‘L’Ingratitude’

From: charlotte-bronte

‘L’Ingratitude’ turned up in the course of my research for a biography of Constantin Heger, who taught Emily and Charlotte Brontë French during their time in Brussels and with whom Charlotte fell in love. I’d been trying to find out about his brother Vital, a sales representative for the royal carpet factory in Tournai and decided to look through the catalogue of the Musée royal de Mariemont for any mention of him – its eclectic holdings include carpets – and found a reference to a manuscript by Charlotte Brontë about a rat. It turned out to be the first piece of French homework Charlotte had written for Heger, lost since the First World War.

Early in February 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, then aged 25 and 23, went to Brussels to board at the pensionnat run by Claire Zoë Parent on the long since demolished rue Isabelle. The sisters went to Belgium to complete their education, in the hope that they might one day open their own school back in Yorkshire. Parent’s husband, Constantin Heger, who taught at the nearby Athénée Royal, also taught French literature at the pensionnat. By all accounts a gifted and dedicated teacher, he gave Emily and Charlotte homework – devoirs – based on texts by the authors they had studied in class. They were to compose essays in French that echoed these models, and could choose their own subject matter: ‘I cannot tell on what subject your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you,’ Heger told them, as he told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, after Charlotte’s death. Heger encouraged the Brontës’ writing, but demanded that they pay attention to their craft. ‘Poet or not … study form,’ he once admonished Charlotte. He often returned their essays drastically revised – sadly, there are no comments on this copy of ‘L’Ingratitude’.