? Is one, then, to cry for ten months? And what eyes will one have at the end? And what good is it?'
I laughed, not only because she seemed to me to put it humorously, but because I was full of happiness that I had found a friend.
'Yes,' she said, 'you laugh, and that is well, too. It's the thing to do. Now, if you cried there might be an excuse; you are farther away from your people than we are. But you ask yourself, What is the good? And you say to yourself, No, I won't discourage the others. And that is English. And that is why I like the English; they are at least reasonable.'
This was balm to me. The sense of desolation had vanished. Here was the proof that I had been a good witness, and served to uphold the good name of England, and also that I had conquered a friend.
I think it was the same afternoon, because there were Catechism classes, from which, as a Protestant, I was exempted, that I was sent out into the garden, for the first time, at an hour when no other pupils were there. Later on this privilege was very often accorded me, for the same reason; so that, in my own day at any rate, no one else in the school had the opportunity I had given me, and that I used, of taking possession of the enchanted place and making it my very own. And this was so because there was no knowledge in my mind at the time that Some One had been beforehand with me here; and that although for my inner self it became (and must always be for me exclusively) my own beautiful, well-enclosed, flower-scented, turf-carpeted, Eden where the spirit of my youth had its home before any worldly influences, or any knowledge of evil, had come between it and the poetry of its aspirations and its dreams, yet for every one but myself, it is Charlotte Brontë's Garden of Imagination, where she used to 'stray down the pleasant alleys and hear the bells of St. Jean Baptiste peal out with their sweet, soft, exalted sound.[1]
And although no angel with a flaming sword—no, nor yet any Belgian architects and masons, who have broken down the walls and uprooted the old trees, and made the old historical garden in the Rue d'Isabelle a place of stones—can drive me out of my garden of memories where still (and more often than before as the day darkens) I walk 'in the cool of the evening' with the spirit of my youth; yet, for English readers, it is not I, but Charlotte Brontë who must describe, what I could never dare nor desire to paint after her, the famous Allée défendue that holds such a romantic place in her novel of Lucy Snowe, and that was also the scene of my second meeting with M. Heger.
'In the garden there was a large berceau,' wrote the author of Villette, 'above which spread the shade of an acacia; there was a smaller, more sequestered bower, nestled in the vines which ran along a high and grey wall and gathered their tendrils in a knot of beauty; and hung their clusters in loving profusion about the favoured spot, where jasmine and ivy met and married them ... this alley, which ran parallel with the very high wall on that side of the garden, was forbidden to be entered by the pupils; it was called indeed l'Allée défendue.'
In my day there was no prohibition of the Allée défendue, although the name survived. It was only forbidden to play noisy or disturbing games there; as it was to be reserved for studious pupils, or for the mistresses who wished to read or converse there in quietude.
If I had a lesson to learn, it was to the Allée défendue that I took my book; and in this allée I had already discovered and appropriated a sheltered nook, at the furthest end of the berceau, where one was nearly hidden oneself in the vine's curtain, but had a delightful view of the garden. Before reaching this low bench, I had noticed, when entering the berceau, that a ladder stood in the centre; and that, out of view in so far as his head went, a man, in his shirt sleeves, was clipping and thinning the vines. I took it for granted he was a gardener, and paid no attention to him; but, in a quite happy frame of mind, sat down to learn some poetry by heart. My impression is that it was Lamartine's Chûte des Feuilles. Shutting my eyes, whilst repeating the verses out aloud (a trick I had), I opened them, to see M. Heger. He it was who had been thinning the vine; it was a favourite occupation of his (had I read Villette I should have known it).[2] Once again he took me by surprise, and I was full of anxiety as to what might come of it. Since I entered the school I had, indeed, caught distant views of him, hurrying through the class-rooms to or from his lessons in the First and Second divisions. But until my French had improved I was placed in the Third division, where M. Heger only taught occasionally, so that I had not yet received any lesson from him.
It was a relief to see that he looked amiable, and even friendly; if only I didn't lose my head and say the wrong thing again! One thing I kept steadily in view; nothing must induce me to forget my brother's advice this time; there must be no attempt at fine phrases, this time nothing that could possibly appear like showing off.... But all my anxieties upon this occasion were dispelled by the purpose of my Professor's disturbance of my studies. He invited me to assist him in washing a very stout but very affectionate white dog, to whom I was told I owed this service as he was a compatriot of mine, an English dog, with an English name: a very inappropriate one, for he was sweet-tempered and white, and the name was Pepper. For this operation of washing Pepper, I was invited upstairs into M. Heger's library, which was, in this beautifully clean and orderly house, a model of disorder; clouded as to air, and soaked as to scent, with the smoke of living and the accumulated ashes of dead cigars. But the shelves laden from floor to ceiling with books made a delightful spectacle.
Upon the occasion of this first visit to his library, M. Heger made me the present of a book that marked a new epoch in my life, because, before I was fifteen, it put before me in a vivid and amusing way the problem of personality, Le Voyage autour de ma Chambre of Xavier de Maistre, was my introduction to thoughts and speculations that led me to a later interest in Oriental philosophy, and especially in Buddhism. I must not forget another present in the form of one more of those luminous little sentences that, as I have said, he used as Lanterns, turning them to send light in different directions. I had confided to him, not my own methods of philosophy—I did not dare incur the risk—but my newly found friend's methods of helping herself to be 'reasonable.' M. Heger showed no enthusiasm, nor even approval: and I found out that he had a strong dislike to my elected friend. Personally he would have preferred and recommended Religious methods of prayer, and docile submission to spiritual direction, to any philosophy, especially in the case of women. But he quoted to me and wrote down for me, and exhorted me to learn by heart and repeat aloud (as I actually did), a definition of the philosophy of life of an Eighteenth-century Woman, as 'Une façon de tirer parti de sa raison pour son bonheur.' I discovered this sentence a great many years afterwards in a book of the de Goncourts. But M. Heger first gave it to me in my girlhood.
