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.