Charlotte Brontë: Villette. London: The Gresham Publishing Company, n.d.
Clear-sighted, cold-on-the-surface Lucy Snowe, English through-and-through, finds herself in the French-speaking town of Villette, where she has gone to seek gainful employment. There, she fights a civil-social continuation of the Napoleon Wars, nearly four decades after the Battle of Waterloo—themselves a continuation of what one Frenchman in the novel calls “the eternal conflict between France and England.” Villette is located in the country of “Labassecour,” usually understood as a fictionalized stand-in for Belgium, where Brontë herself worked as a teacher for several years in the French quarter of Brussels. In French, “Labassecour” means a poultry-yard, perhaps reflecting the author’s dim view of its inhabitants. More fancifully, to put one’s coeur, one’s heart, à bas means to lower it, to subordinate it, and this Lucy does, with true English self-rule.
She needs the work. She spent part of her youth at the home of her widowed godmother, “a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton,” a town possibly named after an ancestor of her godmother’s late husband, a physician whose people evidently came to the British Isles from ‘France,’ specifically Brittainy. As a child, Miss Snowe had visited “about twice a year”; she begins the story she narrates with her last visit, at the age of fourteen. Her godmother’s son, John Graham Bretton, lives there—a “handsome, faithless-looking youth of sixteen,” “spoiled and whimsical”— and they are soon joined by six-year-old Paulina Home, the daughter of a “giddy, careless woman and a “sensitive,” introverted scientist. The mother has died and the father has gone away on a restorative trip. Polly prays for her father with a “monomaniac tendency,” but when it becomes clear that her father’s absence will be extended, she attaches herself to Graham, perhaps a bit to Lucy’s jealous discomfiture. “The league of acquaintanceship thus struck up was not hastily dissolved; on the contrary, it appeared that time and circumstances served rather to cement than loosen it. Ill-assimilated as the two were in age, sex, pursuits, etc. they somehow found a great deal to say to each other”—he, teasing and teaching her, she fussing over him. “With curious readiness did she adapt herself to such themes as interested him. One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but necessarily live, move, and have her being in another; now that her father was taken from her, she nestled in Graham, and seemed to feel by his feeling: to exist in his existence.” Since Graham liked to read, “she proved a ready scholar,” reading Bible stories to him, sympathizing with the people in them, and often turning from them to her favorite topic, Graham. Jacob’s love for his son, Joseph, finds its parallel in her love for him; “if you were to die,” she tells him, “I should refuse to be comforted, and go down into the grave to you mourning,'” as Jacob did to Joseph’s grave. When her father eventually summons her to a new life in France she is heartbroken, “trembling like a leaf when she took leave, but exercising self-command.”
Lucy leaves, too, a few weeks later, returning home to her family. Eight years later, a series of unspecified “troubles”—they must include the death of her parents—left her with “no possibility of dependence on others: to myself alone could I look”; “self-reliance and exertion were forced upon me by circumstances, as they are upon thousands besides.” With that last phrase, she takes care to bridle pity for herself, either from her reader or in her own soul. The effort will prove characteristic of herself, as it seems to have been for the English in her time, and not only in her time.
She finds her first employment as the caretaker and companion of an old maid, who still pines over the fiancé who died in a riding accident, thirty years earlier. (On her deathbed she admits, “I still think of Frank more than of God.”) Readers never hear of her again, but her loss foreshadows the theme of lost and unconsummated love that pervades the novel.
Unemployed again, now aged 23, Lucy determines to try her fortune on the continent, for which she departs without knowing where she will find a job. On the boat to Labassecour she meets a young English lady who is going to school in Villette. Silly and a bit snobbish, Ginevra Fanshawe “tormented me with an unsparing selfishness” and her “entire incapacity to endure” the rolling sea. By contrast, Lucy is the one passenger who can remain on deck throughout the afternoon, upholding England’s honor as a maritime power. But Ginevra does one useful thing, telling her that a Madame Beck, who runs a girls’ school in Villette, is looking for “an English gouvernante.”
Modeste Maria Beck turns out to be “a charitable woman” who, Lucy takes care to recall, “did a great deal of good.” However, the turnover among her employees is sobering. It transpires that charitable Mme. Beck rules her establishment by careful surveillance of her staff and students, “glid[ing] ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every key-hole, listening behind every door.” “While devoid of sympathy, she had a sufficiency of rational benevolence”; very French, she loved ‘the poor’ as a class, as an abstraction, without loving anyone, rich or poor, as a person. The key to heart wasn’t sympathy but self-interest. She reserves her love for herself and her own, particularly her own children, whom she cares for by meeting their every physical need without wasting an ounce of affection. She surveils them as well. In all, she’s a sort of Comtian without Comte’s theories, combining in her soul the qualifications for “a first minister and a superintendent of police,” combined. “Wise, firm faithless, secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate—withal perfectly decorous,” she quickly sees that Lucy will make a good teacher and wastes no time putting her to that service.
