'Villette' rocks Brussels, or was there really a scandal in the city?

 

Newspaper boys in the Rue Isabelle in 1890, with the

newly printed edition of Le Soir

 

Eric Ruijssenaars: It has been suggested, or rumoured, that there was a sort of scandal in Brussels following the publication of Villette. The big question is of course whether this can be true, and what it would have been like. In this article I hope to get somewhat closer to answering this question. In the previous articles I wrote about the editions that would have brought the novel to Brussels. We can assess the likelihood of a scandal with the help of some of this new information. It can allow us to say more on when it might have happened, for example.
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