There was much to admire in M. Heger. He was, at the time, professor at the Brussels Athénée Royal. He had fought on the barricades in September 1830 for Belgian independence, his first wife’s brother dying at his side. That wife and their only child had died of cholera in 1833. He later married Zoë Claire Parent in 1836, and they were to have six children.
In many ways he resembled Patrick Brontë and anticipated Charlotte’s projection of him in Mr. Rochester. Constantin, like Patrick, was strong-willed and courageous, a man with a considerable sex drive who knew how to handle a gun, and yet also a tender and thoughtful teacher and father. As a young man he, like Mr. Rochester, had lived in Paris, though for Heger it was to attend the Comédie-Francais, which gave him a zest for dramatic readings of texts. For this daughter of a Cambridge-educated clergyman, Heger’s learning was of compelling importance. He was deeply versed in French literature, and as he got to know the Brontë sisters furnished them with books in French and German as well as reprints of his own addresses at the Athénée Royal. Just as Patrick selflessly dedicated himself to the calling of parish priest, Heger regarded teaching as his life’s work. Thus when later he became discontented with the secular ideology of the Athéné, he resigned his appointment as principal to teach only the youngest students. He was for many years a member of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, visiting and caring for the poor and sick of the city, and gathering working-class people together for evening lectures in which, as one of his local friends wrote, he found “ways to entertain them even while he teaches them.” This charitable work overcame Charlotte’s lifelong, rabid anti-Catholicism, at least for the moment, and her respect for his care for others, be they pupils or the local poor, is reflected in her letter’s characterization of him as gentleman-like, something she found impressive.
Heger quickly recognized that in Charlotte and Emily he had two exceptional students, and he instituted a tutorial for them both in which he had them read French texts he judged exemplary models and then asked them to write “devoirs” on similar topics. A number of these exercises with Heger’s corrections and comments survive—Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography reprints one, and Sue Lanoff has published all of them in an excellent modern edition. They illustrate in the professor’s marginal notes and comments Heger’s high standards for clarity of prose and accuracy of argument—an excellent discipline for Charlotte as a writer, which, as her early letter suggests, she coupled with what seems to be an almost masochistic need to—as she puts it—submit to his authority. Jane Eyre, as we will see in Chapter Eight, is equally prepared to submit her school drawings to Mr. Rochester’s imperious evaluations.
On November 2 Charlotte and Emily received news in Brussels of the fatal illness of their Aunt Branwell who—quite unlike Jane Eyre’s ruthlessly cruel Aunt Reed—had cared for them at home for most of their lives. They hastened to return to Haworth carrying with them a letter to their father from M. Heger voicing his condolences and urging that the sisters return to continue their studies after the period of mourning. He wrote their father of his concern that this sudden separation threatened to destroy the “almost fatherly affection” that he has offered them, and he finds himself pained at the thought of so much work disrupted, “of so many things well begun.” His concern is “a matter of affection,” and he asks that Patrick Brontë pardon him if he writes of his children, when he discusses their futures, “as if they were a part of our family.” He sees their personal qualities, such as their willingness, indeed, their extreme eagerness, to study and to learn, as the reason why he writes in this way. It is intriguing to speculate on how this kind of rhetoric affected Charlotte privately as Heger characterizes himself as a father figure, given her own complex feelings for Patrick Brontë and her projection of them, as we have seen in Chapter Six, into the dangerous passion she explores in Caroline Vernon where a young woman yields to the aggressive desires of a ruthless man. And so this magnetically commanding personality, only eight years Charlotte’s senior, urges their return to complete important work now disrupted. Unique in her experience, this voicing of a desire that she return to improve as a writer—that was the central thrust of Heger’s training of both sisters—must have suggested a validation of Charlotte she had never encountered before. It stands in dramatic contrast to Southey’s reply to her letter of six years earlier, and we can presume that it made a strong impression on her in light of her subsequent feelings for Heger.