Although it was, of course, as Professor of Literature that M. Heger excelled, he was in other domains—in every domain he entered—an original and an effective teacher. Let me give the history of a famous Lesson in Arithmetic by M. Heger that took place, I am not quite sure why, in the large central hall, or Galerie as it was called, that flanked the square, enclosing the court or playground of daily boarders, whilst the Galerie divided the court from the garden. For some special reason, all the classes attended this particular lesson; where the subject was the Different effects upon value, of multiplication and division in the several cases of fractions and integers. Madame Heger and the Mesdemoiselles Heger, and all the governesses were there. I had been promoted into the first class (passing the second class over altogether) before this, so that I was a regular pupil of M. Heger's in literature, and certainly in this class, a favourite. But I was a complete dunce at arithmetic, and it was a settled conviction in my mind that my stupidity was written against me in the book of destiny; and I admit that, as it did not seem of any use for me to try to do anything in this field, I had given up trying, and when arithmetic lessons were being given I employed my thoughts elsewhere. But a lesson from M. Heger was another thing; even a lesson in arithmetic by him might be worth while. So that I really did, with all the power of brain that was in me, try to apply myself to the understanding of his lesson. But it was of no use; after about five minutes, the usual arithmetic brain-symptoms began; words ceased to mean anything at all intelligible. It was really a sort of madness; and therefore in self-defence I left the thing alone and looked out of the window, whilst the lesson lasted. It never entered my head that I was in any danger of being questioned: no one ever took any notice of me at the arithmetic lessons. It was recognised that, here, I was no good; and as I was good elsewhere, they left me alone. Yes, but M. Heger wasn't going to leave me alone. Evidently he had taken a great deal of trouble, and wanted the lesson to be a success. And it had not succeeded. He was dissatisfied with all the answers he received. He ran about on the estrade getting angrier and angrier. And then at last, to my horror, he called upon me; and what cut me to the soul, I saw that there was a look of confidence in his face, as if to say 'Here is some one who will have understood!'
... Well of course the thing was hopeless. I had a sort of mad notion that a miracle might happen, and that Providence might interfere, and that if by accident I repeated some words I had heard him say there might be some sense in them—but, as Matthew Arnold said, miracles don't happen. It was deplorable. I saw him turn to Madame Heger with a shrug of the shoulders: and that he must have said of the whole English race abominable things, and of this English girl in particular, may be taken for granted; because Madame Heger hardly ever spoke a word when he was angry. But now she said something soothing about the English nation, and in my praise. Well, my case being settled, M. Heger began: and he did not leave off until the whole Galerie was a house of mourning. In the whole place, the only dry eyes were mine, and here I had to exercise no self-control; for although at first I had been sorry for him, now I was really so angry with him for attacking these harmless girls, and attributing to them abominable heartlessness, although the place rang with their sobs, that I don't think I should have minded a slight attack of apoplexy—only I shouldn't have liked him to have died.
It was really a bewildering and almost maddening thing, because on both sides it was so absurd. First of all, what had all these weeping girls done to deserve the reproaches the Professor heaped upon them? 'They said to themselves,' he told them: '"What does this old Papa-Heger matter? Let him sit up at night, let him get up early, let him spend all his days in thinking how he can serve us, make difficulties light, and dark things clear to us. We are not going to take any trouble on our side, not we! why should we? Indeed, it amuses us to see him navré—for us, it is a good farce."'
The wail rose up—'Mais non, Monsieur, ce n'est pas vrai, cela ne nous amuse pas; nous sommes tristes, nous pleurons, voyez.'
The Professor took no heed; he continued. 'They said to themselves "Ah! the old man, le pauvre vieux, takes an interest in us, he loves us; it pleases him to think when he is dead, and has disappeared, these little pupils whom he has tried to render intelligent, and well instructed, and adorned with gifts of the mind, will think of his lessons, and wish they had been more attentive. Foolish old thing! not at all," they say, "as if we had any care for him or his lessons."'
The wail rose up—'Ce n'est pas gentil ce que vous dites là, Monsieur: nous avons beaucoup de respect pour vous, nous aimons vos leçons; oui, nous travaillerons bien, vous allez voir, pardonnez-nous.'
'Frankly, now, does that touch you?' I heard behind me. 'It is not reasonable! I find it even stupid (je le trouve même bête).' Marie Hazard, of course. I made a mistake when I said my eyes were the only dry ones. Here was my philosopher-friend, amongst the pupils in the Galerie, and her eyes were quite as dry as mine.
But the story of the Lesson in Arithmetic does not finish here; and nothing would be more ungrateful were I to hide the ending: by which I was the person to benefit most. To my alarm, in the recreation hour next day, M. Heger came up to me, still with a frowning brow and a strong look of dislike, and told me he wished to prove to himself whether I was negligent or incapable. Because if I was incapable, it was idle to waste time on me—so much the worse for my poor mother, who deceived herself! On the other hand, if I was negligent, it was high time I should correct myself. This was what had to be seen. I followed him up to his library, not joyously like the willing assistant in the washing of Pepper, but like a trembling criminal led to execution. I felt he was going again over 'fractions' and the 'integers.' I knew I shouldn't understand them; and that he wouldn't understand that I was 'incapable,' that when arithmetic began my brain was sure to go!
The funny and pleasant thing about M. Heger was that he was so fond of teaching, and so truly in his element when he began it, that his temper became sweet at once; and I loved his face when it got the look upon it that came in lesson-hours: so that, whereas we were hating each other when we crossed the threshold of the door, we liked each other very much when we sat down to the table; and I had an excited feeling that he was going to make me understand. It took him rather less than a quarter of an hour.
On the table before us he had a bag of macaroon biscuits, and half a Brioche cake. He presented me with a macaroon. There you have one whole macaroon (intègre): well, but let us be generous. Suppose I multiply my gift, by eight: now you have eight whole macaroons and are eight times richer, hein? But that's too many; eight whole macaroons! I divide them between you and me. As the result, you have half the eight. But now for our half-Brioche; we have one piece only: and we are two people, so we multiply the pieces. But each is smaller, the more pieces, the smaller slice of cake; here are eight pieces; they are really too small for anything, we will divide this collection of pieces into two parts. Now does not this division make you better off, hein? Then he folded his arms across his chest in a Napoleonic attitude, and nodding his head at me, asked, 'Que c'est difficile,—n'est-ce pas?'
Of course in this, and indeed in all his personal and special methods, M. Heger followed Rousseau faithfully. But, then, where is the modern educationalist since 1762 who does not found himself upon Rousseau?
It was not, however, in rescuing one from the slough of despond, where natural defects would have left one without his aid, that M. Heger excelled—it was rather in calling out one's best faculties; in stimulating one's natural gifts; in lifting one above satisfaction with mediocrity; in fastening one's attention on models of perfection; in inspiring one with a sense of reverence and love for them, that M. Heger's peculiar talent lay.
I may attempt only to sum up a few maxims of his, that have constantly lived in my own mind: but I feel painfully my inability to convey the impression they produced when given by this incomparable Professor; whose power belonged to his personality; and was consequently a power that cannot be reproduced, nor continued by any disciple. The Teacher of genius is born and not made.
