Letters from Charlotte Brontë to Prof. Constantin Heger

 In 1842 Charlotte and Emily Brontë travelled to Brussels to study at the Pensionnat Heger, a school for young ladies run by Madame Zoë Heger. There the sisters studied French literature under the instruction of Madame’s husband, Constantin Heger. This connection with the dynamic and rigorous Monsieur Heger had the most profound influence on Charlotte Brontë’s life and work.  After Charlotte left the pensionnat on New Year’s Day 1844 she was unable to forget Monsieur Heger. At first she wrote to him every fortnight and then, on Madame Heger’s insistence, she attempted to limit herself to a letter every six months. These letters to Constantin Heger are increasingly unguarded expressions of her torment as she waited for replies that dwindled and then halted altogether.

What language are the letters written in? 

All four surviving letters to Heger are written in French – the language in which he tutored Charlotte – though the post script to the last letter she ever sent him is in English. In her parting words to Heger, she declares that the French language is ‘most precious to me because it reminds me of you – I love French for your sake with all my heart and soul’. Biographer Lyndall Gordon and scholar Sara Dudley Edwards have speculated that writing in a foreign language allowed Brontë the licence to express feelings that she mightn’t have voiced in her native English.

Why were the letters torn up and repaired? 

Of the four remaining letters, three were torn up. The first has been mended with strips of paper; the second and third have been sewn back together; the fourth is intact, though the name and address of a Brussels shoemaker has been scribbled in the margin. Critics have speculated that Monsieur Heger tore up the letters, only for Madame Heger to retrieve them from his wastepaper bin and piece them together again.
 bl.uk/collection-items/letters-from-charlotte-bront-to-prof-constantin-heger

Frederika Macdonald wanted to publish Charlotte’s ‘love letters’ to M. Heger

Read this very interesting article

brusselsbronte/more-adventures-in-nys-two-frederika

Frederika Macdonald wanted to publish Charlotte’s ‘love letters’ to M. Heger in her forthcoming book, The Secret of Charlotte Brontë, about her adventures at the Pensionnat. 

Letters written by Louise Heger

I am searching for more information about these letters.

In this letter Louise Heger describes how one morning in 1913 she heard men selling the newspaper Le Petit Blue shouting about the ‘love affair’ of Monsieur Heger.  She and her brother Paul had just given the letters Charlotte wrote to Monsieur to the British Museum, after which they were published in The Times.


Louise Heger was born in 1839, 3 years before Charlotte and Emily Brontë enrolled at the Pensionnat Heger. She studied under the Belgian Impressionist Alfred Stevens and painted in a studio at the bottom of the Pensionnat Heger garden. Louise was a successful landscape artist and exhibited a Coastal Landscape and a View of the River Ourthe at an 1893 exhibition in Brussels.
She died in 1933 .thebrusselsbrontegroup.org/heger
 

Since the October excursion I have been greatly assisted by Renate Hurtmanns, who paid several more visits to Evere cemetery, as you can see from her report below, with the latest on this research. She has also helped me in transcribing letters written by Louise Heger, the daughter of Monsieur and Madame Heger. Some time ago I discovered that the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has a large very interesting collection of letters written by her, including many she wrote to her parents, sisters and brother that give a valuable new insight into the family.

Exhibition and Lecture at Museum M, in Leuven

On October 27, 2011 several members of the Brussels Brontë Group went to Leuven to an exhibition of paintings and drawings by two Belgian women artists, Isala van Driest (1842-1916) and Louse Heger (1839-1933), and in the evening to a lecture by Professor Sue Lonoff of Harvard University on Louise Heger and Charlotte Brontë. The exhibition was called ‘Isala & Louise, Two Women Two Stories’. Remarkably their surnames were not part of the title, probably to stress the invisibility of women in the professions at the time, for its theme was how these two gifted women overcame prejudice and forged a way into what were conventionally regarded as male preserves – Isala van Driest as a medical doctor, and Louise Heger as an artist specializing in landscape painting and drawing.