Gazing at her first class, Lucy “beheld opposite to me a row of eyes and brows that threatened stormy weather” in their own way worse than the English Channel waves—eyes “full of an insolent light, and brows hard and unblushing as marble. The continental ‘female’ is quite a different being to the insular ‘female’ of the same age and class.” Knowing that “madame would at any time throw overboard a professeur or maîtresse who became unpopular with the school” (like many a private-school administrator before and since, Madame knows where her bread is buttered) they expected “an easy victory” over the newcomer. Lucy subordinates the ringleader, “a young baronne” named Mademoiselle de Melcy, by reading her “stupid” composition aloud in front of the class and then tearing it in two. She is still more severe with the one remaining rebel, a girl with “a dark, mutinous, sinister eye,” whom she pushes into a closet and locks the door behind. It transpires that the girl was disliked by the other students, so this display of force enhances rather than diminishes Miss Snowe’s esteem among the students. Mme. Beck, who as a matter of course has been surveilling the classroom all along, pronounces, “C’est bien” when Lucy emerges from the classroom. From then on, her authority is secure; the reasonable but blunt English way of ruling has prevailed over the French revolutionaries, with the approval of the chief surveiller.
“Villette is a cosmopolitan city, and in this school were girls of almost every European nation, and likewise of very varied rank in life”—the right place to study comparative politics, one might say.” “Equality is much practiced in Labassecour; though not republican in form, it is nearly so in substance,” as indeed France was in 1853, when Brontë published her book, under Napoleon III. (A few years later, Tocqueville would publish his book on the French Revolution, maintaining that civil-social equality had prevailed in France since before the French Revolution, thriving under various forms of monarchism and republicanism alike.) “At the desks of Madame Beck’s establishment the young countess and the young bourgeoise sat side by side”; differentiated only by their manners—often “franker and more courteous” among the bourgeoises, with the aristocrats displaying “a delicately balanced combination of insolence and deceit.” As for the citizens of Labassecour, they “had an hypocrisy of their own,” but “of a such coarse order, such as could deceive few.” Among all, when a lie was judged necessary, “they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth altogether untroubled by the rebuke of conscience.”
As before, Lucy determines as she considers her students, “I must look only to myself” for support in “bring[ing] this stiff-necked tribe under permanent influence.” They “were not to be driven by force” as a general policy. “They were to be humored, borne with very patiently: a courteous though sedate manner impressed them; a very rare flash of raillery did good. Severe or continuous mental application they could not or would not, bear: heavy demand on the memory, the reason, the attention, they rejected point-blank.” English steadfastness was not a resource a teacher could mine in them, but it would serve the teacher very well. “They would riot for three additional lines to a lesson; but I never knew them rebel against a wound given to their self-respect; the little they had of that quality was trained to be crushed, and it rather liked the pressure of a firm heel than otherwise.” Egalitarian, then, but also apt subjects of despotism: Just as Tocqueville would say.
The reason Ginevra Fanshawe knew about the open position at the school turns out to have been simple: She is a student there. She has two suitors in her thrall, one whom she’s nicknamed “Isidore” (perhaps after the scholarly St. Isidore of Seville) who idealizes her and buys her things, much to her amusement (“he really thinks I am sensible”). But “he is only bourgeois.” “My present business is to enjoy youth and not to think of fettering myself, by promise or vow, to this man or that.” She prefers the attentions of “Le Colonel Alfred de Hamal,” an aristocrat. “À bas les grandes passions et les sévères vertus!” Lucy, then, isn’t the only one who knows how to discipline her passions, to say to them, “À bas,” although Ginevra unfortunately disciplines her virtues as well, all in service of a self-conscious superficiality, a way of life consisting of light pleasures. In her own way, she is an English girl who out-Frenches the French.
When one of Mme. Beck’s daughters takes sick, she summons a “Dr. John,” who disappoints Madame by failing to take any interest in her. Initially, Lucy suspects him of carrying on an affair with Rosine Muton, “an unprincipled though pretty little French grisette”—a working-class girl, beneath even Dr. John’s professional but lamentably unaristocratic station in life. Lucy gets caught up in these romantic intrigues, and she soon learns that Mademoiselle Muton is not the object of Dr. John’s affections; Ginevra Fanshaw is, and he is her less-than-respected “Isidore.”
Before giving an account of this discovery, Lucy remarks on another regime difference between herself and the Labassecourians. They worry about her Protestantism, and she is less than impressed with their Catholicism. “One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds; the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live.” There could hardly be a terser description of the contrast between French and English characters. And beyond this, the school, once a convent, comes with its own “ghost story,” a “vague tale” about a nun of “the drear middle ages” who had been “buried alive, for some sin against her vow.” Lucy considers it all “romantic rubbish,” another instance of Catholic superstition. Catholicism pervades the regime of the school, “a strange, frolicsome, noisy little world,” where “great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers”—exactly the observation Rousseau makes about civil society generally, but which Lucy rather thinks more descriptive of Catholic society especially. “A subtle Romanism pervaded every arrangement: large sensual indulgence (so to speak) was permitted by way of counterpoise to jealous spiritual restrain. Each mind was being reared in slavery; but, to prevent reflection from dwelling on this fact, every pretext for physical recreation was seized and made the most of. There, as elsewhere, the CHURCH strove to bring up her children robust in body, feeble in soul, fat, ruddy, hale, joyous, ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning”—as much as saying, “Look after your bodies; leave your souls to me.” “A bargain in which every true Catholic deems himself a gainer,” Lucy ripostes; “Lucifer just offers the same terms.”
