by Deborah Lutz
In contrast, mystery surrounds the wafers Emily kept in round boxes in her desk and paint box. With no evidence that she ever used any—only three letters she wrote have been located, and none of them show traces of carrying wafer seals—their presence has led to fantasies about unknown correspondents. Emily’s wafers have an elusive quality to them, as if they hide more than they say, possibly a reflection of her secretive self. Even those with sayings on them like Charlotte’s have more ambiguous meanings: “Always ready,” “Pray do,” “Please yourself,” “Read and believe,” and “Come if you like.” A few feel inappropriate for any situation, like “Come with a ring.” Who would she, or anyone, send that to? Thomas Hardy used a similar seal to bring about a major plot shift in his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, when Bathsheba Everdene carelessly sends a valentine to William Boldwood, a local farmer, with a seal (in this case, wax) saying, “Marry me.” This brings on his obsessive attention, which finally leads to his murder of a rival. 25
Emily’s wafers advertised her interests: a picture of a dog, her beloved animal, standing on a rock has “Faithful” written on the top and “Firm” on the bottom. Another is a rebus: a bear stands against a tree, next to the words “it in mind” (the whole meaning “bear it in mind”). One seems straight out of one of Emily’s poems. It pictures a bird in a cage and reads, “I can’t get out.” A snail scoots along the ground on another, with the words “Always at home,” apt for one who relished staying in her shell.
From a white packet in Emily’s desk came “Clarke’s Enigmatic Puzzle Wafers,” “Sold by all Wholesale and Retail Stationers.” These seals consist mostly of non-pictorial rebuses, or letters that stand in for words, much like modern-day text messages (pictured here). A few affirm the relationship between writer and reader, like “IOU 0 but goodwill,” “U value me,” and “U no secrets I” (there are no secrets between you and I). Others flirt, such as “ICUR / temptation” (although since the “temptation” is underneath the “ICUR,” this may mean “I see you are above temptation,” which could be even more flirtatious). “U No love’s lost I” seems rather mean-spirited, unless the Victorians understood this expression differently than we do today. Compliments are given, like “ICURA busy B,” “ICUXL” (“I see you excel”), and “URA YZ” (probably “you are a wise head,” with the “z” pronounced “zed”). There are the boldly romantic: “UR all price” and “U it is.” It’s easy to see a poet like Emily, with her queer sense of humor, enjoying these games, although the biggest puzzle is to whom she may have sent these wafers (or any wafers).
A few of the Rebus wafers from Emily’s desk and the envelope they came in. Possible interpretations of these truly enigmatic wafers include, from left to right: “Wise heads have seen (‘c’) between the lines,” “It is beneath you,” “You misunderstand me,” and “You are above it all.” The last one remains unsolved, but it probably ends in “was ever around you.”
Wafers, like seals, could keep contents secret despite being so chatty. The directions printed on one of Charlotte’s wafer packets make this clear: “The prepared side of the Wafer should be moistened and pressed firmly on the letter with the finger; when this is done the letter cannot be opened without injury.” Charlotte made her letters doubly secure by adding circular paste seals underneath the envelope flaps, cheap replacements for shellac, moistened rather than melted, then stuck on. As these paste seals were usually licked, there was some danger because the coloring agents, part of a recipe that included a batter of wheat or other flour mixed with egg white and isinglass, made them poisonous. (Wafer leavings were sometimes used to kill rats and other vermin.) The Brontë girls kept boxes of these paste seals in their desks, along with seal matrixes with grill patterns of dots, made of metal with ivory handles, which they used to spread and affix these circular paste seals along with the more traditional wax ones. 26
Charlotte’s comment about postal clerks’ mistaking socks for money was a personal version of a much wider anxiety about the privacy of letters. Before the penny charge, postal workers exposed letters to a strong light, called “candling,” to look for an enclosure, which would double the postage. Worries about personal or political letters being read were even used as one of many arguments for the penny post, since candling would no longer be needed to check for enclosures. Yet a scandal of a larger order swept the post office not long after the institution of the penny post. The discovery that a “Secret Office” of the London Post had been opening and examining mail to the Italian political agitator Giuseppe Mazzini, then living in London, led to a widely publicized backlash in 1844. Home Secretary Sir James Graham, the issuer of the warrant for the mail opening, was widely reviled, especially by the magazine Punch. An anti-Graham campaign sprouted up, which included the invention of metal seals, attached by metal “claws,” that destroyed the envelope when opened, preventing letters from being clandestinely read and resealed. Anti-Graham slogan wafers became the fashion, such as one with a picture of a fox and this message: “You’ll be run down if you break cover” (“cover” another word for “envelope” and the whole a reference to aristocratic fox hunting). A blunderbuss on full cock with the text “I hope the content will reach you” expressed the violent feelings of some about their privacy. More simple ones stated, “Not to be Grahamed.” 27
