our conversation with Mademoiselle Héger, but the specific causes were
but cursorily touched upon. She could have no personal recollection of
the Brontés; her knowledge of them is derived from her parents and the
teachers,--presumably the "repulsive old maids" of Charlotte's letters.
One of the present teachers in the _pensionnat_ had been a classmate of
Charlotte's here. The Brontés had not been popular with the school.
Their "heretical" religion had something to do with this; but their
manifest avoidance of the other pupils during hours of recreation,
Mademoiselle thought, had been a more potent cause,--Emily, in
particular, not speaking with her school-mates or teachers except when
obliged to do so. The other pupils thought them of outlandish accent and
manners and ridiculously old to be at school at all,--being twenty-four
and twenty-six, and seeming even older. Their sombre and
grotesquely-ugly costumes were fruitful causes of mirth to the gay
young Belgian misses. The Brontés were not especially brilliant
students, and none of their companions had ever suspected that they were
geniuses. Of the two, Emily was considered to be, in most respects, the
more talented, but she was obstinate and opinionated. Some of the pupils
had been inclined to resist having Charlotte placed over them as
teacher, and may have been mutinous. After her return from Haworth she
taught English to M. Héger and his brother-in-law. M. Héger gave the
sisters private lessons in French without charge, and for some time
preserved their compositions, which Mrs. Gaskell copied. Mrs. Gaskell
visited the _pensionnat_ in quest of material for her biography of
Charlotte, and received all the aid M. Héger could afford: the
information thus obtained has, for the most part, we were told, been
fairly used. Miss Bronté's letters from Brussels, so freely quoted in
Mrs. Gaskell's "Life," were addressed to Miss Ellen Nussy, a familiar
friend of Charlotte's, whose signature we saw in the register at Haworth
Church as witness to Miss Bronté's marriage. The Hégers had no suspicion
that she had been so unhappy with them as these letters indicate, and
she had assigned a totally different reason for her sudden return to
England. She had been introduced to Madame Héger by Mrs. Jenkins, wife
of the then chaplain of the British Embassy at the Court of Belgium; she
had frequently visited that lady and other friends in Brussels,--among
them Mary and Martha Taylor and their relatives, and the family of a
Dr. ---- (_not_ Dr. John),--and therefore her life here need not
have been so lonely and desolate as it has been made to appear.
The Hégers usually have a few English pupils in the school, but have
never had an American.
Some American tourists had before called to look at the garden, but the
family are not pleased by the notoriety with which Miss Bronté has
invested it. However, Mademoiselle Héger kindly offered to conduct us
over any portion of the establishment we might care to see, and led the
way along the corridor, past the class-rooms and the _réfectoire_ on the
right, to the narrow, high-walled garden. We found it smaller than in
the time when Miss Bronté loitered here in weariness and solitude.
Mademoiselle Héger explained that, while the width remains the same, the
erection of class-rooms for the day-pupils has diminished the length by
some yards. Tall houses surround and shut it in on either side, making
it close and sombre, and the noises of the great city all about it
penetrate here only as a far-away murmur. There is a plat of verdant
turf in the centre, bordered by scant flowers and damp gravelled walks,
along which shrubs of evergreen and laurel are irregularly disposed. A
few seats are placed here and there within the shade, where, as in Miss
Bronté's time, the _externals_ eat the luncheon brought with them to the
school; and overlooking it all stand the great old pear-trees, whose
gnarled and deformed trunks are relics of the time of the hospital and
convent. Beyond these and along the gray wall which bounds the farther
side of the enclosure is the sheltered walk which was Miss Bronté's
favorite retreat,--the "_allée défendue_" of her novels. It is screened
by shrubs and perfumed by flowers, and, being secure from the intrusion
of pupils, we could well believe that Charlotte and her heroine found
here restful seclusion. The coolness and quiet and--more than all--the
throng of vivid associations which fill the place tempted us to linger.