To confirm the point of this harangue, Lucy offers the spectacle of the annual fête in honor of Mme. Beck, the highlight of which is to be a play directed by M. Paul Emanuel, the “pungent and austere” professor of literature, a man of harsh, “irritable nature.” He lowers himself to beg Lucy for help when one of the girls takes ill a few hours before the play is to go on; “I apply to an Englishwoman to rescue me,” he says through gritted teeth, half to her and half to himself. Playing the role of a foppish man courting a silly flirt in the person of the typecast Miss Fanshawe, she notices that the girl is making eyes at Dr. John, who is in the audience. This goads Lucy to imitate what she sees to be his longing, “rival[ing] and out-rival[ing] him” for attention. “I acted as if wishful and resolute to win and conquer.” Although taking the part “to please another,” she finally “acted to please myself.” Upon reflection, and with a bow to a lesson taught by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, “I quite disapproved of these amateur performances.” In this instance it revealed “a keen relish for dramatic expression” in her nature, which “would not do for a mere looker-on at life; the strength and longing must be put by; and I put them by, and fastened them in with the lock of a resolution which neither Time nor Temptation has since picked.” À bas….
At the ball following the play, Ginevra’s flirtations are interrupted by jealous Madame, who, “like a little Bonaparte,” drags Dr. John away from her and to the invited parents. The girl takes out her frustration on Lucy, explaining at some length how much better-born, wealthier, accomplished, prettier, desired, and happier she is, compared to her loveless, unloved teacher. The suggestion that she is vain rolls off, but she does reveal what Lucy wants her to confirm, that Dr. John is the same as ‘Isidore.’ In conversation with the hapless physician, she learns that he imagines her “a simple, innocent, girlish fairy,” indeed a “graceful angel.” She mocks him by praising his rival, Colonel de Hamal (whom she called a monkey to Miss Fanshawe) as a “sweet seraph,” then leaves him to her illusions.
The school’s next major event is public examination day, two months after the fête. Once again, “the fiery and grasping little man” Paul Emanuel takes charge, and once again needs the Englishwoman to conduct the English exam, the one topic he “could not manage.” She softens his ire when she offers to give no examination on that topic at all. “A constant crusade against the ‘amour-propre’ of every human being, but himself, was the crotchet of this able, but fiery and grasping, little man”; in this, he bears some resemblance to Rousseau. Does he begin to love this English Sophie?
September vacation arrives, and a nightmare about her dead family, “who had loved me well in life” but now “met me elsewhere, alienated,” galls her “inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future”; “quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknown terrors,” terrors she has “suffered with a troubled mind” from the time of her youth. Severed from the love of her family members in this life, perhaps frightened that her current life might meet with their disapproval, and therefore rejection, severance from love in the afterlife, and without any known prospects for love in the future (given Graham’s distraction by Ginevra), in desperation she enters a Catholic Church and its confessional. She disrupts the priest’s routine by confessing, “Mon père, je suis Protestante.” He asks her to come not to the church but to his house, tomorrow, a proposal she would have as soon done as to walk “into a Babylonish furnace.” Why? “That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious.” Had she acceded to his invitation, “I might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of Crecy in Villette.” It was enough that the priest “was kind when I needed kindness; he did me good.”
On the way back to her room she faints. A watchful person, whom she later guesses was the priest, delivers her to Dr. John’s house. She now tells her readers that Dr. John is in fact Graham Bretton, who has followed in his father’s professional footsteps. He still lives with his mother. After more than a week of bed rest she comes down to the sitting room. “How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort!” And “to render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the table—an English tea, whereof the whole shining service glanced at me familiarly,” not only because it is in the English style but because it is the service she remembers from the Bretton’s home in England. One might say that her recovery from an excess of Frenchness requires a dose of Englishness, perhaps a greater contribution to her recovery than Dr. John’s medical care. That night, “When I said my prayers, and when I was undressed and laid down, I felt that I still had friends.” Characteristically, she calls upon “Reason” to moderate her “importunate gratitude” for having recovered them. And she defends her self-rule. “These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good,” making “the general tenor of life… to be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall. As to what lies below, leave that with God.” A regime like Mme. Beck’s, a regime like that of France, may surveil; show God “the secrets of the spirit He gave” and “ask Him how you are to bear the pains He has appointed,” for “patience in extreme need.” God’s time isn’t human time: “The cycle of one departure and return may clasp unnumbered generations; and departure and return may clasp unnumbered generations; and dust, kindling to brief suffering life, and, through pain, passing back to dust, may meanwhile perish out of memory again, and yet again.” This is indeed a Protestant answer both to ‘Hobbesian’ fear of death and the response to it fashioned in Catholic Church ritual.