The first of these maxims was that, before entering upon the study of any noble or high order of thoughts, one had to follow the methods symbolised by the Eastern practice of leaving one's shoes outside of the Mosque doors. There were any number of ways of 'putting off the shoes' of vulgarity, suggested to one's choice by M. Heger: the reading of some beautiful passage in a favourite book; the repetition of a familiar verse: attention to some very beautiful object: the deliberate recollection of some heroic action, etc. With different temperaments different plans might be followed:—what was necessary was that one did not enter the sacred place without some deliberate renunciation of vulgarity and earthliness: by some mental act, or process, one must have 'put off one's shoes.' There is here a strange circumstance that I was too young to feel the true importance of at the time, but that I have often wondered over since then. There can be no doubt of M. Heger's rigid orthodoxy as a Catholic. Yet whilst the recitation of the Rosary inaugurated the daily lessons, M, Heger had a special invocation[3] of 'the Spirits of Wisdom, Truth, Justice, and Equanimity,' that was recited by some chosen pupil; who had to come out of her place in class and stand near him; and who was not allowed by him to gabble. And this was the invariable introduction to his lesson. I can't feel it was an orthodox proceeding: There was not a Saint's name anywhere! But I feel the infallible impression it produced upon me now. One effect, in the sense of 'putting off one's shoes,' that it had for myself was that the Professor of Literature appeared to me without any of the dislikable qualities of the everyday M. Heger.
Another maxim of M. Heger's was certainly borrowed from Voltaire: That one must give one's soul as many forms as possible. Il faut donner à son âme toutes les formes possibles. Again, that every sort of literature and literary style has its merits, except the literature that is not literary and the style that is bad: here again, one has, of course, Voltaire's well-known phrases: J'admets tous les genres, hors le genre ennuyeux.'
A third maxim was that one must never employ, nor tolerate the employment of, a literary image as an argument. The purpose of a literary image is to illuminate as a vision, and to interpret as a parable. An image that does not serve both these purposes is a fault in style.
A fourth maxim is that one must never neglect the warning one's ear gives one of a fault in style; and never trust one's ear exclusively about the merits of a literary style.
A fifth rule:—One must not fight with a difficult sentence; but take it for a walk with one; or sleep with the thought of it present in one's mind; and let the difficulty arrange itself whilst one looks on.
A sixth rule:—One must not read, before sitting down to write, a great stylist with a marked manner of his own; unless this manner happens to resemble one's own.
Now I shall be told that these rules and maxims, whether true or false, are 'known to nearly every one,' and are of assistance to no one; because people who can write do not obey rules: and people who can't write are not taught to do so by rules. If this were literally true then there would be no room in the world for a Professor of Literature. My own opinion is that there are very few good writers who do not obey rules; and that these rules are, if contracted in youth, of great use as a discipline that saves original writers from the defect of their quality of originality, in a proneness to mannerisms and whims.
In connection with the possible complaint that I am putting forward as M. Heger's maxims, sentences that were not originally invented nor uttered by him, my reply is that I do not affirm that he invented his own maxims, but simply that he chose them from an enormous store he had collected by study and fine taste and by a sound critical judgment, the result of an extensive acquaintanceship with the best that has been said and thought in the world by philosophers, poets, and literary artists and connoisseurs. In his character of a Professor of literature I find it hard to imagine that any gift of original thought, or personal power of expressing his own thoughts, could have placed M. Heger's pupils under the same obligations as did his knowledge of beautiful ideas, beautifully expressed, gathered from north, south, east and west, in classical, mediæval and modern times. To be given these precious and luminous thoughts in one's youth, when they have a special power to 'rouse, incite and gladden one,' is a supreme boon:—and in my own case my gratitude to M. Heger has never been in the least disturbed by the discovery that he was not the inventor of the maxims that have constantly been a light to my feet and a lantern to my path during the half-century that has elapsed since I received them from him in the historical Pensionnat, that stood for many years, after Monsieur Heger himself had vanished out of life, but that stands no longer in the Rue d'Isabelle.
[1] From Mlle. Louise Heger I have this note: 'Les cloches de St. Jacques et non pas St. Jean Baptiste, église qui se trouve à l'autre côté de la ville près du canal: quartier du Père Silas dans "Villette."'
[2] Villette, chapter xii.
[3] Esprit de Sagesse, conduisez-nous:
Esprit de Vérité, enseignez-nous:
Esprit de Charité, vivifiez-nous:
Esprit de Prudence, préservez-nous:
Esprit de Force, défendez-nous:
Esprit de Justice, éclairez-nous:
Esprit Consolateur, apaisez-nous.
Here is the invocation, sent me by Mlle. Heger; who has, with extreme kindness, endeavoured to recover it for me.
CHAPTER V
THE STORY OF A CHAPEAU D'UNIFORME
In connection with the particular Belgian schoolgirls whom I knew, who still, in 1860, learnt their lessons in the class-rooms where Charlotte Brontë once taught, and who were still taught by M. Heger, and still surrounded with the benign and serene influences of Madame Heger, let me prove that these schoolgirls had not the characteristics of the Lesbassecouriennes; and that Charlotte Brontë displayed insular prejudice, as well as an imagination coloured by the distress of an unhappy passion, when she said of them, 'The Continental female is quite a different being to the insular female of the same age and class.'[1]
Inasmuch as the story I have to tell is the story of a Bonnet, it will be recognised as one that is calculated to display the qualities and intimate and essential peculiarities of the 'Continental female' (under sixteen) in a light, and under the stress and strain of passions and interests, too serious to permit of any tampering with, or disguise of, nature. One has to realise, also, that the question is not merely of a bonnet, but of a Best Bonnet, a Sunday Bonnet. For, in the remote days of which I am now writing modern young people should realise even schoolgirls of ten or twelve wore bonnets on Sunday, and even upon week-days, when they went beyond the borders of their garden: a hat was thought indecorous on the head of any girl in her 'teens—a form of undress rather than of dress. To wear a hat was like wearing a pinafore—a confession that one had not forgotten the nursery. To save one's best Sunday Bonnet, in the garden, one might go about in a hat, and in the bosom of one's family wear a pinafore to save a new dress; but in the same way that one did not go into the drawing-room with a pinafore on, one did not, in those days, pay visits in a hat: and to go to church in one would have been thought irreverent. So that a Sunday Bonnet meant that childish ways were done with, and that one had attained the age of reason. Like a barrister's wig it imposed seriousness on the wearer, who had to live up to it. Madame Heger, when establishing the rules for the uniform that was worn by all the pupils of the school in the Rue d'Isabelle, paid great attention to the Sunday Bonnet. Following the sense she lent to the law of her system of government, the love of dress was not to be allowed amongst her pupils to become an encouragement to vanity and rivalship, and hence one uniform, for rich and poor alike, avoided any chance of vain, unkind, and envious feelings; but at the same time the love of dress was not to be discouraged altogether; because it was serviceable to taste, and the care for appearance, without which a young person remains deficient in femininity. Therefore although every boarder wore the same uniform, what this uniform was to be was made quite an important question: and the girls were invited to choose a committee to decide it, in consultation with their head-mistress. And to this consultation Madame Heger brought a large spirit of indulgence, especially where the Sunday Bonnet was concerned. The Sunday Dress had to be black silk—about the façon there might be discussion, but not about the colour or material. On the other hand, about the Bonnet, everything was left an open question. It might be fashionable: it might be becoming: and even serviceableness was not made a too stringent obligation. Indeed in the first year of my school career the Sunday Bonnet selected for the summer months was the reverse of serviceable. It was white chip; it was decorated with pink rosebuds, where blonde and tulle mingled with the rosebuds; it had broad white ribands edged with black velvet—in short, a very charming Bonnet: but sown with perils. Everything about it could get easily soiled; and nothing about it would stand exposure to rain.