In the end Emily remained at home. Charlotte returned.
The second year, now lived without her sister, and troubled by her growing attraction to Heger, proved far more difficult than the first. Charlotte writes to Ellen Nussey of her life in Brussels, finding it monotonous, and, far worse, her feeling a constant sense of “solitude in the midst of numbers.” And yet she concedes she is thankful to be here, rather than back as governess to Mrs. Sidgwick or Mrs. White. Sexual issues if anything have become progressively more prominent. In this same letter she repudiates the gossip she has heard from England that she is seeking a husband. She notes that she never exchanges a word with any man other than Monsieur Heger and seldom indeed with him, and then goes on to characterize speculations about a woman who has “neither fortune nor beauty” desiring to get married as an “imbecility which I reject with contempt.” Instead, she argues, it is wiser for such women to convince themselves that they are “unattractive” and that they had better be quiet and think of “other things than wedlock.” She seems to be consciously stifling hope. Charlotte classes herself as a woman who reasonably cannot expect any man to find her interesting. She must therefore anticipate a life without marriage. The loneliness felt by this English, Protestant girl critically intensified during the summer vacation months when the school was virtually empty of students. Meanwhile the presence of M. Heger as the only man she had a meaningful relationship with made the growing tension within herself all the worse. The letter, while overtly ignoring her emerging passion, hints at the conditions that caused its aching growth.
In the end Charlotte resolved to return to Haworth, despite the urgings of both Hegers, husband and wife, that she remain. On the first day of 1844, M. Heger accompanied her to Ostend, giving her a copy of Les Fleurs de la Poésie Francais and a diploma certifying her work at the school. Several weeks later she wrote to her friend Ellen from Haworth describing how much she suffered as she left Brussels, saying she would never forget “what the parting with Mons Heger cost me.” It grieved her that in leaving she had grieved him who had been so “true and kind and disinterested a friend”; a complex of regret, guilt, and frustrated desire that would return in Jane Eyre’s grief as she flees Mr. Rochester and Thornfield. She continues that she will soon be twenty-eight and ought to be working and “braving the rough realities of the world” as other people do. The interlacing of age, sexual longing, and the unpleasant prospect of future work emerge here, as they will later in Jane Eyre as Jane, having fled Mr. Rochester, accommodates to life as teacher in the remote village of Morton.
In the months that followed, Charlotte began writing M. Heger a series of letters in French. There may have been many of them. Significantly, the letters are all addressed to him, personally, and they put him in a difficult position. Only when his answers became rarer, and when they ceased altogether, did she begin to attribute his silence to the intervention of his wife. In reality, as Gérin concludes, “he set no great store by them,” and so sooner or later he tore them up. However, Madame diligently collected the torn-up pieces from his basket, stitched, gummed, pasted, and glued them together again. When she did this is not at all clear. Her motive, when she did reconstitute them, must have been, Gérin suggests, that fearing some blemish might attach to her husband in the correspondence with a by then famous author, she preserve them because whatever happened “the integrity of M. Heger as a teacher of young girls must never be called into doubt.” Mme. Heger had come to realize that her dubious regard for Charlotte’s feelings and motives, which had led to progr
essively more chilly treatment of this woman from Yorkshire, was amply justified.
In Charlotte’s first surviving letter dated July 24, 1844, and so a half year after her return to Haworth, she writes of her hope to visit M. Heger again in Brussels: “it must happen since I so long for it,” she insists. She then complains, as if unconsciously transferring her father’s growing health crisis to herself, that at the moment her eyesight is too weak for writing—“if I wrote a lot I would become blind.” And then she adds, suggesting that Heger is aware of her ambitions, that if she didn’t have this fear she would write a book and she would dedicate it “to my literature master—the only master that I have ever had—to you Monsieur.” With this, Charlotte articulates in concise terms that their relationship has been unique in her experience and her sense that it is a relationship of master to disciple—a relationship of dominance eagerly accepted as not only correct but also satisfying and pleasurable. Writing and literary achievement emerges from this relationship and the feelings that it impels.