Dr. John persists in his illusions about Miss Fanshawe until he, his mother, and Lucy encounter her at a concert, accompanied by another young lady aristocrat. When Ginevra snubs both the doctor and his mother, he draws the line. “I never saw her ridiculed before.” He confides to Lucy, “As [Ginevra] passed me tonight, triumphant, in beauty, my emotions did her homage; but for one luckless sneer, I should yet be the humblest of her servants”; “she could not in ten years have done what, in a moment, she has done through my mother.” How does my mother seem to you? he asks Lucy. “As she always does—an English, middle-class gentlewoman; well, though gravely dressed, habitually independent of pretense, constitutionally composed and cheerful.” Exactly so, Dr. John agrees: “The merry may laugh with mamma, but the weak only will laugh at her; she shall not be ridiculed with my consent at least, nor without my—my scorn—my antipathy.” And that is that.
But this doesn’t mean that Dr. John turn his attentions to her. School re-starts; Graham promises to write. But “Reason” forbids her to reveal her feelings for him, to him. “This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope: she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken-down.” For me, Reason “was always as envenomed as a step-mother.” “If I have obeyed her it has been chiefly with the obedience of fear, not of love”; Lucy is no philosopher. “Long ago I should have died of her ill-usage, her stint, her chill, her barren board, her icy bed, her savage, ceaseless blows, but for that Kinder Power who hold my secret and sworn allegiance,” “a spirit softer and better than human Reason.” It is in that kind of love, agapic love, that “divine, compassionate, succourable influence” that she finds solace for the lovelessness she has found in the world. In the event, Dr. John does write, and Lucy discerns that his “blithe genial language” was intended “not merely to content me” but also “to gratify himself.” The fact that he writes her because he wants to gives Lucy a moment that “had no pain, no blot, no want; full, pure, perfect, it deeply blessed me,” and she will forgive him for turning from her once again “for the sake of that one dear remembered good!”
While reading the letter, a figure resembling the ghostly nun appears to her. In their next conversation, Dr. John will explain it away as an illusion “resulting from long-continued mental conflict.” When he prescribes happiness as the cure and a “cheerful mind” as the preventive,” Lucy quite rightly rejoins that “happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mold and tilled with manure,” but a blessing. In effect taking that rebuke to heart, at least in part, he invites to his home every week, “to keep away the nun,” as he puts it with his characteristic kind jocularity. “He regarded me scientifically in the light of a patient, and at once exercised his professional skill, and gratified his natural benevolence, by a course of cordial and attentive treatment.” It is a response unlikely to satisfy a woman. He is not unthoughtful. On the contrary, “Dr. John could think, and think well, but he was rather a man of action than of thought; he could feel, and feel vividly in his way, but his heart had no chord for enthusiasm: to bright, soft, sweet influences his eyes and lips gave bright, soft, sweet welcome, beautiful to see as dyes of rose and silver, pearl and purple, imbuing summer clouds.” But as for the other half of Burke’s dichotomy, the sublime as distinguished from the beautiful, “what belonged to storm, what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden and flaming,” for that “he had no sympathy, and held with it no communion.” This “cool young Briton” looked down on the sublime as “the pale cliffs of his own England” look down on the tides of the Channel. It is Lucy, for all her superficial coldness, who responds to the sublime, to the Biblical more than to the classical. In this she is closer to Dostoevsky than to Jane Austen, despite her Englishness. Unlike Austen or Austen’s heroines, unlike Dr. John, for her Reason is a heavy bridle, a yoke, a burden only assuaged by the divine, agapic love which, regardless of the comfort it offers, issues from the supremely sublime God of the Bible.
A man of moderation, a ‘classical’ man, Dr. John can act decisively in response to the sublime when it appears, quite literally sudden and flaming. A fire breaks out in the theater: “Reader, I can see him yet, with his look of comely courage and cordial calm” while most of the crowd panicked and began to stampede. He sees one woman “braver than some men”; he helps her guardian rescue her from being trampled by terrified crowd. The girl turns out to be a Miss Bassompierre, formerly known as Paulina Home; her father recently inherited the estate of his late mother, a French aristocrat, along with the aristocratic ‘de’ that comes with the family fortune. Miss Fanshawe is quite beside herself with jealousy, inasmuch as Dr. John and his mother strike up a social connection with father and daughter, in the aftermath of the emergency. As Paulina tells Lucy, the Graham she knew at Bretton was smaller and wasn’t yet shaving, “yet he is Graham, just as I am little Polly, or you are Lucy Snowe.” This sense of the continuity of individual identity over time exactly fits Lucy’s mindset: “I thought the same,” namely, that “the child of seven was in the girl of seventeen,” “but I wondered to find my thoughts hers: there are certain things in which we so rarely met with our double that it seems a miracle when that chance befalls.” Paulina is indeed her double in another sense, as she will soon take the place at Dr. John’s side that Lucy had wished for herself. Lucy watches as their intimacy in conversation grows: “There are certain natures of which the mutual influence is such that the more they say the more they have to say. For these, out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion, amalgamation.” There is of course nothing for her to do, and she returns to the school. “Though stoical, I was not quite a stoic; drops streamed fast on my hands, on my desk I wept one sultry shower, heavy and brief. But soon I said to myself, The Hope I am bemoaning suffered and made me suffer much: it did not die till it was full time: following an agony so lingering, death ought to be welcome. Welcome I endeavored to make it. Indeed, long pain had made patience a habit.” She puts Dr. John’s letters away, in a hole in an old pear tree on the school grounds. “I was not only going to hide a treasure” (Mme. Beck has been reading them, and showing them to M. Emanuel); “I meant to bury a grief. If lie be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.”