Madame Heger, recognising these material inconveniences, had nevertheless seen that, on the educational side, there were compensating advantages—the cultivation of neatness and order. She had not then discouraged the white chip, rosebuds and the rest; at the same time, she had stated the case for a yellow straw, with a plaid-ribbon that would not easily soil.
'On the one hand,' she had said, 'you may, with merely simple precautions, carry your Bonnet through the summer to the big holidays, without anxiety. On the other hand, no doubt there will be anxiety: the white chip is extremely pretty, but do not forget that it will require almost incessant care. Never must this Bonnet be put on one side without a clean white handkerchief to cover it. Not only so, one storm, if you have no umbrella, will suffice; everything will need renewal. And I warn you, my children, that if this misfortune arrive, it is not I, but you, who will have to ask your good mammas for another Bonnet. I ask from your parents a chapeau d'uniforme, and one only, each term: no more. So now decide as you please.'
The decision had been for the white chip, arrive what may. My own point of view, whilst the subject was being discussed around me, was that nothing could interest me less. Fancy troubling one's head about a Bonnet! I did not say it, because I had no wish to make myself unpopular, but the interest in the affair appeared to me puerile. Happily these trifling matters had no importance for me; it did not matter to me at all what sort of chapeau d'uniforme they chose.
How wrong I was! It mattered to me more than to any one else in the whole school, because no one wore their chapeau d'uniforme so much, and no one took the poor thing out so frequently into storm and rain. All the other boarders attended early mass on Sunday mornings in a convent chapel, within five minutes' walk of the school. The other occasions when they wore the fragile white chip chapeau were safe occasions, when, if it rained, they took shelter in their own homes on the monthly holidays, or were sent back to school in a fiacre. My case was different. Every Sunday morning, in accordance with the arrangement made by my mother, my brother called at the Rue d'Isabelle to take me to the English Church, which in those days was a sort of hall, known as the 'Temple Anglican,' situated in a passage near the Bruxelles Museum. The service was generally over by noon; but it was too late for me to return to school in time for the déjeuner at mid-day, and this authorised the custom of my taking lunch with my brother and enjoying a short walk afterwards; so that I was taken back by him to the Rue d'Isabelle before four o'clock. Now it will be easily understood that this agreeable arrangement had temptations: and that sometimes, on very fine days, there would occur forgetfulness of the 'Temple Anglican' altogether; and the whole of these four or five hours would be spent in our favourite haunt, the Bois de la Cambre, where we would picnic, on cakes and fruit, when there was pocket-money enough, or on two halfpenny 'pistolets,' when, as often happened, ten centimes, that ought to have gone into the plate at the Temple, was all we had. And whether the lunch was of cakes, or of dry bread, it did not alter the fact that we talked of home incessantly; and were supremely happy. Yes; but no doubt our conduct was reprehensible, and did not deserve the favour of Heaven. And my recollection is that almost invariably these picnics in the Bois de la Cambre, to which an exceptionally fine day had tempted us, ended in a downpour of rain. And how it rains at Brussels, when it does rain! So now, think of the state of the white chip Bonnet, and of the bunch of rosebuds, interwoven with blonde, and of the white silk ribbon edged with black velvet, that I took back with me to the Rue d'Isabelle.
And it is here where the beautiful nature of Belgian schoolgirls, or of these particular Belgian schoolgirls who were my companions and contemporaries, stands revealed. For upon one particular Sunday, having hastily and silently fled to the dormitory upon my return, and being discovered there, in dismayed contemplation of the lamentable saturated mixture of mashed up tinted pulp and wires, that had once been rosebuds and blonde, my depths of despondency moved these sympathetic young hearts to compassion. As it was Sunday afternoon, one was allowed to loiter over getting ready for dinner; a circle of consolers gathered round me, and from it, forth stepped two rival aspirants to the honour of sacrificing themselves on the altar of friendship. The first said: 'Now nothing is more simple: we shall wrap up this unhappy rag in my handkerchief as you see;—You shall have my chapeau d'uniforme, and I shall tell Maman everything—she interests herself in you; for when she was young, she was at school in England. She will send me another chapeau d'uniforme, and all is said.'
The other girl, whose name was Henriette—I forget her surname—said, 'My plan is easier: for here is an accident,—as though it were done on purpose. Now what do you say: I have two chapeaux d'uniforme, if you please! The first my mother sent me as a model to show Madame Heger, and from this model she chose it. But now Madame had ordered mine with the others: and when I told my mother, she said, 'Say nothing: an accident may happen, the Bonnet will not support rain, you will have this one at hand if a misfortune arrive. Well, and here is the misfortune: there's no difficulty at all.'
Both of these girls had their homes in Brussels, and both of them I knew had everything their own way with two fondly indulgent mammas. I had no scruple in accepting their generous sacrifice, and I hugged them both, and was really (I who despised tears) on the verge of crying. Between the two, I hardly knew which offer to take, but it seemed to me that as Henriette had two Bonnets, it was most reasonable to take hers. And we all went down to dinner happily. And the 'Unhappy rag' 'cette malheureuse loque,' was buried in the hangar, the wood-house at the bottom of the garden.