Heger’s letters in reply, which have not survived, seem to have contained nothing more than “kindly advice” about her studies and her mode of life.
In the third surviving letter from January 8, 1845, written a whole year after her departure from Brussels, she laments that Heger has not been replying to her letters and though she tries to “master” her feelings, like Caroline Gordon, she suffers from “an almost unbearable inner struggle.” She has “tormenting dreams,” in which she sees him “always severe, always saturnine and angry with me,” and she adds that she refuses to resign herself to the total loss of “my master’s friendship.” She would prefer to undergo “the greatest bodily pains” rather than have her heart constantly “lacerated by searing regrets.” The masochistic character of her feelings for him is clear. She continues, pitifully begging for “a little friendship,” professing she does not need “a great deal of affection from those I love” and, indeed, is not accustomed to it but wishes only to preserve the “little interest” he once had in her. It is instructive to compare the language of this letter with the subsequent, imagined relationship between Jane Eyre and her “Master.” Mr. Rochester will torment Jane, stage managing an elaborate house party in order to hurt her into loving him, forcing her to “conceal” her feelings and “smother hope.” At the end of an evening, he quizzes Jane, seemingly eagerly happy to observe that tears of pain are already “shining and swimming” in her eyes. Yet, while drawing upon these memories as she writes, Brontë is able to foresee a resolution to Jane’s suffering, something Charlotte will not permit herself to hope for.
The fourth and final surviving letter dated November 18, 1845, starts by lamenting she has not heard from him for six months. She feels humiliated that she does not know how to gain “mastery over one’s own thoughts.” She feels herself to be “the slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea,” which, she admits, “has become a tyrant over one’s mind.” Here her language is even more overt: mastery, slave, dominance, tyrant. Charlotte was very familiar with all of this. Ruthless domination is frequent in the juvenilia. But now these fantasies have become painfully real for her. She continues, imagining that writing to an old pupil cannot be a very interesting occupation for him, then desperately conceding, “for me it is life itself.” Were he to forbid her to write or refuse to reply, that would be to tear from her “the only joy I have on earth.” While this language is desperate, it is arguably an exact analysis of her life. Daily life at Haworth had become, for her, joyless. What is unreasonable is any hope that such a serious-minded, hardworking, and morally conventional man could possible change that reality.
Evidently no reply ever arrived. Nine months later she began Jane Eyre. The novel can thus be seen as a continuation of her letters to him; the book she had promised if her eyesight did not fail. We can now more fully understand that the novel imagines the passionate love and intense personal involvement Heger denied her as being offered to the heroine Jane Eyre, who so fully resembles Charlotte.
But before Brontë began writing that novel, she had to write another, and it too, in a more obvious way, is about her secret history, and it too is a sad and bewildered effort to reach out to her lost master.
Charlotte Brontë began her first, full-fledged novel during the winter of 1846. At the same time, Emily was working on Wuthering Heights and Anne on Agnes Grey. Charlotte’s first working-title for this book was The Master. Read in the light of Charlotte’s secret history, The Professor takes on particular significance in being, before Jane Eyre, Charlotte’s most recent exploration of the master motif. In it we find an exploration of the emotional dynamic between a male teacher and an unusual female student. Which is to say, it is all about Charlotte and M. Heger, and it constitutes her first effort to deal with her feelings for him.
Its narrator is an Englishman, William Crimsworth. As we have seen in Chapter Five, in choosing a male narrator, Brontë is following her regular practice during the years when she and Branwell wrote their Angrian saga. Then, Charlotte may have preferred to use the male voice because it seemed to put her on a more equal footing with her brother in their sibling rivalry for dominance. Further, like her preference for using a pseudonym, it deepens her disguise, allowing her to write about her secrets without detection.
