The brontes in brussels, p.13
The Brontës in Brussels, page 13
28 March: Birth of Mme Heger’s fourth child and first son, Prosper.
Spring and summer: In her few surviving letters from this period Charlotte reported enjoying her studies and feeling contented in Brussels.
15 August – end September: Charlotte and Emily spent the summer vacation at the Pensionnat with a few other boarders, including the Wheelwright sisters, with whom they became friendly.
12 October: Death of Martha Taylor.
29 October: Death of Aunt Branwell.
6 November: Charlotte and Emily, having heard the news of their aunt’s death, returned to Haworth, sailing from Antwerp.
17 November: Death of Julia, the youngest of the Wheelwright girls.
1843
27 January: Charlotte, returning to Brussels alone, took the train to London. She sailed from London Bridge Wharf to Ostend that night and at noon the next day caught a train to Brussels, arriving in the evening.
February–March: Bitterly cold weather in Brussels with heavy snow. Charlotte was now giving classes at the Pensionnat. She also gave English lessons to M. Heger.
4 June: In a homework assignment Charlotte reported going on an outing to the country with another teacher and some of the pupils from the school, returning along the popular Brussels promenade the Allée Verte.
15 August: Start of the school summer holiday, which was to be a lonely time for Charlotte. On the same day there was a concert in the park that may have provided inspiration for the one described in Villette.
1 September: Charlotte’s confession in the Cathedral.
18 September: Charlotte caught a glimpse of Queen Victoria on a visit to Belgium.
24 September: There was a concert in the park to mark the anniversary of the 1830 revolution, which included a performance by a huge choir. Like the park concert on 15 August, this may have inspired the description of an outdoor choral performance in Villette.
October: Early in October Charlotte, increasingly lonely and depressed at the Pensionnat, gave notice that she wished to resign her teaching post and return to England but was persuaded by M. Heger to stay longer.
15 November: Birth of Mme Heger’s fifth child, Victorine.
10 December: Charlotte attended a concert at the Salle de la Grande Harmonie and saw Leopold I and his Queen. Shortly after this she told the Hegers that she had decided to leave Brussels.
1844
1 January: Charlotte left Brussels for Ostend, arriving back in Haworth on 3 January.
Fighting on the steps down to Rue d’Isabelle during the Belgian Revolution
Reproduced in Jacques Dubreucq, Bruxelles 1000, une histoire capitale
A Brontë Walk in Brussels
Note: for fuller information on the places referred to, see earlier chapters, in particular Chapter 3: The Site of the Pensionnat Heger Today, Chapter 9: A Look Back at the History of the Isabelle Quarter, Chapter 10: The Fate of the Isabelle Quarter and What You Can Still See and Chapter 11: Around Place Royale.
The Steps Behind the Belliard Statue
Get off the metro at Parc and walk along Rue Royale towards Place Royale. On the right-hand side you will see a statue of General Augustin Daniel Belliard (1769–1832) who as the French ambassador to Belgium played a key role in the negotiations on Belgian independence after the 1830 revolution against Dutch rule. In 1832 he died of a stroke in the park near this spot, and the statue, the first official one in the city after independence, was erected by public subscription in 1836 in gratitude for his services. The sculptor was Guillaume Geefs, who was responsible for many notable works of the period including the monument in Place des Martyrs to the fallen of the revolution.
The building to your left as you look at the statue is the Hôtel Errera, which was here in the Brontës’ time. It is currently occupied by the Flemish regional government.
Map showing street layout in the 1840s
Map showing the same area today
Go to the top of the double staircase leading down behind the statue. In the Brontës’ time a single set of steps, long, steep and rather dark, led down to the Rue d’Isabelle, which was at a lower level than the present street. It ran parallel to Rue Royale, and the door of the Pensionnat Heger, the boarding-school where the Brontës stayed, was immediately opposite you when you reached the bottom of the steps. In Chapter 7 of The Professor the hero William Crimsworth describes looking down from the top of a ‘great staircase … into a narrow back street, which I afterwards learnt was called the Rue d’Isabelle’ and seeing the door of the school where he is later to work. It was an exact description of the view of the real Pensionnat from the top of the steps.
