A Brontë walk in Brussels
It was one of those grey, sluggish Sunday mornings. All I wanted to do was to stay in bed, safely tucked under the warm blankets, lost in a good book and pampered by a steaming cup of tea. But the alarm went off at 7 am and I didn’t snooze. I had signed up for a Brontë walk in the centre of Brussels and I wasn’t going to miss it.
The Brontës in Brussels
In 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, authors of beloved novels such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, came to Brussels, where they attended a boarding school in hopes of advancing their education. Emily grew homesick very soon and left the country after a year. Charlotte stayed for another year at the school without her sister. Charlotte’s experience in Brussels was pivotal. Her first novel, The Professor, and her last one, Villette, are heavily influenced by her life in the Belgian capital.
📍Royal Chapel
The meeting place was in front of the Royal Chapel, which houses the Brussels Protestant Church at the very heart of the city. Helen MacEwan, the founder of the Brussels Brontë group and our guide for the day, was waiting outside the chapel. The group was small, and after a quick stop at the chapel, our tour began. As Helen commenced her excellent retelling of the sisters’ adventures in Brussels, I noticed the mesmerising sound of the organ coming from the chapel behind us. It was spooky. The perfect soundtrack, I thought. Charlotte and her sister Emily were slowly coming to life. I was all ears.
📍Mont des Arts
From the chapel, we made our way to the Mont des Arts, an urban and important historic site in the city of Brussels. Standing at the top of the stairs that connect the upper and the lower part of the city, we listened to Helen talking about how Charlotte and Emily arrived on a steamship in Ostend and after staying a couple of nights there, they boarded the train to the capital. The young sisters had arranged to attend boarding school in Brussels in order to advance their education in French. This, they thought, would open the door to their shared dream: opening their own school.
📍Rue Villa Hermosa
Before climbing up to our next stop, Helen pointed to a small dead-end street. Right next to the Musical Instruments Museum is Rue Villa Hermosa. I had never really noticed this street before. This, Helen said, is one of the few streets that has remained partly intact after the redevelopment of the city. This was a street that the two sisters had regularly taken. There is a picture of this street as it used to be in the nineteenth century, where you can see the famous Prince of Wales tavern. The name of the street was Rue d’Isabelle, a street that is completely wiped out today but was very important to the sisters during their stay in Brussels. Fun fact: Dickens and Thackeray are said to have been frequent visitors to the tavern.
📍Place Royale
Next, we stopped at Place Royale, just a few steps up the hill. This square is one of the few sites that has remained barely untouched since the eighteenth century. We stood facing the Church of St James on Coudenberg, which has most likely evoked one of the scenes in Villette, Charlotte Brontë’s last novel. Helen reminded us of the scene in the novel while commenting on Charlotte’s own first impressions as a newly arrived in Brussels. As Lucy Snowe does in the novel, Charlotte herself finds odd men with ‘cigars’ hiding behind the pillars of the building she cannot tell if it is a church or a palace.
📍Parc Royal
From the Church of St James, we headed just around the corner and towards the royal park. The kiosque à musique, a beautiful bandstand, which dates from Charlotte and Emily’s time in Brussels, was our next stop. The young women had certainly attended concerts there during various festivities in the city. In Villette, Charlotte describes this very spot when Lucy, in a semi-hallucinatory state, having resorted to an opiate to relieve her insomnia, wanders out at night and finds herself at a midnight feast in the park.
📍The Belliard Statue
Exiting the park on Rue Royale, we stopped in front of the statue of a French ambassador named General Augustin Daniel Belliard. Μr Belliard was a key figure in the Belgian independence negotiations front, but we were more interested in the steps right behind his statue. Helen had explained earlier that the school the two sisters attended was the Pensionnat Heger. When she had asked us if we knew where to find it in the city, no one answered. We were about to find out.
📍Bozar (or Palais de Beux Arts)
Having taken the steps behind the Belliard statue quite a few times myself, I knew that they would lead us down to the Bozar (a homophone for Palais de Beaux Arts), the centre for fine arts in Brussels. What I didn’t know was that Emily and Charlotte had taken these steps — a single, darker, steeper and longer version — down to Rue d’Isabelle, where Pensionnat Heger was located. Today, we can only recruit our imagination if we want to reconstruct how it would all have looked lik. Rue d’Isabelle was scraped from the city landscape together with other streets in the quarter in favour of redevelopment projects. Sadly, nothing remains of the Pensionnat today.
Before leaving the site, Helen pointed upwards close to the entrance of Bozar. We all turned to find a plaque commemorating the Brontës' stay in Brussels. This was the official plaque placed there by the Brontë Society in 1979. How many times have I passed this spot without noticing a single thing?
📍Hotel Ravenstein
Our next stop was down another flight of stairs, this time following Rue Ravenstein just before reaching the Hotel Ravenstein at the corner of the street. Although I had passed by a few times, I had never gone down these steps before; I was curious. We ended up in a cul-de-sac, at the end of which there was another plaque. This time, it was one of these blue literary plaques that you see in Britain, unofficially placed there in 2004. It is probably the only blue plaque to be found in Belgium.
This hidden street, Rue Terarken, is one of the few cobblestone streets left from the Brontës’ time. It is now a very small street, almost a sample of what it once was. It was originally connected to Rue d’Isabelle and, likely, the two sisters walked along on their way to the Protestant chapel for the Sunday service.
📍The Cathedral
Τhe walk was nearing its finish line. One last stop before we dropped off at Waterstones for refreshments, our guide encouraged us on this grey Sunday morning. On our way to the Cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula, the two patron saints of the city of Brussels, Helen explained the reason we were heading there.
During the school summer holidays of 1843, Charlotte decided to stay in Brussels at the Pensionnat. We don’t know why she chose to do so. She had the means to afford the expenses of a journey back home, but she decided against it. Whatever her reasons, she failed to foresee how alone she would be as everyone would leave the school for the summer break. She soon grew increasingly lonely. Her only refuge was walking the streets of Brussels all day.
At some point, on a fine September morning, her boredom and depression — possibly augmented by her impossible love towards her teacher, Constantin Heger — hit rock bottom. On her return from her walk to the Protestant cemetery, she couldn’t possibly return to a deserted school. Instead, she decided to walk the streets around the Pensionnat when she heard the bell tolling. It was coming from St Gudule, the Catholic church. Suddenly, on an impulse guided by her depressed mood, the daughter of a Protestant clergy and a staunch Protestant herself, Charlotte found herself confessing. We do not know what she confessed. Was it loneliness and ennui that muddled her mind or was it something darker, of a more intimate nature? Helen hinted to the latter.
📍Place des Martyrs
We rounded up our walk at Place de Martyrs, a beautiful square tucked behind the ugly shopping street, which accommodates the monument to the Belgian insurgents killed in the Revolution of 1830. Unfortunately, the square was momentarily under construction and not much could be seen or said besides the fact that Charlotte mentions the square in Villette,? not in the most flattering commentary about the Belgian Revolution.
Our walk came to an end at Waterstones. What better than a refreshing glass of water in the comfort of a bookshop? Thankfully for my pocket, I resisted the urge to go on a Brontë book-buying spree. The Brontës in Brussels, written by our guide, Helen MacEwan, was my only purchase. It was only fair since the walk was completely free of charge. Now I wish for a rainy Sunday to spend safely tucked under the duvet, with a heartwarming cup of tea and Helen’s book to take me back in time once again.