But under cloudless skies one is prone to forget the lessons of misfortune. It took some time—but the Sunday came when, once again, it seemed 'almost wrong' to waste summer hours in the Temple Anglican, when one felt so good under the beautiful trees in the Bois de la Cambre. And then there was pocket-money in hand, and a lunch of cakes, and not halfpenny pistolets, could be obtained.
'I suppose you don't think it will rain?' I suggested.
'Rain!' My brother said with scorn. 'Look at that sky! How could it rain?'
It managed to do it. True, it was only a brief shower: but the water came down in sheets. In despair I took off the chapeau d'uniforme, and my brother, who wore an Inverness cape, sheltered it under the flap. I stood to hold the cape at a right angle, so that the precious object might not be crushed, and we were watching it under this sheltering wing, and my brother was assuring me it was all right when,—as I stood there bareheaded and rain-beaten, beneath a tree by the side of the broad path near the entrance to the wood—a short, stoutish man, buttoned up to the chin in his greatcoat, and holding his umbrella tightly, walked by us at a great pace, without (so at least it seemed) looking at us at all. And that man was M. Heger. We gasped, and looked at each other.
'He didn't see us,' said my brother cheerily. 'What a bit of luck!'
'You may be quite sure he did see us,' I answered. 'Well, I wonder what will happen now?'
With this new anxiety on our hands, even the precious chapeau d'uniforme became a secondary consideration. But the shower having passed, we examined it carefully. There was no disaster this time. The rosebuds were still rosebuds and the blonde still blonde. It is true that a splash had fallen on the white chip crown, but my brother was always ready with comfort.
'When it's dry,' he told me, 'you'll easily get that off with a bit of bread.'
This consoled me for the time being: but he was wrong as to the question of facts. Bread had no effect upon that blot. It remained an island, or, to speak more correctly, a coast-line, on the white chip, to the end of that chapeau d'uniforme's existence. But one dusted the stain over with white powder before putting on one's Bonnet, and hoped no one noticed it? So far as I know, no one did. But let it not be supposed that I escaped moral punishment: I, who had once boasted in my pride that nothing was less indifferent to me than my Sunday Bonnet, wore this one uneasily to the end of the term, always conscious that the tell-tale stain was there, and might suggest questions as to its origin.
Nor did I escape scot-free from M. Heger's hands, although he did behave with a certain generosity, for he kept the secret. But he used his own method of punishment.
Happy in the confidence given me by my brother's assurance that I should easily get rid of the rain-blot, I went back to the Rue d'Isabelle, in some anxiety about M. Heger, but nearly persuaded that, after all, perhaps, with his umbrella to think of and grasp, and the hurry he was in, he very likely hadn't seen us. But when the pupil's door was opened in answer to my ring, and I was hoping to hurry through the corridor to the staircase leading to the dormitories, I found M. Heger waiting for me. He barred my path and looked down at me with his penetrating, mocking eyes,—that, although I do not like to contradict Charlotte, I still think had more green and steel, than violet-blue, colour in them.
'A-ah,' he said with his long-drawn sigh, 'you are attentive at my lessons, Mees; do you now listen with the same attention to the sermon of the Minister at your Temple?'
Here was my opportunity; of course I ought to have said, 'No, Monsieur, I don't listen to any one with so much attention as I do to you: no one interests me so much.' When I had got upstairs and had taken off the chapeau d'uniforme, I realised that this was what any rational being would have said. But it was too late then—all I did say was, 'Je ne sais pas, Monsieur' (a bad French accent too).
'A-ah,' he repeated, tightening his mouth, 'now I should like to see whether you profit by the instructions of your Minister: Thus I shall be glad if you will write me a résumé in French of the sermon you heard to-day at the Temple. It will be a good exercise for you in the French language. And also I shall enjoy the happiness of knowing this wise Minister's advice. It is understood, you will give me the résumé of this sermon to-morrow.'
'Oui, Monsieur.'
All through the evening recreation hours, and at night when I fought against sleepiness in my bed, I worked over the composition of that sermon. It is true that I did fall asleep in the middle of it myself; but that does not prove it was a dull sermon, for I took it up again in the morning with renewed zest. I gave up my whole recreation hour after déjeuner to writing it out. And I believed it to be as good a sermon as was ever preached. And there was no vanity in this belief: because it was not my own sermon, but one I had originally heard preached in my childhood in an old village church, and the arguments in favour of being good and simple had taken hold of my imagination, partly on account of the associations with the place where I heard it. Well, but now, can my readers deny that when I say M. Heger was a more irritating than lovable man, I have sound reasons for my statement? After ordering me to write that sermon, and when I had stolen several hours from my sleep, and given up two recreations to obey him, he never asked for it! And when I told him I had written the sermon and that it was ready for him, he merely looked down upon me with a strange twinkle in his eyes, and said, 'A-ah, c'est bien. Vous l'avez donc bien retenu, ce fameux sermon? tant mieux, tant mieux.'
[1] Villette, chapter viii.
CHAPTER VI
MADAME HEGER'S SENTIMENT OF THE JUSTICE
OF RESIGNATION TO INJUSTICE
At the end of these reminiscences I have now to relate the incident that stands out in my memory as, not only the most bitter experience I had ever, up to this date, undergone of personal injustice in my brief life of fifteen years, not only, what was of great moral importance to me, my first lesson in the philosophy of refusing to torment oneself in order to punish one's tormentors, but also the incident that revealed to me a secret sorrow hidden away under Madame Heger's serenity; and that convinces me, now, that the tragical romance of Charlotte Brontë was not to her, as it must have been to M. Heger, misunderstood, and regarded as an event of small importance; but that it 'entered into her life,' and was to her a very serious trouble.
One day in June, I am not able to remember now upon what especial occasion, nor in honour of what event, all the school was given an entire holiday: and, for its better enjoyment, the girls were invited by a former pupil in the Rue d'Isabelle, who had married and possessed a fine château and a large garden within walking distance of Bruxelles, to spend the whole day in her house and garden, where a mid-day collation was prepared for them. I remember very little about the day's enjoyments—the cruel impressions that followed the pleasant holiday have effaced from my memory almost everything that preceded them. I know, however, that all was sunshine and good humour: that my companions whom I had trusted as friends were as friendly to me as ever; and that with my two chosen companions, the philosopher Marie Hazard and the other still dearer friend, who was a philosopher in a different sense, as a profound Nature-worshipper,—where I was supposed to be a philosopher in a sense of my own as a worshipper of ideas—talked 'philosophy' wisely and well—in our own estimation, and ate red gooseberries. As we talked other girls discovered these gooseberry-bushes also, and came in flocks: so we three withdrew, and sat down under some shady tree, and were very happy and at peace. Near us, on a low cane chair, sat one of the under-mistresses, a Frenchwoman, whom I liked extremely, and who also liked me: her name was Mlle. Zélie—she was too young to have been one of the mistresses known to Charlotte Brontë twenty years before. She may have been twenty-six: or she may have been thirty.