Rue Baron Horta and ‘Bozar’
Go down the steps to Rue Baron Horta. This street was built in the early years of the twentieth century when Rue d’Isabelle, together with many other charming narrow cobbled streets around the Pensionnat, was razed for redevelopment projects such as the Mont des Arts complex and the construction of the Gare Centrale on the rail link between the North and South Stations.
The Pensionnat was demolished in 1909–10. The school classrooms stood roughly on the site of the BNP Paribas Fortis Bank building to your right as you walk up Rue Baron Horta, while the garden was in the area now occupied by the Palais des Beaux-Arts arts centre on the left.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts (‘Bozar’) is a 1920s Art Deco building designed by the architect Victor Horta (1861–1947), after whom the street is named, who was famed for the Art Nouveau creations of his earlier period. The sloping and irregular terrain of the site posed an architectural challenge, as did the height restrictions imposed to preserve the view of Brussels from the Royal Palace. Horta got round these problems by creating eight different levels inside the building, some of them underground. Bozar is home to the National Orchestra of Belgium and is the venue for the prestigious annual Queen Elisabeth Music Competition.
Almost at the end of the street and before you get to the main entrance of Bozar on the corner with Rue Ravenstein, look for a plaque on the building high above a narrow window. Placed by the Brontë Society in 1979, it reads:
Near this site formerly stood the Pensionnat Heger where the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë studied in 1842–43. This commemorative plaque was placed here by the Brontë Society with the kind permission of the Palais des Beaux-Arts/Paleis voor Schone Kunsten 28-9-79.
Rue Terarken and Hôtel Ravenstein
Turn left out of Rue Baron Horta into Rue Ravenstein. Just before you come to the Hôtel Ravenstein, a mansion on the left-hand side, Rue Ravenstein forms a bridge or viaduct over a small street at a lower level. Descend some steps to your left leading down to this little cul-de-sac and walk to the end of it. At the time of writing, next to a goods entrance to Bozar is a replica of the round blue literary plaques that mark places associated with writers all over Britain, surely the only one of its kind that can be seen in Belgium. Placed in 2004 by a Dutch Brontë enthusiast, it reads:
This plaque commemorates the old Quartier Isabelle of which the Rue Terarken is a lucky survival. Charlotte and Emily Brontë would have passed this street when going to the Pensionnat Heger in the Rue d’Isabelle where they stayed in 1842–43. The memory of this area lives on in the vivid image Charlotte portrays in her novel Villette.
This cul-de-sac, Rue Terarken, is one of the few remaining sections of the low-lying cobbled streets of the Brontës’ period. It was originally a much longer street that joined up with Rue d’Isabelle, and the Brontës might well have walked along it. To get to the Protestant chapel where they attended services on Sundays, for example, one convenient route would have been to go to the end of Rue d’Isabelle, into Rue Terarken and then along Rue Villa Hermosa.
Go back up the steps, which are the only ones still to be found on the site of one of a series of steps known as the ‘Escaliers des Juifs’ (in memory of the medieval Jewish quarter formerly located here) at the end of each of the narrow streets leading down to Rue Terarken from Montagne de la Cour.
Continue past the splendid Hôtel Ravenstein or Cleves-Ravenstein, a fifteenth-century mansion of the Burgundian period and according to some accounts the birthplace of Henry VIII’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves. Only the part of the building nearest the steps, before you come to the entrance to the courtyard, dates from the fifteenth century; the part beyond that is a twentieth-century imitation.
Mont des Arts
Before bearing left up Montagne de la Cour towards Place Royale, pause at the top of Mont des Arts, whose stairways and gardens slope down from the art museums towards the Gare Centrale, for one of the best views over Brussels. You can see the spire of the Town Hall in Grand Place below. This will give you a good idea of the difference in levels between the Haute-Ville (Upper Town), developed in the eighteenth century, and the old Basse-Ville (Lower Town). Charlotte Brontë highlights the contrast between the old and new towns to great effect in Villette. Rue d’Isabelle was at an intermediate level on the hill linking the two.