Crimsworth takes employment as a teacher of English at a “Pensionnat de demoiselles” on the same Rue d’Isabelle occupied by Mme. Heger’s school and is directed by Mdlle. Reuter. Though Crimsworth, just as Charlotte Brontë, is dismayed by the worldliness of the young female students, all of this falls into insignificance as he begins to notice one of his students, the Swiss-English Mdl. Frances Henri: slight, “anxious and preoccupied,” with a “care-worn” forehead and a mouth that conveys surprise. This is Charlotte Brontë as she must have first appeared to M. Heger. In the novel she gives voice to what she imagines his first reactions to her were. It is also, of course, how Mr. Rochester first views Jane Eyre. In these scenes of emerging love the sequence from fact to fiction is invariable: the sad fact of Charlotte and Heger, followed by the fictional extrapolations of Frances and Crimsworth, Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Except that in the first of the three the love is one-sided and hence thwarted, and, in the end, a source of a frustrated desire and pain that the novels seek to rectify. For Charlotte Brontë, writing became a way for imagination to liberate her from the trammels of painful reality—the “truth” that she aspired both to render and to transcend—and in these fictions Brontë and her readers find a way to something happier and more fulfilling.
Crimsworth soon learns that to earn her lessons, Frances must train other students in needlework, and while “she liked to learn, [she] hated to teach.” Insubordinate pupils ignore her pleas for order. A difficulty Frances shares with Charlotte Brontë during her years at Roe Head.
Then, one evening, Crimsworth sits down to read her first essay, what he names “the poor teacher’s manuscript,” expecting that now he would “see a glimpse of what she really is.” Indeed, that is exactly what happens. Almost at once he finds that the essay is unique in its conception and imagination. He admits that he had seen nothing like it in “the course of my professorial experience.” When he voices his praise a “transfigured . . . almost triumphant” smile crosses her face, which seems to be asking, “Do you think I am a stranger to myself?” Skipping over M. Heger’s tart criticism of her devoirs written under his tutelage, Charlotte imagines this altered version of her “master” immediately recognizes the powers she has known from youth, and her triumph is to find them finally ratified by him. It’s a moment of wish-fulfillment for her. A scene she longed for but has never experienced.
We might call this “the test.” Charlotte had experienced it during her two years under Heger’s tuition, but never with this kind of successful outcome. Soon, as we shall see, Jane Eyre too must face this test. In each instance when the woman’s work succeeds, it not only succeeds in winning a just estimate of h
er work but also of her inner worth, and in so doing it establishes a kinship between the man who judges and the woman he is judging. His admiration validates a specific kind of relationship between them, which Rochester is later to call “a cord of communion.” It becomes the basis for Jane Eyre’s later defiant claim that she has “as much soul” as he does, and that if her spirit could address his beyond the limits of custom and convention, that they would be “equal—as we are!” Brontë never, up to the publication of Jane Eyre, experienced this validation. But in her first two novels she lives vicariously through her heroines who do.
Soon, because of Crimsworth’s interest and his praise, Frances undergoes a physical transformation. Her look of wan emaciation, her thoughtful, thin face, blooms with a new “clearness of skin,” and “a plumpness almost embonpoint” softened the decided lines of her features. His admiration gives her a new life.
The jealous Mdlle. Reuter, much like the chilly Mme. Heger, faults Frances: “she rather needs keeping down.” She is made to echo Southey’s letter: “literary ambition” is not for “a woman.” Rather, she should remain “a respectable, decorous female.” This judgment had remained stamped in Charlotte’s memory, and now it reappears in the mouth of the hateful and narrow-minded school mistress just as Frances, a character so clearly representative of Charlotte Brontë’s wishes and dreams, achieves a highly personal, albeit secret, victory. Charlotte answers Southey and the censorious, self-satisfied women in power from her past life through success in writing that creates a bond between her heroines and the men they desire.
The Secret History of Jane Eyre Page 12