Constantin Heger

Constantin Georges Romain Heger^[a] was born in Brussels in 1809 and moved to Paris in 1825 seeking employment. For a period he worked as secretary to a solicitor, but because of a shortage of funds, was unable to pursue a legal career himself. In 1829, he returned to Brussels, where he became a teacher of French and mathematics at the Athénée Royal. In 1830, he married his first wife, Marie-Josephine Noyer. When revolution broke out in Brussels in 1830, Heger fought on the barricades from 23 to 27 September alongside the revolutionaries. In September 1833, Heger's wife died during a cholera epidemic.^[1] His son, Gustave died in June 1834, at nine months old. He was appointed a teacher in languages, mathematics, geography and Belgian history at the veterinary college in Brussels' Rue Terarken. Heger continued to teach at the Athénée Royal when it relocated to the Rue des Douze Apôtres in 1839. He met Mlle Claire Zoë Parent (1804 – 1887), the head of the neighbouring girls' boarding school in the Rue Isabelle, where he began teaching. They married in 1836 and had six children.^[1]

In 1842 Emily and Charlotte Brontë travelled to Brussels to enroll in the boarding school run by Heger and his wife. Their aim was to improve their skill in languages. In return for board and tuition, Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music. Charlotte was greatly impressed with Heger, whom she describes in an early letter to a friend^[2]:

There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken M Heger the husband of Madame - he is a professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament - a little, black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tomcat - sometimes those of a delirious Hyena - occasionally - but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like ...

The sisters' time at the school was cut short in October 1842 by the sudden death of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843 to take up a teaching post at the school. Her second stay there was not a happy one; she was lonely, homesick, and had developed a passionate (and unreciprocated) attachment to Constantin Heger, which made it impossible for her to remain. She finally returned to the Parsonage at Haworth in January 1844, and later used her time at the boarding school as the inspiration for parts of The Professor, Jane Eyre and Villette. She maintained a somewhat one-sided correspondence with Heger, sending him numerous letters, which he mostly seems to have left unanswered. Charlotte Brontë's feelings for Heger were not made public until after her death, when four of her letters to him were published in The Times. In one of these, she writes:^[3]

...all I know – is that I cannot – that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master's friendship – I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains that have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope – if he gives me a little friendship – a very little – I shall be content – happy, I would have a motive for living – for working. Monsieur, the poor do not need a great deal to live on – they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich men's table – but if they are refused these crumbs – they die of hunger – No more do I need a great deal of affection from those I love – I would not know what to do with a whole and complete friendship – I am not accustomed to it – but you showed a little interest in me in days gone by when I was your pupil in Brussels – and I cling to the preservation of this little interest – I cling to it as I would cling on to life.

Heger had first shown these letters to Elizabeth Gaskell when she visited him in 1856 while researching her biography The Life of Charlotte Brontë, but Gaskell omitted any mention of them from the biography. The letters, referred to as the 'Heger Letters', had originally been torn up by Heger, but his wife retrieved them and meticulously pieced them back together. Their son, Paul Heger, and his sisters eventually donated the letters to the British Museum, and in 1913 they were published.^[4] Heger's letters to Charlotte were all destroyed.

After the Brontës' stay at the boarding school, Heger became principal of the Athénée Royal in 1853, but resigned the position in 1855 in objection to methods implemented by the general inspectors of the school. At his request, he resumed the teaching of the youngest class in the school. He continued to give lessons in his wife's boarding school until he retired around 1882.

Constantin Heger died in 1896, and was buried with his wife and their daughter Marie, who died in 1886, in Watermael-Boitsfort municipal cemetery, on the edge of the Sonian Forest.