Rue Villa Hermosa
Walk up Montagne de la Cour. On the left-hand side, just before you come to the Musical Instruments Museum, is Rue Villa Hermosa, which like Rue Terarken is one of the few fragments of the old quarter to survive the twentieth-century redevelopment and is cut short by the Bozar building. It originally terminated in steps leading down to Rue Terarken, but these disappeared when Bozar was built. It is named after the Duke of Villahermosa, a seventeenth-century governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In the nineteenth century it was well known for the Prince of Wales tavern, which was visited by Dickens and Thackeray.
The Protestant Chapel, ‘Chapelle Royale’
Before you get to Place Royale cross over to the right-hand side of Montagne de la Cour and make your way to Place du Musée, hidden away behind the art museums.
This beautiful courtyard is one of the surprises of Brussels. The neoclassical buildings lining it originally formed part of the palace built in the 1760s by the Archduke Charles of Lorraine, a governor of the Austrian Netherlands, whose statue stands at the side of the square.
In a concave crescent-shaped wing of the buildings you will see four doors. The one on the right is the entrance to the ‘Chapelle Royale’ where Charlotte and Emily went on Sundays, which has been used for Protestant services since Napoleon granted the Protestants freedom to worship in 1804. During the period of Dutch rule (1815–30) it was used by the Dutch royal family, and in the Brontës’ time the Protestant King Leopold I was one of the worshippers. Services were taken by the King’s chaplain, the Reverend Evan Jenkins, whose wife recommended the Pensionnat Heger to the Brontës and invited them to lunch every Sunday – an invitation she came to regret because of the sisters’ taciturnity.
In Chapter 19 of The Professor Charlotte compares the dress sense of the English congregation unfavourably with that of the bruxellois on their way to mass.
Gracious goodness! why don’t they dress better? ‘My eye is yet filled with visions of the high-flounced, slovenly and tumbled dresses in costly silk and satin, of the large, unbecoming collars in expensive lace, of the ill-cut coats and strangely-fashioned pantaloons which every Sunday, at the English service, filled the chairs of the Chapel royal and after it, issuing forth into the square, came into disadvantageous contrast with freshly and trimly attired foreign figures, hastening to attend salut …
If you can time your walk to arrive when the chapel is open for a service, you might be able to have a peek inside. It is little changed since the Brontës’ time. Its bright cream-and-gilt decoration, painted ceiling and cherubs must have been in striking contrast to the somewhat dark and austere interior of their father’s church of St Michael and All Angels in Haworth.
In 1842 the triennial art exhibition or ‘Salon’ was held in the Musée des Beaux-Arts housed in Charles de Lorraine’s palace. Two of the paintings Charlotte saw there, Edouard de Biefve’s Une Almée – which she renames ‘Cleopatra’ – and Fanny Geefs’ La Vie d’une Femme, inspired the scathing description of two pictures in a gallery visited by Lucy Snowe in Chapter 19 of Villette. Lucy describes the women depicted in the latter painting as ‘brainless nonentities’. Fanny Geefs (née Corr) was a Brussels-born artist of Irish descent, whose husband Guillaume Geefs sculpted the Belliard statue.
Place Royale
Walk out of Place du Musée and turn right into Place Royale, one of the few places in Brussels that has changed little since the Brontës’ time. It was built on the site of the splendid old Coudenberg palace on the top of the Coudenberg (‘cold hill’). The old palace burned down in 1731, and in the 1770s Charles of Lorraine commissioned the French architects Nicolas Barré and Barnabé Guimard to create the present neoclassical square; Guimard was responsible for much of the new Royal Quarter built round the park, including the Palais de la Nation (parliament building). The statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, who was one of the leaders of the first crusade in the eleventh century, was erected in 1848, after the Brontës’ time.
Cross Rue de la Régence and you will come to the entrance to Rue de Namur. On Sundays the Brontës used to walk up this street, through the city gateway of the Porte de Namur and along Chaussée d’Ixelles, for the dreaded Sunday lunches at the home of the Jenkins family.