The garden is not a spacious nor even a pretty one, and yet it seemed to
us singularly pleasing and familiar,--as if we were revisiting it after
an absence. Seated upon a rustic bench close at hand, possibly the very
one which Lucy Snowe had cleansed and "reclaimed from fungi and mould,"
how the memories came surging up into our minds! How often in the summer
twilight poor Charlotte had lingered here in restful solitude after the
day's burdens and trials with "stupid and impertinent" pupils! How
often, with weary feet and a dreary heart, she had paced this secluded
walk and thought, with longing almost insupportable, of the dear ones in
far-away Haworth parsonage! In this sheltered corner her other
self--Lucy Snowe--sat and listened to the distant chimes and thought
forbidden thoughts and cherished impossible hopes. Here she met and
talked with Dr. John. Deep beneath this "Methuselah of a pear-tree," the
one nearest the end of the alley, lies the imprisoned dust of the poor
young nun who was buried alive ages ago for some sin against her vow,
and whose perambulating ghost so disquieted poor Lucy. At the root of
this same tree one miserable night Lucy buried her precious letters, and
"meant also to bury a grief" and her great affection for Dr. John. Here
she had leant her brow against Methuselah's knotty trunk and uttered to
herself those brave words of renunciation which must have wrung her
heart: "Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, _but you
are not mine_. Good-night, and God bless you!" Here she held pleasant
converse with M. Paul, and with him, spell-bound, saw the ghost of the
nun descend from the leafy shadows overhead and, sweeping close past
their wondering faces, disappear behind yonder screen of shrubbery into
the darkness of the summer night. By that tall tree next the class-rooms
the ghost was wont to ascend to meet its material sweetheart, Fanshawe,
in the great garret beneath yonder skylight,--the garret where Lucy
retired to read Dr. John's letter, and wherein M. Paul confined her to
learn her part in the vaudeville for Madame Beck's _fête_-day. In this
nook where we sat, Crimsworth, "The Professor," had walked and talked
with and almost made love to Mademoiselle Reuter, and from yonder window
overlooking the alley had seen that perfidious fair one in dalliance
with his employer, M. Pelet, beneath these pear-trees. From that window
M. Paul watched Lucy as she sat or walked in the _allée défendue_,
dogged by Madame Beck; from the same window were thrown the love-letters
which fell at Lucy's feet sitting here.
Leaves from the overhanging boughs were plucked for us as souvenirs of
the place; then, reverently traversing once more the narrow alley so
often traced in weariness by Charlotte Bronté, we turned away. From the
garden we entered the long and spacious class-room of the first and
second divisions. A movable partition divides it across the middle when
the classes are in session; the floor is of bare boards cleanly scoured.
There are long ranges of desks and benches upon either side, and a lane
through the middle leads up to a raised platform at the end of the room,
where the instructor's chair and desk are placed.
How quickly our fancy peopled the place! On these front seats sat the
gay and indocile Belgian girls. There, "in the last row, in the
quietest corner, sat Emily and Charlotte side by side, so absorbed in
their studies as to be insensible to anything about them;" and at the
same desk, "in the farthest seat of the farthest row," sat Mademoiselle
Henri during Crimsworth's English lessons. Here Lucy's desk was rummaged
by M. Paul and the tell-tale odor of cigars left behind. Here, after
school-hours, Miss Bronté taught M. Héger English, he taught her French,
and M. Paul taught Lucy arithmetic and (incidentally) love. This was the
scene of their _tête-à-têtes_, of his earnest efforts to persuade her
into his faith in the Church of Rome, of their ludicrous supper of
biscuit and baked apples, and of his final violent outbreak with Madame
Beck, when she literally thrust herself between him and his love. From
this platform Crimsworth and Lucy Snowe and Charlotte Bronté herself had
given instruction to pupils whose insubordination had first to be
confronted and overcome. Here M. Paul and M. Héger gave lectures upon
literature, and Paul delivered his spiteful tirade against the English
on the morning of his _fête_-day. Upon this desk were heaped his
bouquets that morning; from its smooth surface poor Lucy dislodged and
fractured his cherished spectacles; and here, _now_, seated in Paul's
chair, at Paul's desk, we saw and were presented to Paul Emanuel
himself,--M. Héger.