As she sat there, doing embroidery, and watching all the time a swarm of girls picking gooseberries,—we three, who had left off picking them, were at rest upon the grass,—there came, suddenly, a servant in great haste sent from the Rue d'Isabelle by Madame Heger, with a letter: neither Monsieur nor Madame had arrived yet, they were to be there in time for the collation in the afternoon. The letter was an urgent order to Mlle. Zélie that the girls were not to touch the fruit in the kitchen garden—this stipulation had been made by the generous hostess, who had invited all this company to a feast of cakes and cream and good things of every description, but who wanted her gooseberries and currants for jam. Here of course was cause of great dismay: although the bushes had not been entirely stripped, yet certainly thirty or forty girls amongst the gooseberry-bushes alone had made their mark. We three philosophers had trifled with one bush perhaps; but our share in the depredation was comparatively slight. A bell was rung, and the message read aloud. I am convinced from that moment onwards no one touched any fruit:—still the mischief had been done; it was obvious to the naked eye that the gooseberry-bushes had been attacked.
The person who seemed most distressed was poor Mlle. Zélie: she blamed no one, but repeated constantly, 'Why then did not Madame warn me? Never should I have permitted it, had I not supposed that it was understood that these gooseberries, without value for that matter, were intended to be eaten. It seemed to me, in the absence of instructions, so natural.'
And a chorus of girls answered: 'We thought it too, Mademoiselle: never would we have touched a gooseberry had we understood.'
There the matter remained. We were not particularly unhappy: as a matter of fact all the gooseberries in the garden could have been purchased for five francs in Bruxelles. No harm had been done the bushes: it was a mal entendu—what would you have? The only person who seemed to take it to heart was poor Mlle. Zélie.
'Quel malheur,' she kept repeating. 'Quel malheur! mais aussi, pourquoi Madame ne m'a-t-elle rien dit?'
We continued, Marie Hazard and myself, sitting under our shady tree; our third philosopher, the Nature-worshipper, always good at decoration, had been called off to assist at laying out the tables, and arranging flowers; groups of other girls were sitting in circles on the grass or walking about arm in arm, when—suddenly arrived upon the scene M. Heger. He came up with an amiable expression: but in a moment the look changed to one black as night: he had seen the tell-tale signs of the depredations inflicted on the gooseberry-bushes.
'Who is responsible for this?' he asked, 'c'est une bassesse! Mlle. Zélie, what does this signify? Were you not told the fruit was to be respected?'
Poor Mlle. Zélie stood there quivering with terror.
'Unhappily,' she said, 'Madame's letter arrived too late: without bad intention, these young girls imagined themselves free to eat gooseberries: from the moment it was known that it was forbidden, I am sure there was no infraction of the rule: but alas! what was done, was done. I regret it profoundly: and so I am sure do you, is it not so, my children?' she asked, turning to Marie Hazard and myself:—there was a clear and empty space around us—every other girl had somehow vanished.
'Yes, Mademoiselle, we are very sorry,' both of us answered at once.
M. Heger swooped round upon us in his wrath.
'And so,' he said, 'it is you, is it; you two who have so much pride, both of you; who are so little sensitive to the counsels of your teachers, you, who are so superior in your own esteem, who are the guilty ones? It is you two, and you alone in the entire Pension, who have been capable of this indignity? And see what ruin you have made! Are you not ashamed—what gluttony!'
'Mais non, Monsieur, non,' pleaded Mademoiselle Zélie, 'these young girls are not alone responsible; many others also took the fruit; you must not blame them for everything.'
'Is that so, Mademoiselle Hazard? Is that so, Mees?'
'Il ne faut pas nous demander cela,' said I, with my usual bad accent in agitated moments. 'C'est aux autres qu'il faut le demander.'
'Mais oui,' he said, 'and this is what I intend to do; Mlle. Zélie, do me this pleasure: fetch me the élèves who were here just now: call them together. I must get to the bottom of this. Je dois approfondir cela.'
Mlle. Zélie was some time about it: but in the end, she returned with a good company of girls, forty or fifty at least; amongst them nearly all of those who had been most busy amongst the gooseberry bushes. They stood round us in a sort of circle; Marie Hazard, myself, and M. Heger.
M. Heger delivered a little speech: he explained, and enlarged upon, the confidence that our kind hostess had placed in us; she had thrown open her garden to us; she had prepared a feast for us; she had made only one condition—respect my gooseberry-bushes. Was it possible, could one suppose it possible, that any one could be found base enough, greedy enough, to ignore her wishes?
'We were not told,' said Marie Hazard; 'This is not reasonable—one would not have touched a gooseberry had one known. Is one a child of six then, to love gooseberries to this extent?'
'Mlle. Hazard, it is not to you I address myself,' said M. Heger. 'I have no question to ask you. You admit, and indeed it is not possible for you to deny, that you have committed this act of gluttony—inexcusable in a child of six. It is to you all, my dear pupils, outside of these two, who I know are guilty, that I ask it, and with confidence—amongst you all, have any of you been guilty of this indignity?'
Dead silence. Mlle. Zélie was fidgeting about, snapping her fingers nervously. But she said nothing.
M. Heger again addressed the girls round him, and there was a note of triumph in his voice:—
'Cela suffit,' he affirmed, 'I shall ask no more. If any of you are guilty, you know it in your consciences: you know now what it remains for you to do. For me, I believe, and I love to believe, that the only pupil in this school capable of this unworthy conduct is a foreigner.'
'Pardon, Monsieur,' said a voice at my elbow, 'je suis Belge; et moi aussi j'ai mangé des groseilles.'
M. Heger bowed towards her profoundly.
Je fais une exception en votre faveur, Mademoiselle Hazard,' he said: and then he walked away.