She continues her friendship with Paulina, who has been pestered by jealous cousin Ginevra, who brags about her admirers and denigrates Dr. John while claiming to have him as her admirer. “She is insolent; and I believe, false,” Paulina tells her. Lucy knows this to be true, but they agree to test his feelings at a dinner party.
Meanwhile, Ginevra’s falseness stems from her inability to see the difference between nature and convention. “Who are you, Miss Snowe?” she asks, not understanding how a woman who was first hired as a nursery-governess now enjoys the respect of Mme. Beck and the company of the young Countess de Bassompierre. She means “who” in the sense of social status; “her incapacity to conceive how any person not bolstered up by birth or wealth, not supported by some consciousness of name or connection, could maintain an attitude of reasonable integrity.” There is some sense in this, “the world’s wisdom,” as “an accumulation of small defenses” in the form of conventional respectability can serve as a “safeguard from debasement”; human beings are social animals, after all. Ginevra’s error consists in taking this too far, in overlooking the natural character of both the sanguine Dr. John and self-reflective, often melancholy Lucy. The courtship between Dr. John and Paulina proceeds, quite apart from Miss Fanshawe’s verbal sniping when, at the party, he approaches Paulina, not Ginevra. (Ginevra will recover from her disappointment, soon enough; later on, she will elope with Colonel de Hamal, shallow calling to shallow.)
There is another courtship going on, an unexpected one between Lucy and Paul Emanuel. As both these souls tend toward the sublime, not the beautiful, this one cannot go smoothly: “Never was a better little man, in some points, then M. Paul: never in others, a more waspish little despot,” by turns Corneille and Napoleon. Gradually, even torturously, he gains in her esteem. At a holiday ceremony at the local college she listens as he gives the featured speech. “The collegians he addressed, not as school-boys, but as future citizens and embryo patriots. With all his fire he was severe and sensible: he trampled Utopian theories under his heel; he rejected wild reams with scorn—but, when he looked in the face of tyranny—oh, then there opened a light in his eye worth seeing; and when he spoke of injustice, his voice gave no uncertain sound, but reminded me rather of the band-trumpet, ringing at twilight from the park.” Not all, “but some of the college youth caught fire”—that image of the sublime—as “he eloquently told them what should be their path and endeavor in their country’s and in Europe’s future.” In a later conversation, he tells her he wishes her to be “mon ami.” Here again, the difference between France and England appears. She agrees to call him “my friend,” a word with a less intimate connotation than the French “ami.” He doesn’t know that, and he rewards her with a previously unexampled “smile of pleasure, or content, or kindness.” His “visage changed as from a mask to a face.” Diplomatic relations have been established, indeed a human one. He will continue to call her “une Anglaise terrible,” but in a more playful manner than before. They begin to know and understand one another, although not without what increasingly look like lover’s quarrels. Whereas the courtship of Dr. John and Paulina proceeds beautifully, by proper stages, the sublime courtship of M. Paul and Lucy begins, proceeds, and culminates in storm.
For example, the time for M. Paul’s annual fête arrives, the counterpart of the one for Mme. Beck. Almost predictably, Monsieur will deliver the keynote address on his own day of honor. From the podium, baits her, and plays to the crowd, with an attack on “les Anglaises”—their “minds, morals, manners, [and] personal appearance,” and more specifically “their tall stature, their long necks, their thin arms, their slovenly dress, their pedantic education, their impious skepticism”—quite the charge, Miss Snowe evidently thinks, coming from a countryman of Voltaire—their “insufferable pride, their pretentious virtue.” “For some time the abuse of England and the English found and left me stolid.” But after fifteen minutes or so “this hissing cockatrice” began to abuse “not only our women, but our greatest names and best men; sullying the shield of Britannia, and dabbling the union-jack in mud.” All to the amusement of the girls, “for it is curious to discover how these clowns of Labassecour secretly hate England.” Out of patience, she matches his French patriotism with her English, in French: “Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héros! À bas la France, la Fiction et les Faquins!” Against French myths and indeed lies, English history; against French scoundrels, English heroes. Having achieved his purpose of drawing her out, he rewards her with a smirk, infuriating her still further. But back in her room, her rage subsided, she “smiled at the whole scene.” Things are getting to the point where she can’t stay angry with him for long. “I was losing the early impulse to recoil from M. Paul,” and as for himself, he later meets her in a manner “both indulgent and good-natured.” True, “he had points of resemblance to Napoleon Bonaparte,” with his “shameless disregard of magnanimity”; “he would have exiled fifty Madame de Staëls, if they had annoyed, offended, outrivaled, or opposed him,” but Lucy has begun to learn how to negotiate the sharp rocks of his shoreline, without quite being able to overcome his imperial libido dominandi. She does not yet clearly see that M. Paul, a master classroom teacher, delights in testing, in this case testing her loyalty to her country. (And not without reason: How much can one trust a person who despises his own country?) She has passed.