It was something more than curiosity which made us alert to note the
appearance and manner of this man, who has been so nearly associated
with Miss Bronté in an intercourse which colored her whole subsequent
life and determined her life work, who has been made the hero of her
best novels and has even been deemed the hero of her own heart's
romance; and yet we _were_ curious to know "what manner of man it is"
who has been so much as suspected of being honored with the love and
preference of the dainty Charlotte Bronté. During a short conversation
with him we had opportunity to observe that in person this "wise, good,
and religious" man must, at the time Miss Bronté knew him, have more
closely resembled M. Pelet of "The Professor" than any other of her
pen-portraits: indeed, after the lapse of more than forty years that
delineation still, for the most part, aptly applies to him. He is of
middle age, of rather spare habit of body; his face is fair and the
features pleasing and regular, the cheeks are thin and the mouth
flexible, the eyes--somewhat sunken--are of mild blue and of singularly
pleasant expression. We found him elderly, but not infirm; his
finely-shaped head is now fringed with white hair, and partial baldness
contributes an impressive reverence to his presence and tends to enhance
the intellectual effect of his wide brow. In repose his countenance
shows a hint of melancholy: as Miss Bronté has said, "his physiognomy is
_fine et spirituelle_;" one would hardly imagine it could ever resemble
the "visage of a black and sallow tiger." His voice is low and soft, his
bow still "very polite, not theatrical, scarcely French," his manner
_suave_ and courteous, his dress scrupulously neat. He accosted us in
the language Miss Bronté taught him forty years ago, and his accent and
diction do honor to her instruction. He was, at this time, engaged with
some patrons of the school, and, as his daughter had hinted that he was
averse to speaking of Miss Bronté, we soon took leave of him and were
shown through other parts of the school. The other class-rooms, used for
less advanced pupils, are smaller. In one of them, the third, Miss
Bronté had ruled as monitress after her return from Haworth. The large
dormitory of the _pensionnat_ was above the long class-room, and in the
time of the Brontés most of the boarders--about twenty in number--slept
here. Their cots were arranged along either side, and the position of
those occupied by the Brontés was pointed out to us at the extreme end
of the long room. It was here that Lucy suffered the horrors of
hypochondria, so graphically portrayed in "Villette," and found the
discarded costume of the spectral nun lying upon her bed, and here Miss
Bronté passed those nights of "dreary, wakeful misery" which Mrs.
Gaskell describes.
A long and rather narrow room in front of the class-rooms was shown us
as the _réfectoire_, where the Brontés, with the other boarders, took
their meals, presided over by M. and Madame Héger, and where, during the
evenings, the lessons for the ensuing days were prepared. Here were held
the evening prayers, which Charlotte used to avoid by escaping into the
garden. This, too, was the scene of M. Paul's whilom readings to
teachers and pupils, and of some of his spasms of petulance, which
readers of "Villette" will remember. From the _réfectoire_ we passed
again into the corridor, where we made our adieus to our affable
conductress. She gave us her card, and explained that, whereas this
establishment had formerly been both a _pensionnat_ and an _externat_,
having about seventy day-pupils and twenty boarders when Miss Bronté was
here, it is now, since the death of Madame Héger, used as a day-school
only,--the _pensionnat_ being at some little distance, in the Avenue
Louise, where Mademoiselle is a co-directress.
The genuine local color Miss Bronté gives in "Villette" enabled us to be
sure that we had found the sombre old church where Lucy, arrested in
passing by the sound of the bells, knelt upon the stone pavement,
passing thence into the confessional of Père Silas. Certain it is that
this old church lies upon the route she would naturally take in the walk
from the Rue d'Isabelle to the Protestant cemetery, which she had set
out to do that dark afternoon, and the narrow streets of picturesque old
houses which lie beyond the church correspond to those in which she was
lost. Certain, too, it is said to be that this incident is taken
directly from Miss Bronté's own experience. A writer in "Macmillan"
says, "During one of the long holidays, when her mind was restless and
disturbed, she found sympathy, if not peace, in the counsels of a priest
in the confessional, who pitied and soothed her troubled spirit without
attempting to enmesh it in the folds of Romanism."
