The Hotel Cluysenaar

The Hotel Cluysenaar, on Rue Royale, which later became the Astoria Hotel, is more than likely the original model for the Hotel Crécy in Villette. This is how Charlotte describes it (Vashti chapter): “It was an hotel in the foreign sense: a collection of dwelling-houses, not an inn - a vast, lofty pile, with a huge arch to its street-door, leading through a vaulted covered way, into a square all built round”.

In Villette, Charlotte describes how Lucy goes up a “wide, handsome public staircase” to the second floor of the Hotel Crécy where she is admitted to “a suite of very handsome apartments” (Vashti chapter).

The Wheelwright family, friends of the Brontë sisters, took up residence at the hotel when they moved over from England to Brussels. Dr. Thomas Wheelwright, his wife and five young daughters, arrived in the city in July 1842, leaving in August 1843. One of the Wheelwright daughters, Laetitia, was to become Charlotte’s lifelong friend. 

J.J. Green in his 1916 article wrote that “at their residence in a flat at the big Hotel Cluysenaar, the Wheelwright children delighted in the big staircases, running up one and down the other” (p. 224). Mr. Green had some problems with the spelling of the hotel's name. Occasionally it gets ‘Clusyenaar’ and at one point it reads ‘Olusyenaar’. A ‘kluizenaar’, in modern Dutch spelling, means a hermit, a recluse. As a surname, in older variants, it is not uncommon in the Low Countries. thebrusselsbrontegroup

photo inside the hotel:  flickr.com/photos
A lot of beautiful photo's: charlottemathieson/charlotte-brontes-brussels/