 

Of crucial interest was the role Louise played many years later when her parents were long dead, namely what was to become of the letters Charlotte wrote to her teacher M Heger when she had left Brussels for the last time. Louise knew that at least some of them had been kept, having first been torn up and subsequently pieced together, perhaps by Mme. Heger. The actual facts are not really known. But Louise did know that her mother wanted them to be preserved and had therefore bequeathed them to her. Even during Mme Heger’s lifetime Charlotte Brontë had become a very famous author and Mme wanted to scotch any insinuation that her relationship with her husband had been anything other than a schoolgirl’s crush. So it was Louise who initiated the quest to preserve the four letters for posterity – on the one hand to exonerate her father altogether and on the other, as part of British literary heritage. She discussed the case with her brother Paul who knew nothing about the existence of the letters. They decided to consult an eminent English art-critic, Marion Spielmann, and at his suggestion donated the letters to the British Museum (they are now in the British Library) in 1913. Later on they were published in The London Times -- and caused a sensation.
In his writings on the subject Spielmann seems to play down Louise’s role in the preservation of the letters, possibly, as Sue Lonoff implied, because he had a tendency to disregard the female in any but a conventional role; on the other hand, Louise herself may have been too modest a person (we might say under-assertive) to claim her true position. More might come to light as research is done on the life and work of Marion Spielmann. brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/exhibition-and-lecture-at-museum-m-in.html

Spielmann, M.H., “Mlle. Louise Heger. Last link with the Brontës,” in The Times (19 August 1933). An obituary.

http://books.google.nl/books/Marion+Spielmann+bronte

Marion Harry Alexander Spielmann (1858–1948) was a prolific Victorian art critic and scholar who was the editor of The Connoisseur and Magazine of Art. Among his voluminous output, he wrote a history of Punch magazine, the first biography of John Everett Millais and a detailed investigation into the evidence for portraits of William Shakespeare. Spielmann was born in London May 22, 1858 and was educated at University College School andUniversity College, London. He soon established himself as an art journalist, writing for the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 to 1890, most notably discussing the work of G. F. Watts.^[1] By the 1880s, Spielmann had become "one of the most powerful figures in the late Victorian art world". Marion Spielmnn painted by John Henry Frederick Bacon.

Charlotte Bronte's love for Constantin Heger

I received an a-mail with the question:

Where can I find the texts of Charlotte's letters to Heger?

I started searching and collected these items

"Day or night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach - all that I know - is that I cannot - that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope ... I cling on to preserving that little interest - I cling on to it as I cling on to life."  Charlotte Bronte

espinasse/real-charlotte-bronte.html

Four of the most poignant love letters in English literature have returned to the Yorkshire village where their misguided writer posted them 160 years ago. After a century in storage at the British Library, the heartfelt notes from Charlotte Bronte have gone on display at the parsonage in Haworth, where she agonised over their phrasing during periods of depression in 1844. 

Their pathos is heightened by jagged tearmarks where their exasperated recipient, the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, ripped them up and threw them into the bin. They were saved by his suspicious wife who sewed the fragments together, probably as potential evidence that Charlotte, who trained as a teacher with the couple in Brussels two years earlier, might have tried to lead her husband on. calledunderthesky/charlotte-brontes-love-letters

Charlotte's portrayal of the temperamental M. Heger as she first saw him in 1842 again describes a striking man:

"He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena; occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air nor above 100 degrees removed form mild and gentlemanlike…”

Brontë began writing to Heger after her return to Haworth and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. Brontë began writing to Heger after her return and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. In the letters that do remain, Kauffman notes a variety of characteristics that fit the ‘amorous epistolary discourse’ on which her study focuses. These include:

• ‘the denial of the reality of separation’;
• ‘the desire for contact’;
• ‘despair at the master’s silence’;
• and ‘resigned desolation charlotte_bronts_letters/

""January 8, 1845

Monsieur, the poor have not need of much to sustain them --

they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table.

But if they are refused the crumbs they die of hunger. 

Nor do I, either, need much affection from those I love. 

I should not know what to do with a friendship entire and complete -

I am not used to it. 