I remained at first almost stupefied: the first shock rendered me unable to distinguish between reality and fiction. I began to doubt my senses: was I really, were Marie Hazard and myself, the only girls in the school who had rifled the gooseberry-bushes? Did it mean that, if not deliberately base, in some way there was a peculiar deficiency in delicacy and honour in my constitution, rendering me capable of doing base things without knowing it? Was it true that in this foreign country I had disgraced my own? This was my first impression, confusion of mind; because up to this date I had never known nor suffered from real injustice. Here was an entirely new experience. And at first it baffled me. I suppose I must have shown this desperation in my face: for M. Heger was no sooner out of sight than attempts were made to console me: but I was beyond consolation. Mlle. Zélie came first; she laid a soothing hand on my shoulder.
'Do not afflict yourself, my child,' she said. 'This is a misunderstanding: I shall explain everything to Madame Heger.'
Then several girls came bustling up, rather shamefacedly, assuring me that it was nothing: 'Quelle affaire,' they ejaculated. 'Et tout cela à propos de quelques groseilles!'
'It has nothing to do with the gooseberries,' I said; 'you are all cowards, and I detest you; why couldn't you say you took them too?'
'What good would it have been, with M. Heger? We shall all go to Madame and tell her everything. She will see how it is at once. Voyons, Chou: ne pleures pas.'
'Je ne pleure pas; vous mentez:' and this was both impolite and incorrect: I was crying, but not ordinary tears, because they scalded one.
What happens invariably with people who insist upon their own private grievances too much, and too long, happened in my case that afternoon: at first I had been an object of sympathy, but when I refused it, and was ungracious, I became a bore. The case was stated to me in reasonable terms:
'Say that we should have done differently and were cowardly. It was not out of ill-will to you, but because we were afraid of M. Heger, with whom one must not reason when he is in a bad humour, as every one knows. You and Marie Hazard, for instance, who must always be in the right with him, in what way does it serve you? Voyons: be frank; at least: cela vous réussit-il? Listen then: we will make it all plain with Madame Heger. Mlle. Zélie will tell her we knew nothing when we ate those gooseberries; we thought they were there for us—that it belonged to the feast to eat this fruit: they were not so very good, these gooseberries after all: it was a politeness on our part, not greediness. Every one nearly ate gooseberries. When we were told it was a mistake, we ate no more gooseberries, and were sorry. La petite Anglaise and Marie Hazard did as the others did: and here is the whole history. Now all this is known already to almost every one. It will be known to Madame Heger before we go home to-night. What then do you want? Look at Marie Hazard: she is in the same case as you are, and does not afflict herself.'
'Marie Hazard is at home here, and I am not at home. I am English; and I am told by M. Heger before you all, that because I am English I am capable of baseness.'
'And what does that do to you?' asked Marie Hazard, herself, turning upon me with her cruel reasonableness. 'English or Belgian, one is not capable of baseness, and one has not deserved any blame: that is what is serious; the rest signifies nothing. One must not be a patriot to this extent. It is not reasonable. If even you had been in the wrong about those gooseberries, do you truly imagine to yourself that the honour of England would have been affected by it?'
Just because this was so reasonable and true, it stung me to the soul. 'Ma chère et bonne amie,' wrote Rousseau to Madame d'Epinay in the days of their friendship, when explaining why he had burnt a letter to her that seemed to him more reasonable than kind: 'Pythagore disait qu'il ne faut jamais attiser le feu avec une épée. Cette sentence me paraît être la plus importante et la plus sacrée des lois de l'amitié.' I knew nothing about the sayings of Pythagoras, nor the writings of Rousseau in those days. But it did seem to me opposed to the sacred laws of friendship, to remind me, in this moment, that it was absurd in me to drag patriotism into this question.
'Leave me alone,' I said, turning my back upon them, 'you tire me, all of you; none of you understand me.'
Although I sulked the whole afternoon, and was, as I deserved to be, left to sulk, as 'insupportable,' I yet came round to the conviction before we returned, that everything had been explained, and that even M. Heger understood that an injustice had been done me; and that although, of course, no apology could be looked for from such an obstinate man, still he knew he had been in the wrong and was secretly repentant. But I was to be undeceived. After our return to the Rue d'Isabelle, the lecture du soir in the refectory was given, as was the usual plan on holidays, by M. Heger, seated at the head of the room, with Madame Heger on his right hand, and a table before them, placed between the two long lines of tables with benches stretching the length of the room against the walls, and two ranges of chairs on the opposite side of the tables facing the benches, where sat all the pupils. Having finished the 'reading,' M. Heger summed up in a few words the sentiments that 'he was sure all there must feel of gratitude to their hostess, once an inmate of this school; and who had contrived this little fête for her successors. He asked their consent to a message of thanks that was to be sent her; and he wound up his expression of confidence in the enjoyment every one had derived from this holiday, by stating the satisfaction of Madame Heger and himself at the good conduct of every one; and then came this sentence:—There was only one regrettable exception to be made to the perfect behaviour and sense of respect due to the lady who had thrown open her house and garden to them, and this exception, he was, at any rate, pleased to recognise, was not amongst those brought up in the sentiments of religion and convenience cherished by almost all of them: and hence though one had to deplore the fault, in the case of a foreigner (une étrangère) one was more disposed to regard it with indulgence.'
Marie Hazard rose from her seat:—but there really was no time for any protest or objection. There was a shuffling of chairs, a movement of benches. Monsieur and Madame Heger walked out of the Refectory by a folding door behind them that opened into a passage leading to their own part of the house; and the pupils filed out, under the surveillance of the mistress in charge, by the opposite door towards the staircase leading to the Oratory, for evening prayers. I alone remained sitting on my bench, in my usual place in the Refectory, about half-way down the right-hand line of tables. No one paid any attention to me, until the room was nearly empty, and then the mistress at the door looked round, and seeing me sitting there, said, 'Make haste, Mees; you will be late for prayers: what are you doing?'
I remained sitting there. She looked at me a moment; evidently didn't like my looks; shrugged her shoulders, agitated her hands, said—
'One cannot wait for you any longer mademoiselle, vous êtes notée,' and vanished.
I do not know now, and I hardly think I knew then, what I meant by the resolution that was the only one firmly present to me, that no one, nothing, should move me from the place where I was sitting in the Refectory: that there I was going to remain all night, and for ever if necessary, until this wrong was redressed, and until just excuses were made to me. What had at first been a new and astonishing discovery to me, that injustice could be done, and that people whom I respected and even loved, could be unjust to me, had now become a well-established and common fact, and I saw injustice everywhere and felt no use in living at all, because I had become convinced that people would always be unjust to me, always; it was the common rule of the world evidently. What was I to do then? Resist, perish in resisting? Very possibly, but not submit.