Around the same time that the anti-Graham campaign was running hot, Charlotte was sending passionate letters to a married man in Brussels, all the time worrying that his wife was intercepting and reading them (as indeed she was). So, while Branwell was actually having an adulterous affair, Charlotte was wishing she could have one. Charlotte and Emily had made this Brussels trip, mentioned in the last chapter, because all of the siblings had to find means to support themselves and to add to the family’s small income. This was especially true given that the specter of their father’s possible death hung over them. Patrick, now in his sixties, was already past the time’s life expectancy. If he died before them, he would leave them with no income, their only savings being a small legacy they expected to receive from Aunt Branwell. Charlotte’s attempts at being a governess had been disheartening and worse. About the only benefit of this “slavery,” as Charlotte called it, was source material for her character Jane Eyre, who would become the most famous governess of all time. The three sisters had cooked up a plan to open their own school at the parsonage, and Charlotte thought they needed first to polish their skills, especially their French. Aunt Branwell agreed to contribute some money toward their scheme, and they decided to study abroad, where schools were generally cheaper. Belgium was less expensive than France, so Brussels, where Charlotte had some friends at school, was chosen over Paris. As Anne continued to pull in a salary from the Robinsons (tiny though it was), it was Emily, rather implausibly, who went with Charlotte.
While in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her professor, Constantin Heger, a married man with five, soon to be six, children. Charlotte called him the “black Swan,” his powerful mind offset by a temperament “very choleric and irritable.” A “little black ugly being,” Heger sometimes had the look of an “insane tom-cat,” or a “delirious hyena.” From an animal lover, such creaturely attributes would be considered endearing. His anger and impatience with her mistakes as a student appeared especially charming. Heger developed a fondness for Charlotte, and he appreciated her brilliance, yet he didn’t reciprocate her ardor. His wife, the director of the school, began to have suspicions and grew cold toward Charlotte. Seeing less of Heger and feeling isolated, Charlotte fell into another gulf of black anxiety, which she re-created in Lucy Snowe’s wanderings in an opium trance in Villette. Packing up suddenly and returning to Haworth, she sent Heger a series of increasingly distraught letters, of which only four—and none of his replies—survived. While attempting to maintain the language of friendship and the tone of respect due to a teacher, she had trouble hiding her raw emotion and need. After no reply to an especially ardent message (now missing), she wrote begging him
for a letter because his words were “one of the greatest joys I know.” She longed to be with him someday, and in a postscript she repeated twice that: “I shall see you again.” This is a surprisingly bold letter, a baring of wild desire despite (perhaps because of) Victorian codes of behavior. Charlotte acted with a reckless romanticism, more akin to her sister’s future character Catherine Earnshaw than to her own Jane Eyre, who will be very careful not to commit adultery with the already married Rochester. To Heger, Charlotte’s stormy words probably felt like a threat. He tore the letter into four pieces, threw it into the wastepaper basket, and didn’t reply. His wife found the ripped-up letter. Using cut-out strips of white paper of varying sizes and a gum adhesive, she painstakingly pasted the fragments together, making it a mostly legible whole. 28
Charlotte wrote again a couple of months later, asking if he had received her letter because “for all those six months I have been expecting a letter from you, Monsieur—six months of waiting—is a very long time indeed!” In a postscript she tells him that “I have just had bound all the books that you gave me,” including two of his speeches. There is something erotic about this book binding, as if she needed to dress what remained to her of his touch and mind, in order to more fully possess it. This letter he also ripped up and discarded, refusing to send her a response. His wife fished this one out of the bin too, took a needle and white thread, and repaired it, using a loose stitch. 29