But you showed me of yore a little interest,

 when I was your pupil in Brussels, 

and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest --

 I hold on to it as I would hold on to life. ”inspire_emotion/loveletters/

books.google.nl/books/letters+from+charlotte+bronte+to+heger

http://books.google.nl/books/letters+from+charlotte+bronte+to+heger

One of Louise Heger's letters at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Documentatiecentrum voor Vlaamse Kunst)brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/ongoing-brussels-research 

On this page she describes how one morning in 1913 she heard men selling the newspaper Le Petit Blue shouting about the ‘love affair’ of Monsieur Heger. She and her brother Paul had just given the letters Charlotte wrote to Monsieur to the British Museum, after which they were published in The Times.
Written in French, the letters later became historically valuable as Charlotte's fame grew, but Heger attempted to bin them a second time when his daughter showed them to him as he lay dying. They were bequeathed to the British Museum by Heger's son to help an accurate record of the writer's tormented youth. 

kleurrijkbrontesisters/brontes-letters-to-constantin-heger

/brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/piecing-together-story-of-bront-heger.html
 secretofcharlottdjvu.txt

greeneyedmystic./charlotte-bronte-letters 

literature.com/forums/ 

Charlotte Brontë's feelings for Heger

The extent of Charlotte Brontë's feelings for Heger were not fully realised until 1913, when her letters to him were published for the first time. Heger had first shown them to Mrs. Gaskell when she visited him in 1856 while researching her biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë, but she concealed their true significance. These letters, referred to as the 'Heger Letters', had been ripped up at some stage by Heger, but his wife had retrieved the pieces from the wastepaper bin and had meticulously glued or sewn them back together. Paul Heger, Constantin's son, and his sisters, gave these letters to the British Museum, and they were shortly after printed in The Times newspaper

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the posthumous biography of Charlotte Brontë by Gaskell, was the first of many biographies about Charlotte to be published. Though frank in places, Gaskell suppressed details of Charlotte's love for Heger, a married man, as being too much of an affront to contemporary morals and as a possible source of distress to Charlotte's still-living friends, father and husband.

Charlotte continued to write to C. Heger well into 1845.
Charlotte's portrayal of the temperamental M. Heger as she first saw him in 1842 describes a striking man:

“He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament; a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat, sometimes those of a delirious hyena; occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air nor above 100 degrees removed form mild and gentlemanlike.

Later letters to Constantin Heger.

“If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be altogether without hope; if he gives me little – just a little – I shall be satisfied – happy; i shall have reason for living on, for working .... Nor do I, either, need much affections from those I love .... But you showed me of yore a little interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold on to the maintenance of that little interest – I hold on to it as I would hold on to life.

Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger

 

 

collection-items/letters-from-charlotte-bront-to-prof-constantin-heger

 

In beginning her exploration of Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger, Kauffman suggests that the letters reveal Charlotte Brontë’s transformation ‘from Heger’s correspondent into the novelist of Jane Eyre’ (Kauffman 1986: 160). Kauffman intends to connect the rhetorical strategies of the letters and of Jane Eyre to map ‘the metamorphosis of the rhetoric of passion from an authentic to a fictional discourse’ (p. 160).

To start with, Kauffman maps out the narrative of Brontë’s and Heger’s encounter including:

• Charlotte’s and Emily’s trip to Brussels in 1842 to learn languages;

• their return to England at the death of their aunt;

• Charlotte Brontë’s return to Brussels alone in 1843;

• and her final return to England in 1844.

Brontë began writing to Heger after her return and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. In the letters that do remain, Kauffman notes a variety of characteristics that fit the ‘amorous epistolary discourse’ on which her study focuses. These include:

• ‘the denial of the reality of separation’;

• ‘the desire for contact’;

• ‘despair at the master’s silence’;

• and ‘resigned desolation’ (p. 161).

In initial letters, Brontë is ‘submissive’ and puts ‘emphasis on having been given the authority to write’ (p. 161). However, when Heger write back with a firm, stern tone providing instruction as to how she must write, Brontë rebels and does the opposite; ‘she becomes more outspoken, more indignant, less submissive’ (p. 161-162). Kauffman notes that ‘[l]ike all amorous epistolary discourses, Charlotte’s letters are demands, pleas, threats, and confrontations, filled with the same marks of internal tension, contradiction, self-division, and torment’ (p. 163).