Lucy is about to discover what drives this odd little man. This becomes possible because she has more the temperament of a research professor than that of a teacher. (As for M. Paul, he “was not a man to write books.”) Alone in the garden of the school, she begins her discoveries with introspection, a quest for self-knowledge few of the other persons she has encountered trouble themselves to undertake. “Courage, Lucy Snowe!” she tells herself. “With self-denial and economy now, and steady exertion by-and-by, an object in life need not fail you.” For now, “labor for independence until you have proved, by winning that prize, your right to look higher.” For now, an émigré among unfriendly foreigners, “is there nothing more for me in life—no true home—nothing to be dearer to me than myself? Nothing, at whose feet I can willingly lay down the whole burden of human egotism, and gloriously take up the nobler charge of laboring and living for others?” Perhaps not: “for you the crescent-phase must suffice,” and so it is with “a huge mass of my fellow creatures in no better circumstances,” and “I find no reason why I should be of the few favored.” Since “this life is not all, neither the beginning nor the end,” I shall continue “to believe while I tremble” and “trust while I weep.” And she concludes with a blessing: “Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful; but you are not mine. Good-night, and God bless you!”
Enter M. Paul, who interrupts her musings. He explains that, like Mme. Beck, he has been surveilling her, along with everyone else in the school, for months, from his apartment window with the aid of a looking-glass. “My book is this garden; its contents are human nature—female human nature.” He dismisses her objections to his spying as mere Protestantism, remarking that his tutor was a Jesuit, who would make no objection at all to what Lucy calls his “discoveries made by stealth.” He tells her he never once would “trouble my head about my dignity,” being a more modest man that she has supposed. In his observations, he too has seen the apparition of the nun, and together, that night, they see it again.
Whatever his methods of discovery, his discoveries favor her. A few weeks later, at a school picnic in the country where he leads the group in prayer, he allows that the two of them “worship the same God, in the same spirit, though by different rites.” This is something, not only a gesture of religious toleration but a self-revelation, and Lucy appreciates what he’s revealed. “Most of M. Emanuel’s brother professors were emancipated free-thinkers, infidels, atheists; and many of them men whose lives would not bear scrutiny: he was more like a knight of old, religious in his way, and of spotless fame,” his “vivid passions” and “keen feelings” kept in check, for the most part, by “his pure honor and his artless piety.” They read Corneille together, and he found in it “beauties I never could be brought to perceive”—the beauties of French neo-classicism, of Christianity and Aristotelianism combined. Be that as it may, she begins to perceive the beauties of Corneille in him.
He continues to test her. If you were my sister, would you “always be content to stay with a brother” such as I? Yes, she answers. But would she would remember him if he voyaged overseas? “Monsieur, how could I live in the interval?” she answers, with a touch of defensive ambiguity, leaving her sincerity open to affirmation or to doubt. “Pourtant j’ai été pour vous bien dur, bien exigeant”—yet I was for you very hard, very demanding. She hides her face behind the volume of noble Corneille, as tears cover her face. She has passed his love-test, and for the rest of the day he treats her with a gentleness that “went somehow to my heart.” Still on guard, she “would rather he had been abrupt, whimsical, and irate as was his wont.” She doesn’t like being vulnerable, a disposition her experiences have engrained in her.
She does well to be on guard. On an errand into town for Mme. Beck, she begins to see the design behind all the surveillance, the truth of M. Paul. She learns that Mme. Beck and M. Paul both know the priest, Père Silas, the one to whom she had confessed and who had delivered her to Dr. John on the night of her breakdown. She learns from the priest that M. Paul, his former student, had been engaged to a young woman, Justine Marie. The match was opposed by her grandmother “with all the violence of a temper which deformity”—she is a hunchback—made “sometimes demoniac.” Marie broke the engagement, went into a convent, and died there; since then, M. Paul has supported Marie’s widowed mother and the vile grandmother, taking on (in Père Silas’s words) “their insolent pride the revenge of the purest charity.” [1] Indeed, he also keeps his old tutor in the household, as well. “By this arrangement he has rendered it impossible to himself ever to marry”; he can’t afford it. Père Silas is mostly telling her the truth, but the Jesuit is telling her the truth with a plan in mind, she sees: He continues to want to bring her into the Church. As he soon admits, “I envy Heresy her prey.” She will resist the plot, but she now sees that, for all his theatrics, which made M. Paul “seem to me to lack magnanimity in trifles, yet how great he is in great things!” Not only that, the priest confides, given his continued to devotion to the memory of Marie, “the essence of Emanuel’s nature is—constancy.” That is what he was testing in her, whether it was constancy to the teaching vocation, constancy to her country or constancy to him. “He had become my Christian hero, under that character I wanted to view him.”