Our way to the Protestant cemetery, a spot sadly familiar to Miss
Bronté, and the usual termination of her walks, lay past the site of the
Porte de Louvain and out to the hills a mile or so beyond the old city
limits. From our path we saw more than one tree-surrounded farm-house
which might have been the place of M. Paul's breakfast with his school,
and at least one old-fashioned manor-house, with green-tufted and
terraced lawns, which might have served Miss Bronté as the model for "La
Terrasse," the suburban home of the Brettons, and probably the temporary
abode of the Taylor sisters whom she visited here. From the cemetery are
beautiful vistas of farther lines of hills, of intervening valleys, of
farms and villas, and of the great city lying below. Miss Bronté has
well described this place: "Here, on pages of stone, of marble, and of
brass, are written names, dates, last tributes of pomp or love, in
English, French, German, and Latin." There are stone crosses all about,
and great thickets of roses and yew-trees,--"cypresses that stand
straight and mute, and willows that hang low and still;" and there are
"dim garlands of everlasting flowers."
Here "The Professor" found his long-sought sweetheart kneeling at a
new-made grave, under these overhanging trees. And here _we_ found the
shrine of poor Charlotte Bronté's many weary pilgrimages hither,--the
burial-place of her friend and schoolmate Martha Taylor, the Jessy Yorke
of "Shirley," the spot where, under "green sod and a gray marble
headstone, cold, coffined, solitary, Jessy sleeps below."
THEO. WOLFE.
COOKHAM DEAN.
For a long time "the Dean" had had a certain familiarity for us. We
heard it continually spoken of among our artist friends, and had even
come to recognize many of its picturesque features as we came across
them in our usual studio-haunts and in the exhibitions. We seemed to
know those green, billowy swells at sight, as well as the thatched and
tiled roofs and old-fashioned gardens, the swinging barred gates and
stagnant, goose-tormented pools,--even the coarse-limbed rustics in
weather-beaten "store-clothes," picturesque only in mellow fadedness.
We knew all this; yet, when we set eyes and feet upon Cookham Dean for
the first time, behold, the half had not been told us! We had directed
many a letter to Cookham Dean, and knew them to have been duly delivered
by a bucolic postman on a tricycle. But a hundred canvases, and almost
as many tongues, had failed to tell us of the sunny slopes and shadowy
glades, the sylvan lanes and ribbon-like roads, the old stone inn with
open porch and sign swinging from lofty post set across the way, as
Italian campanile stand away from their churches, all coming under the
name of "Cookham Dean," although that "Dean," properly speaking, is only
their geographical and artistic centre.
Long before we reached _Ye Hutte_ from Cookham station--Ye Hutte set
amid bushy and climbing roses upon a prominent knoll of the many-knolled
Dean--we ceased to wonder that our picturesque imaginings of the region
we were passing through had been so various. Artists were before us,
artists behind us, artists on every side of us, two sketching-umbrellas
glinting like great tropical flowers in a corn-field, another like a
huge daisy in the dim vista of a long lane.
"C---- lodges in that red cottage, B---- in the next one, H---- in this
tumble-down farm-house, the L----s in that row of laborers' cottages,
the D----s in the inn," said Mona, tripping lightly over well-known
names, whose most accustomed place is in the exhibition catalogues.
Through the open windows of a hideous brick row, built to hold as many
laborers' families all the year round and as many Bohemian summer
artists as can crowd therein, we caught glimpses of tapestries worth
their weight in gold. One well-known artist has taken possession of the
end of this uncomely row, intended for a supply-shop to the
neighborhood. This shop is his studio, which he has filled with
treasures of Japanese art. As a Cookhamite assured us, "Mr. C---- goes
in for the _Japanesque_;" and he screens the large display-windows
intended for cheese, raisins, and potted meats with smiling mandarins
and narrow-eyed houris under octopus-like trees.
At the rear of the same "Row" we recognized a broad-hatted figure once
familiar to us in the Quartier Latin and the artistic _auberges_ of the
Forest of Fontainebleau. The very personification of _insouciance_ and
_laissez-aller_, he whose tiny bedroom-studio up-stairs ran riot with
color caught among California mountains, in cool gray France and
ochreous England, was bending the whole force of his mind to sketching a
pouter pigeon preening itself upon a barrel.
