In this earlier
period Charlotte and Emily were too busy with their books to think of
'calls' and the like frivolities, and it must be confessed also that at
this stage Laetitia Wheelwright would have thought it too high a price
for a visit from Charlotte to receive as a fellow-guest the apparently
unamiable Emily. Miss Wheelwright, who was herself fourteen years of age
when she entered the Pensionnat Heger, recalls the two sisters, thin and
sallow-looking, pacing up and down the garden, friendless and alone. It
was the sight of Laetitia standing up in the class-room and glancing
round with a semi-contemptuous air at all these Belgian girls which
attracted Charlotte Bronte to her. 'It was so very English,' Miss Bronte
laughingly remarked at a later period to her friend. There was one other
English girl at this time of sufficient age to be companionable; but with
Miss Maria Miller, whom Charlotte Bronte has depicted under the guise of
Ginevra Fanshawe, she had less in common. In later years Miss Miller
became Mrs. Robertson, the wife of an author in one form or another.
To Miss Wheelwright, and those of her sisters who are still living, the
descriptions of the Pensionnat Heger which are given in _Villette_ and
_The Professor_ are perfectly accurate. M. Heger, with his heavy black
moustache and his black hair, entering the class-room of an evening to
read to his pupils was a sufficiently familiar object, and his keen
intelligence amounting almost to genius had affected the Wheelwright
girls as forcibly as it had done the Brontes.
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