But heroes may not be available for marriage. Three questions “were at once the deepest puzzle, the strongest obstruction, and the keenest stimulus, I had ever felt.” Was the ghost of his dead fiancée “an eternal barrier” to marriage, for M. Paul? “And what of the charities which absorbed his worldly goods”—that is, could he support a wife in addition to his fiancée’s remaining family? And “what of his heart, sworn to virginity?” She reduces these three questions to two, presumably the first and the third, since Lucy can and does support herself (although perhaps jealous, disappointed Mme. Beck might have something to say about that). And so she turns the tables and tests him. For starters, exactly where do you live, M. Paul? He admits that his study at the school is his home, and he keeps no servants beyond his own hands. “I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded, and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom an dwell and testament, not to be disputed, has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven.” At this, she tells him the results of her own research, based partly on her own surveillance but mostly on the testimony of the priest. After overcoming his surprise, he wants to know, given this knowledge, can you be my ami, or in English “a close friend,” “intimate and real,” “a sister”? She hesitates, and so he invites her to continue her research, to test him further. Meanwhile, he has another test question for her. Recalling the figure of the nun they saw in the school garden, he asks, “You did not, nor will you fancy, that a saint in Heaven perturbs herself with rivalries of earth? Protestants are rarely superstitious; these morbid fancies will not beset you?” On the contrary, she answers: “I know not what to think of this matter; but I believe a perfectly natural solution of this seeming mystery will one day be arrived at.” He has answered the first question, along with the second. And her expectation will be confirmed a short time later, when she learns from a letter from Ginevra that the nun apparition was none other than Colonel de Hamal in disguise, on one of many visits to his lover at the school.
Then there is one last religious test. He leaves a religious tract in her desk at school, written by Père Silas. “He that had written it was no bad man, and while perpetually betraying the trained cunning—the cloven hoof of his [Jesuit] system—I should pause before accusing himself of sincerity.” She surmises that M. Paul placed the tract with her in order to satisfy the importunities of his friends, worried over his “fraternal communion with a heretic.” When he asks her about it, she ventures, “I thought it made me a little sleepy.” After he leaves, she overhears him praying to the Virgin Mary for her salvation in the Church. “Strange! I had no such feverish wish to turn him from the faith of his fathers. I thought Romanism wrong, a great mixed image of gold and clay; but it seemed to me that this Romanist held the purer elements of his creed with an innocency of heart which God must love.” She considers Romanism defective because its priests are “mitered aspirants for this world’s kingdoms,” without sufficient longing for the kingdom of the next world. “There is a Mercy beyond human compassions, a Love stronger than this strong death which even you [priests] must face, and before it, fall: a charity more potent than any sin, even yours; a Pity which redeems world’s—nay, absolves Priests.” As she tells M. Paul, “the more I saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism”; Protestants keep “fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance.” Given that nature, Protestants eschew confession to priests and go directly to God, praying the Sinner’s Prayer, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” With this, she has met his final test of constancy, her constancy to Protestantism. “‘Whatever say priest or controversialists,’ murmured M. Emanuel, ‘God is good, and loves all the sincere”; as a Catholic, he too prays the Sinner’s Prayer. “It may be that the constancy of one heart, the truth and faith of one mind according to the light He has appointed, import as much to Him as the just motion of satellites around their planets, of planets about their suns, of suns around that mighty unseen center, incomprehensible, irrealizable, with strange mental effort only divined.” And so “God guide us all! God bless you, Lucy!” It is a blessing parallel to the one Lucy whispered to her mental image of Dr. John, just before M. Paul’s crucial intervention. Whether he knows it or not, M. Paul has enunciated the terms of the English religious settlement, the Anglican Church establishment of course abstracted. France and England have reached an Entente Cordiale. Later on, Lucy will reflect, “All Rome could not put into him bigotry, nor the Propaganda itself make him a real Jesuit. He was born honest, and not false—artless, and not cunning—a freeman, and not a slave.” A real French republican who remains faithful to French Catholicism in a spirit of true catholicity can treat with an equally free, unslavish English Protestant.
