The Bronte Sisters by Catherine Reef Read Free Book Online Page A

would challenge her eager mind. “Papa will perhaps think ita wild and ambitious scheme;” but, Charlotte asked, “who ever rose in the world without ambition?” This statement would have shocked many people, because for a woman to be ambitious went against the Victorian ideal. Still, Charlotte boldly admitted that when her father left Ireland to go to Cambridge University, “he was as ambitious as I am now.”
    To persuade her father and aunt, Charlotte stressed the practical side of the venture. Spending time abroad refining her French would make Charlotte stand out from the many other Englishwomen running schools, she said. Also, in Brussels she might meet Belgian families wanting to educate their daughters in England and recruit these girls as pupils. The Reverend Brontë and Aunt Branwell agreed to the plan, to Charlotte’s great joy. It was decided that Emily would study with Charlotte in Brussels while Anne remained with the Robinsons.
    As far as their father and aunt knew, Emily and Charlotte would be gone for six months. But Charlotte whispered to Emily, “Before our half yearin Brussels is completed, you and I will have to seek employment abroad.”
    The Reverend Brontë escorted his daughters, although they traveled as well with Mary Taylor, who had made a brief trip to England, and her brother Joe. Together this group went by boat to the Belgian port of Ostend and journeyed inland past fertile plains. Mounting a hill, they saw in the distance the towers and steeples of the Belgian capital.
    The Taylors’ school was too costly for the Brontës, so Charlotte and Emily had chosen instead the Pensionnat Heger, a girls’ boarding school in the old part of Brussels. The long, low school building appeared unadorned and even grim when viewed from the narrow cobblestone street, but it had a pleasant, well-tended garden hidden from view. Once inside the door, the sisters received a warm greeting. The director, Madame Claire Zoë Heger, lived at the school with her children and husband, Monsieur Constantin Heger, who taught literature to the girls. He and the other teachers taught exclusively in French, one of Belgium’s principal languages. (Flemish and German are the other two.)
     
    Students pose in the garden of the Pensionnat Heger. This photograph was taken in 1883, some years after Charlotte and Emily Brontë left the school.
     
    Constantin Heger, age thirty-three, was “a little black ugly being,”Charlotte observed. He might have been “a man of power as to mind,” but he was “irritable in temperament.” Another student recalled, “In talking perhapshe made his profoundest impression by a steadfast often mocking gaze.”
    This forceful teacher quickly noted that his two new students had unusual ability. He saw how much Charlotte loved to learn. He recommended books for her to read, and he reviewed her compositions with extra care. He taught her to improve her writing, telling her to “sacrifice,
without pity,
everything that does not contribute to clarity.” He spurred her on to find
le mot juste
—exactly the right word to express what she wanted to say.
    Monsieur, as he was called, would read to the sisters from works by great French authors. After discussing a passage, he would ask them to write—in French—a composition of their own, sometimes inspired by the famous author’s subject or words. Charlotte accepted the challenge. Under Monsieur’s direction, she also wrote on religious topics like “the Death of Moses” or “the Immensity of God.” In a paper titled “The Nest,” a subject of her own choosing, she described how watching a mother bird tending her hatchlings had revealed God’s presence. She wrote, “The bird’s nest is but a line,a word in the huge book that Nature opens for the instruction of the entire human race, a book whose every page abounds with proof of the existence of God.”
    Emily refused to write like anyone but herself. It was her own idea to write