There I sat at fifteen years of age, on the bench, with my elbows planted on the Refectory table, and my burning, throbbing head between my hands, in the frame of mind in which Anarchists are made.
But the influence was already approaching that was to transform anarchy into the ideal socialism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where the bitter bitter rage of rebelliousness against the wrong done oneself becomes the generous sympathy with all injustice throughout the world: 'Ce premier sentiment de l'injustice est resté si profondément gravé dans mon âme, que toutes les idées qui s'y rapportent me rendent ma première émotion; et ce sentiment, relatif à moi dans son origine, a pris une telle consistance en lui-même, et s'est si bien détaché de tout intérêt personnel, que mon coeur s'enflamme au spectacle ou au récit de toute action injuste, quel qu'en soit l'objet, et en quelque lieu qu'elle se commette, comme si l'effet en retomboit sur moi.'
The lesson that the author of the Confessions learnt at an even earlier age than I did was taught me by a Victim of injustice who continued throughout her life so courageously undisturbed by it in kindness and consideration for others, that her sensibility to it became a less powerful feeling in her than her compassion for the suffering and passionate woman who had wronged her.
I cannot say how long I had sat in the Refectory, when I saw the folding doors at the head of the room open, and quietly and composedly as usual, Madame Heger entered and approached me. She sat down on the chair opposite my bench on the opposite side of the table.
'My child,' she said, 'you are wrong to take so seriously the reproach addressed to you by M. Heger as the result of a mistake. Mlle. Zélie has explained to M. Heger and to me the accident. It was a pity, no doubt, that this happened: but you have not any more blame than the others. All is forgotten and forgiven. But you, my child, are wrong in this. Why do you remain here, when prayers are already over, and without permission? You know well it is forbidden.'
I broke out passionately complaining that I could not be expected to obey rules when I was unjustly treated: I could bear anything else, but I could not support injustice.
'Pas l'injustice,' I protested, 'j'obéirais a tout, je supporterais tout: mais, pas l'injustice, non, madame, non, je ne saurais supporter l'injustice.'
'Cependant, mon enfant, il faut savoir la supporter. Que faire? Seriez-vous la seule personne au monde qui ne connaîtrait pas l'injustice?'
I shook my head obstinately: I made a show of resistance: but I was already under Madame Heger's influence. A tremendous change had taken place in me. I was no longer an Anarchist. It had already come to me as a conviction that there was nothing grand, but rather something mean, in refusing to bear anything that my other fellow-creatures had to bear, that better and nobler people than I had borne.
'It saddens me,' continued Madame Heger—'(Cela m'attriste) to see a young girl like you, who soon must enter life, and who takes the habit of saying, "I cannot support this, everything else you like, but not this": or "I will renounce everything else, but not that." It does not depend upon us, my child, what we must support, nor what we may, because les convenances or the interests of others demand it, have to renounce. Amongst the many pupils I have known, there have been some passionate like yourself and exalted, who have said like you to-day, I cannot support injustice, who have seen injustice, where there was no intention to be unjust; who have refused counsel with anger and impatience, and who in their refusal to bow to necessary obligations have been themselves unjust. And they have been unhappy in their lives; most unhappy. Dominated by some fixed idea, the slave of some desire that cannot be accomplished, they have seen enemies in those who would have been their friends. They have created for themselves a sad fate; and I know one of them who died of it (j'en connais une qui en est morte).'
Something in Madame Heger's voice surprised me, for her even tones quavered and broke. I looked up suddenly, her face was ashen white and her lips blue. I was struck to the heart. I knew not why, but in some way I instinctively felt that, through my fault, she was in pain: I was full of remorse. The table was between us, or I should have thrown myself upon my knees before her. My emotion had the usual effect upon my French accent. 'Forgive me, oh forgive me,' I wanted to say, 'I am ashamed of myself.' I said, 'Pardong, O pardong, j'ai honte de moi.'
As it happened, nothing could have been better timed than my relapse into English barbarism. In a moment Madame's unusual emotion was under control: the soft colour returned to her cheek and lips, she shook her head gently, and said in her ordinary voice—
'You must take care of your accent, my child. One says "pardon," not "pardong "; and one does not say "J'ai honte de moi," but one says "Je suis honteuse," or "J'ai honte."
'But I see you are now in a good disposition,' she went on, 'and I am pleased to see it. Thus then, go quietly to bed without disturbing your companions, and I will send Clothilde to you with some flower-of-orange water that will tranquillise this hot head. Good night, and be very wise in the future: and all will be well.'
Ever since I have known the story of Charlotte Brontë I have had the firm conviction of what was in Madame Heger's mind when she spoke to me of one who had imagined enemies in friends, and who, complaining of injustice, had been unjust. But since I have read Charlotte's Letters, the unmistakable proof is that Madame Heger, so far as my memory serves me after all these years, actually quoted the very words of one of these letters, about one dominated by a fixed idea, and the slave of vain desires.
So then we may decide finally, that Madame Heger was not Madame Beck. And of M. Heger we may decide that he was not Paul Emanuel either; for Paul Emanuel having learnt that he had committed an injustice, would have called his whole school together, and in full class-room repaired his involuntary fault. But the real M. Heger did nothing of the sort. For a time there was a great coldness towards him in my heart. But in the hours of his lessons he remained, as ever, the 'Professor' of unrivalled merit.
Summing up what may be gathered from these reminiscences, I think the facts that can be affirmed are these:—
No moral likeness, but a physical resemblance, between Madame Heger and the portrait of Madame Beck. A strong and lifelike resemblance, between Paul Emanuel and M. Heger, up to the point when the Professor Paul falls in love with Lucy Snowe. After this event, a dwindling resemblance between the Professor in Villette, and the real Professor in the Rue d'Isabelle, who was never in love with Charlotte Brontë, and who was the lawful and attached husband of the Directress of the Pensionnat.
But when Professor Paul Emanuel becomes the docile disciple of Père Silas, when he is caught in the 'Jesuitical cobwebs of mother Church,' then he ceases to resemble the real man in the very least. M. Heger's role in life was not that of a disciple but of a Master of other people, and a very arbitrary and domineering Master too, for whom the world was his class-room. He was under the thumb of no priest, nor spiritual director. As for Jesuitical 'cobwebs,' the notion of M. Heger caught in any cobweb is absurd!
Every one knows what happens when a bumble-bee in its courses comes in contact with a cobweb. It is a mere incident in the career of the bumble-bee—but it is a disaster for the cobweb.