For Lucy, however, there will be no entente with life in this world. She has a presentiment of that as she watches the happy continuation of Dr. John’s courtship of Paulina. They are among “Nature’s elect,” as distinguished from God’s; “often, these are not pampered, selfish beings” but “harmonious and benign” souls, “men and women with charity, kind agents of God’s kind attributes. Dr. John “was born victor, as some are born vanquished”—including Lucy Snowe. She confirms this, once again, as M. Paul undertakes to do what he had hinted at doing—proceed to leave Europe and take care of an estate at Basseterre (literally, ‘low earth’), Guadeloupe, owned by the old grandmother and in need of looking-after “by a competent agent of integrity” so that it may produce a decent stream of income. M. Paul is such an agent, and the woman has offered him a deal: Do this for two or three and “after that, he should live for himself,” since she and her daughter, a reliable income assured, then will no longer need his financial assistance. Père Silas is happy, as his former student now “runs risk of apostacy” with his Protestant ami; Mme. Beck is happy to destroy (as she hopes) that friendship, even if she no longer can hope to make M. Paul her own. The self-interest of each of M. Paul’s associates will be satisfied.
She must endure one more test, this unintended. M. Paul delays his departure for a few days, and Lucy happens upon him, along with those he supports. One of these is an attractive young woman, his ward. Their obvious affection for one another alarms her; unseen by his party, she retreats to her room in despair. Fortunately visits her at the school, just before departing. Having been surrounded by women rivals more physically attractive than herself—Ginevra, Paulina, even (as she has mistakenly supposed) his ward—she needs one last, crucial, reassurance: “Do I displease your eyes much?” His “short, strong answer” gave her to know “what I was for him,” and “what I might be for the rest of the world, I ceased painfully to care.” More, and unexpectedly, he has provided for her in his absence, setting her up with a school-room attached to an apartment, so that she can have her own students and get away from the surveilling and by unbenignant eye of Mme. Beck. Do the others know this? she asks. “‘Mon ami,’ said he, ‘none knows what I have done save you and myself: the pleasure is consecrated to us two, unshared and unprofaned.'” When she confesses her doubts of him, respecting his intentions toward his young ward, “he gathered me near his heart. I was full of faults; he took them and me all home.” Any Christian will recognize in this an imitatio Christi. But this savior is wholly a man, one who now proposes marriage.
The three years ensuing “were the happiest of my life.” This implies that there will be no happy marriage, and there is none. A seven-day but destructive, anti-creative Atlantic storm takes his boat down on the return voyage. “Here pause,” Lucy tells herself. “There is enough said.” She will not share this last agony with her readers. M. Paul’s work for the others completed, “Madame Beck prospered all the days of her life; so did Père Silas.” The grandmother lived to be ninety. All profited from his stewardship of the estate. Lucy’s legacy is the story itself, her Christian testimony.
That testimony is the core of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Dr. John and Paulina are beautiful, blessed by nature and by nature’s God for lives lived harmoniously, pictures of the classical virtues. Lucy and M. Paul are sublime, persons who will never ‘fit in’ with nature, with ‘this world.’ God harrows them for the next world, for His world, providentially. Human beings imitate divine providence by exercising surveillance. Unlike God, they cannot see all; unlike God, they cannot understand all they see; unlike God, they lack the power to do everything they want, and they lack the perfect justice to want everything they should. True, some are better than others. The innocent and justifiable inquiries of Lucy, and even the secretive surveillance of M. Paul, serve just and even loving purposes. The surveillance of Mme. Beck and of the French Catholic Church in the person of Père Silas, not so much. M. Paul is an apparent Bonaparte; Mme. Beck is a real one, if on a decidedly smaller scale. Lucy fights a war of Napoleonic proportions in her soul, and her victory consists partly of the rule of natural reason over her heart but most essentially of the attunement of her heart to the love of God.
Surveillance aims at ruling; it is a technique of ruling. In the civil-social regime of the French, “sensual indulgence” is allowed, so long as it remains subordinate to the Catholic Church and (often) a monarchic regime. The French may care for their own bodies so long as they leave their souls to their rulers, who rule their souls as much as human beings can do, by keeping a close watch on actions. The French are equal, under monarchy both religious and civil. English civil society is aristocratic—foolishly so, when embodied by a Ginevra Fanshawe, more seriously when embodied by a John Graham Bretton, a bourgeois professional man who marries into a newly-aristocratic family. The virtues of the current and future rulers of England will be found in such as he, and his bride. In Lucy, the English regime shows a soul that will never enter the ruling class but will form its civil-social foundation. Lucy sternly imposes reason on her conduct. This leaves her soul, the part of her no human can directly see, to God’s love, not to the human-all-too-human rule of the Church. An onlooker in life, a ‘loser’ not a ruler, disciplined by reason but rewarded by agapic love, Lucy is providentially directed to pin her hopes on the next life, the Kingdom of God. This is indispensable to the welfare of the English regime and the people its ruling class rules. The majority of people in any regime will not live humanly fulfilled lives. Their charity, their kindness, their ‘other-worldliness’ gives them, and their country, a way of life worth defending. Vive l’Angleterre, l’Histoire et les Héroes, indeed, Charlotte Brontë gives her heroine to say, on the way to this final settlement of the Napoleonic Wars.
Note
- As M. Paul’s apostolic namesake puts it in Romans 12:20, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirsts, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” The Apostle Paul is quoting Proverbs 25: 21-23.
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