Like Mary Jacobus in ‘The Buried Letter’, Kauffman notes that the figure of student-governess-teacher is an ambiguous one in nineteenth-century British society. She describes Brontë as ‘simultaneously a family intimate and a family employee; the boundaries between belonging to and being excluded from the family are constantly shifting ones’ (p. 163). In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram tries to humiliate the governess-heroine and in her letters, Brontë expresses anguish at her humiliation in being a governess. In her letters to Heger, Brontë seems unsure as to whether to situate herself as governess or pupil as she tries to reconcile Heger’s warmth in past encounters and the coldness of his silence. Gaskell and others have tried to suggest that the romance between Heger and Brontë was imagined, but Kauffman provides much evidence that suggests that Heger exploited teacher-pupil relationships on a regular basis with his charismatic personality. Brontë’s letters are always a work of persuasion for him to break his silence and write to her again, which he never does. Silence is of course an obsession of Brontë’s novels too: ‘[i]h her letters, poems and novels Charlotte continued all her life to portray the intense misery of loneliness, exile and unrequited love’ (p. 170).

Kauffman, L. 1986, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

The Secret of Charlotte Brontë

This is probably the first and only book which is focused solely on Charlotte Brontë and Brussels, and would therefore be of great interest to everyone interested in that period of her life.

Frederika MacDonald, in 1859, was herself a pupil at the Pensionnat Heger where 17 years earlier Charlotte had been a student, and later a teacher. She knew from first-hand experience what life was like at the school, and even more interesting, what M. Heger and his wife Madame Heger were like in real life.

Frederika had been writing articles as an ex-pupil of the Pensionnat from 1894 onwards, but when Charlotte’s letters to Heger were made public in 1913 (when Paul Heger handed them over to the British Museum), she was the first to quote from these letters in a Brontë biography. They form a vital part of this publication, in which Frederika tries to unravel the ‘secret’ of Charlotte on the basis of these letters.

The book is separated in 2 parts:

Part I; CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S LETTERS TO M. HEGER
(These Letters supply the Key to the Secret of Charlotte Brontë). She ends this part by quoting Charlotte’s last desperate letter to Constantin Heger. She writes: “ The Letter obtained no answer.
And thus the end was reached. We now know where in Charlotte Bronte's life lay her experiences that formed her genius and made her the great Romantic whose quality was that she saw all events and personages through the medium of one passion: the passion of a predestined tragical and unrequited love.”

Part II; SOME REMINISCENES OF THE REAL MONSIEUR HEGER
Frederika MacDonald gives us a marvellous insight into her life at the Pensionnat and her own personal view of the teacher she and Charlotte both shared. She writes: “ But Monsieur Heger had one really beautiful feature, that I remember often watching with extreme pleasure when he recited fine poetry or read noble prose : - his mouth, when uttering words that moved him, had a delightful smile, not in the least tender towards ordinary mortals, but almost tender in its homage to the excellence of writers of genius.

In brief, what M. Heger 's face revealed when studied as the index of his natural qualities, was intellectual superiority, an imperious temper, a good deal of impatience against stupidity, and very little patience with his fellow-creatures generally; it revealed too a good deal of humour; and a very little kindheartedness, to be weighed against any amount of irritability. It was a sort of face bound to interest one; but not, so it seems to me, to conquer affection.” There are also some interesting illustrations, which you hardly find in any other publication or biography.

I strongly recommend this book as a wonderful addition of any good Brussels/Brontë collection.
If you are able to get your hands on a copy, don’t let it slip you by. There is however the possibilty to read the text, by clicking on this link: http://www.archive.org/details/secretofcharlott00macduoft
To see the digitalized original edition, click on ‘FLIP BOOK’ in the left panel where it says; ‘View the book’.

Some more information on Frederika’s book in the Australian Brontë Association Newsletter:
www.ics.mq.edu.au/~chris/bronte/news17.pdf