CHAPTER XII.
EUGÈNE SUE AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S BRUSSELS LIFE.
I.
MDLLE. LAGRANGE AND HER MANUSCRIPT "CATHERINE BELL THE ORPHAN."
When Mrs. Gaskell published her Brontë biography it was discovered that while she had been enabled by aid of the mass of commonplace Brontë correspondence to present an interesting picture of the domestic conditions at the Haworth parsonage, she had yet been unable to throw any light upon that episode in Charlotte Brontë's life which, it had been suspected, was responsible for the extraordinary love passages in the Brontë works and Miss Brontë's insistence in choosing the hero of each of her books from the same model.
It is therefore most miraculous and sensational that after having found Montagu's Gleanings in Craven was the key to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, I should further come to discover, what the world had thought would never be found: external evidence throwing light upon Miss Brontë's real relations with the Hégers at Brussels, to whose pensionnat she went in the 'forties. This discovery was the subject of my article "The Lifting of the Brontë Veil" Mr. W. L. Courtney commissioned me to write in the Fortnightly Review. Therein I showed Eugène Sue had presented the whole history of M. Héger's passion for Charlotte Brontë, and Madame Héger's jealousy, in a work entitled Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, published in 1850-51—seven years before the publication of Mrs. Gaskell's Life, and before the publication of either The Professor or Villette; and we saw that M. Héger knew all Miss Brontë's literary secrets in 1850.
Skilfully enough Eugène Sue in this story—the first version of which was issued serially in September 1850, from The Weekly Times Office, London, whence were published many of M. Sue's serials;[56] the second, an abridged and altered version for French readers, published in Paris in March 1851—gave two phases of Charlotte Brontë, something after the method we see Miss Brontë herself employed in Jane Eyre, wherein she gave two phases of Tabitha Aykroyd, one in the beginning as Bessie, another later on as Hannah of the Rivers family.[57]
Indeed it will be found that in this work Eugène Sue also imitated Charlotte Brontë's Method I., interchange of the sexes of characters portrayed from life.
The two phases of Miss Brontë in this romance are Miss Mary Lawson, an Irish governess at the de Morville establishment; and Mademoiselle Lagrange, a former governess at the same house. The Mademoiselle Lagrange is, however, always referred to in the abstract, and serves to illustrate, it appears, Miss Brontë before her first departure from and return to Brussels, as well as after, for she was twice at the Hégers. And it may be observed that Charlotte Brontë was called "Mademoiselle Charlotte" at the Héger pension when she was governess there in 1843. Certainly the choice of Lagrange for Miss Brontë was pertinent: la grange is French for "the barn," and may have been suggested by the Eyre of Jane Eyre, which to a French ear would recall aire—a barn floor. Mdlle. Lagrange who had left the de Morville (Anglicè, Morton. As we have seen, Morton of Jane Eyre was Haworth to Charlotte Brontë) establishment on account of the jealousy of Madame de Morville, whom I identify as Madame Héger, is a plain-featured literary aspirant, and she writes a manuscript entitled not exactly Currer Bell, but "Kitty Bell, the Orphan."