The neoclassical church with its pillared portico and cupola is Saint Jacques sur Coudenberg. The Hegers worshipped at this church, which was where the investiture of Leopold I, first King of the Belgians, took place on 21 July 1831.
On Lucy’s arrival in Brussels on a cold wet night she gets lost looking for an inn to which she has been directed and describes a scene that may have been prompted by Charlotte’s memory of St Jacques and Place Royale:
On I went, hurrying fast through a magnificent street and square, with the grandest houses round, and amidst them the huge outline of more than one overbearing pile; which might be palace, or church – I could not tell. Just as I passed a portico, two moustachioed men came suddenly from behind the pillars; they were smoking cigars … They spoke with insolence, and, fast as I walked, they kept pace with me a long way. (Villette, Chapter 7)
Walk past the church to the BELvue museum, which tells the history of Belgium since the revolution. It was formerly the Hôtel Bellevue, where Charlotte’s idol the Duke of Wellington stayed at the time of Waterloo. During the Belgian Revolution the building was used as a base by the insurgents in the battle with Dutch troops that raged for four days (23–26 September 1830) in the square and park and on the steps down to the Rue d’Isabelle.
Through this museum you can access the archaeological site of the long-demolished Coudenberg Palace and walk on a part of the Rue d’Isabelle which has been excavated, the part which originally led to the palace. It is an eerie experience to tread its cobbles underground. You are not following literally in the Brontës’ footsteps, however, since they could never have walked on this particular stretch of the street. It was buried at the time of the late-eighteenth-century redevelopment of Place Royale, when the height of the square was raised substantially.
The Park
Leave Place Royale by the Rue Royale side and enter the park from Place des Palais, in front of the Royal Palace.
The palace has had a chequered history. The building the Brontës knew was the result of a conversion of two town houses that was carried out in 1815–29. Since then the structure has undergone numerous alterations.
The Park was redesigned by Barnabé Guimard and Joachim Zinner at the time of the redevelopment of the royal quarter in the 1770s. In its heyday it teemed with the fashionable bruxellois and visitors to the city staying in the nearby hotels. It was in the park that Wellington, asked on the eve of Waterloo whether he thought he would win the coming battle, pointed to a British soldier strolling under the trees and replied that the outcome depended on whether ‘he had enough of that article’.
Walk to the kiosque à musique, the bandstand, in Charlotte and Emily’s day a brand-new construction designed by the up-and-coming architect Cluysenaar. They are likely to have attended concerts here during festivities such as the commemoration of the 1830 Revolution or the Feast of the Assumption. A concert at a kiosque is mentioned in Chapter 38 of Villette, in which Lucy leaves her bed to join the crowd in the park at a midnight fête.
Erected in 1841, the bandstand was first placed near the north gate of the park opposite the Belgian parliament building on the site occupied today by the Grand Bassin (large pond) before being moved to its present location in 1846.
Have a look at the Petit Bassin near by, an octagonal-shaped pool that may have been the one Charlotte had in mind when she describes how Lucy’s longing to stand near the cool waters of a ‘stone basin’ in the park makes her leave her bed and head for it on a stifling midsummer night.
Exit the park opposite the Belliard statue, which was the starting point of our walk. Turn right and walk along Rue Royale past the Parc metro station and across Rue de la Loi on your right, where the parliament building stands. The next street off to the right is Rue de Louvain. The Brontës would have walked along it to the Porte de Louvain (on the site of Place Madou today) and thence along Chaussée de Louvain to the Protestant cemetery to visit the grave of their friend Martha Taylor, who died at her school in Koekelberg on the outskirts of the city. This is the route taken in The Professor by William Crimsworth on his way to the Protestant cemetery where he is reunited with Frances Henri. The cemetery, which stood roughly at the intersection of Chaussée de Louvain and Rue du Noyer, no longer exists, and the Chaussée, a country road in the Brontës’ time, is now a busy shopping street.