After this, Charlotte’s letters became even more rash. In her next letter (pictured at the beginning of this chapter), all her feelings of want tumbled out, uncensored. His neglect has left her “neither rest nor peace” day or night, and nightmares torment her sleep when it does come. She calls him “my master,” submits to his possible reproaches for her desperate words, but refuses to resign herself to the loss of his attention; otherwise her heart will be “constantly lacerated by searing regrets.” She must tell him how she feels even if “she has to undergo the greatest bodily pains.” Her language grows even more abject; she even hints at suicide. “If my master withdraws his friendship,” then she will be utterly without hope. Only a tiny morsel of his affection will give her a motive for living. She would then “cling to the preservation of this little interest—I cling to it as I would cling on to life.” She expects and hopes for nothing more from him than “crumbs,” but if these aren’t given to her, she will “die of hunger.” Heger rent this one into about nine pieces. Again his wife salvaged the torn parts, reassembling them with needle and thread. 30
Heger responded to this self-abasing cry with a stiff letter in the hand of his wife, to whom he dictated his words, giving Charlotte permission to write once every six months. In her fourth and probably final letter, Charlotte, calmed because of his reply that has “sustained” and “nourished” her, still feels a great privation. A painful endurance must be undergone, she laments, if she can’t communicate with him for six months. She has tried to forget him, but can’t gain mastery over her thoughts—she is the “slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant” over her mind. If he fails to write her, she warns, she will “pine away.” Heger left this letter whole, for reasons unclear, but possibly because he now knew that his wife had read and kept the letters. He absent-mindedly jotted down the name and address of a local shoemaker on its edge, treating it as scrap paper. 31
It is fitting that the steamiest letters Charlotte ever wrote to a man ended up in the hands of a woman, who used domestic handicrafts—needlework, recycling strips of paper, gumming—to piece them together. Claire Zoë Heger’s daughter Louise later explained that her mother kept them because she felt that their inappropriate heat could lead to “misapprehension,” and she wanted evidence that the amour was all on Charlotte’s side, in case of future accusations. But this doesn’t feel like the whole truth. The stitching together of the notes—stored for decades in her jewelry box—has a tinge of obsessiveness to it, as if the troubled relationship between the two women needed memorializing in physical form. 32
At some point Zoë Heger told her husband that she still had the letters, and when Elizabeth Gaskell traveled to Brussels in 1856 to gather information for her biography of Charlotte, Heger either read passages from the letters to Gaskell or let her read them. Only the tamest extracts appeared in the biography. Madame Heger showed the letters to her daughter Louise many years later, after Charlotte had become famous. According to Louise, this revealing of the correspondence happened after she attended a lecture—she doesn’t say by whom—criticizing the Hegers for cruelty toward the great author. After her mother died in 1890, Louise handed the letters back to her father, who must have thought they had long been destroyed because he angrily “flung them into the [waste] basket.” Louise rescued them, like her mother before her, but waited until after her father died in 1896 to tell her brother Paul about them. Louise and Paul traveled to London in 1913 to donate them to the British Museum, where curators set each fragile sheet between two glass panes, and then framed them. They built a specially designed box to store them, each frame with its own slot, and the catalog number painted on the side of the varnished wood. 33