Still another of the ugly cottages, cursed by artists but inhabited by
them, was hired at ten pounds a year by two young landscapists. A
charwoman came every morning to quell the mad riots in which the
household gods (or demons) diurnally engaged, but at all other times the
landscapists manoeuvred for themselves. That the domestic manoeuvring of
young landscapists is not always _toute rose_ we saw reason later to
believe. For not once, twice, nor yet so seldom as a dozen times, have
we seen these young manoeuvrers begin to dine at four, when shadows
were growing too long upon field, thicket, and stream, only to finish we
knew not when, so late into darkness was that "finish" projected. We
could see one of the diners passing along the road from the public
house, an eighth of a mile away, at four, with the _pièce de résistance_
of the meal in an ample dish enveloped in a towel. Ten minutes later the
other rushes by, contrariwise of direction, in pursuit of beer and the
forgotten bread. A little later, and a scudding white dust-cloud in the
road informs us that one of the dining 'scapists flees breathlessly
vinegar- or salt-ward. Still another five minutes, and the other diner
hies him in chase of the white scud, calling vigorously to it that there
is no butter for the rice, no sugar for the fruit.
We saw at once that this Berkshire corner abounds more in dulcet and
sylvan landscape bits than in picturesque motifs for those who paint
_genre_. The peasants have a certain inchoate picturesqueness, as of
beings roughly evolved from the life of this fair material nature, and
sometimes, in silhouette against dun-gray skies and amid rugged fields,
give one vague feeling of Millet's pathos of peasant life and labor. The
yokel himself, however,--and particularly _herself_,--seems determined
to deny all poetic and picturesque relations, by clothing himself--and
herself--in coarse, shop-made rubbish, in battered, _démodé_ town-hats
and flounced gowns from Petticoat Lane.
From certain points of the "Dean" the distances are dreamy and wide,
with high horizon-lines touching wooded hills and shutting the Thames
into a middle distance toward which a hundred little hills either
descend abruptly or decline gently upon broad green meadows. Nature here
smiles, not with pure pagan blitheness, but with a tenderer grace, as of
a soul grown human and fraught with countless memories of man's smiles
and tears, his hard, bitter labor, his sins, sorrows, and longings. But
it is very tender, and not even the wildest storm-effects raise the
landscape to any expression of tragic grandeur, but only suede its fair
hues and soft outlines to the wan pathos peculiar to English moorlands.
_Ye Hutte_ is a misnomer for the extraordinary establishment, studio and
domicile combined, at which we dismounted. It is not a _hut_, and
neither in architectural motive nor the artistic proclivities of its
inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue
was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast,
barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch
vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was
erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its
interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and
choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak
ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels and the usual chaotic
_impedimenta_ of painters. The choir, ascended by a ladder, holds three
tiny cot-beds, while beneath the choir and concealed by beautiful
draperies are stored the domestic and culinary paraphernalia,--pots,
pans, brushes, dishes, and, above all, the multiplicity of petroleum- and
spirit-stoves in which the Bohemian artistic soul delights. Ye Hutte is
an artist's studio, and its name may be found in all the exhibition
catalogues, for several generations of painters drift through it every
year. As one inmate rushes off to the Continent, the sea-shore, or the
mountains, another takes his place. Yet Ye Hutte holds scant place in
its real owner's esteem compared with that larger studio owned by all
the Dean artists in common, where all their summer's work is done, and
which is parquetted with grain-field gold and meadow emerald, walled
with rainbow horizons, and roofed with azure festooned with spun silk.
Ye Hutte is better appreciated as evening rendezvous for the
palette-bearing hosts, both male and female, who, sunbrowned and tired,
partake there of restful social converse as well as of the hospitable
cup that cheers. Evening after evening, by twos and threes, they sit in
the moonlight under the silver-touched vines and dewy blossoms of the
porch, listening to the far-away cry of night-birds, the murmur of
drowsy bells upon cattle stirring in sleep, or of human voices idealized
by remoteness into faint haunting music, while before them white light
touches the wooded heights of Cliefden,--distant heights full of
picturesque mystery and passionate history,--touches and idealizes into
a semblance of poetic realism the sham ruins of Hedsor, and spreads a
pearly sheen over the unseen Valley of the Shadow of Light through which
winds the quiet Thames.