Charlotte probably never knew that Heger ripped up her letters, nor that Zoë reconstituted them, but she did suspect that his wife read them. When Charlotte didn’t receive a reply to her first letter, she thought Zoë might be intercepting them and keeping them secret from her husband. She tried various ruses to get around this imagined problem. One letter she sent to the Athénée Royal, where the professor also taught. Others she gave into the care of various friends who were traveling to Brussels, asking them to put them directly into Professor Heger’s hands. She even used this excuse to fit in an extra letter to Heger: “I am well aware,” she wrote him, “that it is not my turn to write to you, but since Mrs. Wheelwright is going to Brussels and is willing to take charge of a letter—it seems to me that I should not neglect such a favorable opportunity for writing you.” In another letter, she makes it clear that hand delivery by her friend Joe Taylor—Mary Taylor’s brother—will assure her that Heger will receive it: “a gentleman of my acquaintance will be passing through Brussels and has offered to take charge of a letter to you, as that I shall be certain you have received it.” The humiliation of his refusal to reply was compounded by the fact that she expected friends to deliver his letters to her. “Mr. Taylor returned,” she wrote bitterly to Heger, “I asked him if he had a letter for me—‘No, nothing, Patience’—I say—‘His sister will be coming soon’—Miss Taylor returned ‘I have nothing for you from M. Heger’ she says ‘neither letter nor message.’ ” Involving friends must have made her rejection sting that much more. 34
She must have known that her fourth letter would be read by Madame Heger as it was a reply to a letter written in the hand of Madame Heger herself. During her last months in Brussels, Charlotte surmised that “her master’s” wife knew of her infatuation. In ways hard to parse, Charlotte’s passion for Heger wasn’t just between the two of them; somehow Zoë made up a third. A complicated mass of emotions probably influenced Charlotte’s attitude toward the wife, not just the usual jealousy and feeling of competition for his affections, but also admiration for, even fascination with, this other woman, a worthy adversary.
Charlotte never forgot Zoë Heger. Soon after she arrived back in Haworth, she began writing her first novel, which she initially called “The Master,” later changing it to The Professor. She based the character Zoraïde Reuter on Zoë. Still thinking of her when she wrote Villette a few years later, Charlotte created the more complicated character Madame Beck—the clever but plotting director of the school where Lucy Snowe teaches—with Zoë Heger vividly in mind. (Madame Heger was furious when she read the novel in a pirated edition, immediately recognizing herself.) When Lucy Snowe receives a letter from the handsome Dr. Bretton, she takes care to keep it inviolate from the spying of her employer, Madame Beck, by first folding it in silver paper, then placing it in her
“casket,” then setting the casket in a box, which she locks, then putting the box into the drawer of her bureau. Despite these precautions, Madame Beck spirits away and reads this letter and another four Lucy receives from Bretton, leaving the ribbon tied around the packet noticeably disarranged, evidence of her perfidy. Here the teacher/student receives letters from the man she loves instead of writing them, as Charlotte did, and the female spy is the outsider looking in on someone else’s relationship. This rewriting gives the character most closely identified with Charlotte herself more agency and positive action than the real-life situation, where Charlotte was, in some sense, the outsider trying to pry her way in. Charlotte also gives Lucy the role of the spying third person in a romantic correspondence when she reads the pink note thrown over the wall mentioned earlier. 35
Lucy, fed up with this “tampering,” thinks about other places to squirrel away her letters. She considers the attic of the school as a possibility, but worries about the damp or the gnawing rats. She decides they must be buried, and she goes to a junk shop—“an ancient place, full of ancient things”—and buys a thick glass bottle. “I then made a little roll of my letters, wrapped them in oiled silk, bound them with twine, and, having put them in the bottle, got the old Jew broker to stopper, seal, and make it air-tight”—making this the most elaborate letter “seal” imaginable. She takes this “treasure” and finds a deep hollow in an ancient pear tree in the school’s garden. After slipping the bottle in this hole, she puts a slate over it and secures it with mortar, found in a nearby toolshed, finally covering it all up with soil—as if she were mailing them to another world entirely. She calls this a “burial,” of the letters themselves and of the grief over her unrequited love that they represent. This sorrowful past must be “wrapped in its winding-sheet, must be interred,” in a “newly-sodded grave.” The equation of the letters with a corpse is made stronger by a legend that a slab at the base of this tree is the “portal of a vault, emprisoning deep beneath the ground . . . the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive, for some sin against her vow.” Lucy herself does some burying alive—of the part of herself that has been vivified by love for Dr. Bretton. Even more than this, Lucy feels herself buried alive, in a life not of her choosing, in a series of jobs she dislikes, and in a society that severely limits her opportunities because she is a woman.