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II
What are these two new passages at the Pierpont Morgan?
Brontë scholars will recognize the second one as a re-working of The Professor. If, therefore, we are to hazard a guess as to a possible date, we must quickly review the circumstances of its composition and probable revision.
In February of 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to study French at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels; this was to prepare them to become (along with Anne) headmistresses of their own proposed school at Haworth. On 1 January 1844, at age twenty-seven, Charlotte left Brussels for the last time. There followed two years of personal, private suffering.[3] During her twenty months at the Pensionnat she had unwittingly—and probably until the very end, unknowingly—fallen in love with her "dear Master," the very dynamic but also very married Constantin Heger. Then in April of 1846, on behalf of all the sisters, Charlotte wrote Aylott and Jones about their possible interest in "three distinct and unconnected tales" (SHB 2:87). These were to be Emily's Wuthering Heights, Anne's Agnes Grey, and Charlotte's The Professor, a short novel set in Brussels. Tellingly, Charlotte originally titled it The Master.[4] By the time The Professor reached the firm of Smith, Elder in July of 1847, it had been rejected five times since the summer of 1846 (SHB 2:152-153). William Smith Williams, reader for Smith, Elder, also rejected the hapless manuscript, but his two-page letter was so courteous and specific that Charlotte wrote back that she (or, rather, Currer Bell) would like to send him a three-volume manuscript then nearing completion.[5] Three weeks later she sent him Jane Eyre which was quickly accepted and published on October 16th.
But the Brussels experience was recent enough and dominant enough in her life that she still needed to see it in print, albeit fictionally disguised.
Yet in her 1983 study, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, Christine Alexander suggests that a recasting of The Professor was taking place sometime during the fall and perhaps winter of 1847-48. She points to an untitled manuscript known sometimes as John Henry and sometimes as The Moores;[6] the narrative breaks off after the opening of chapter three, but its focus on the two Crimsworth brothers (whose names are now changed to Moore) points to a revision of the early chapters of The Professor. Of equal interest is Alexander's reference to "an earlier preface to The Professor, about which little is known" (Alexander, 223). This manuscript (Bonnell Collection, Haworth) breaks off after one and a half pages. It consists of Currer Bell's critique of the narrator, William Crimsworth, as well as "the same summary of the early lives of the two brothers, Edward and William, that we find in The Professor, in John Henry, and in the juvenilia" (Alexander 224).
"Three commencements have I essayed . . ." Alexander suggests that John Henry (or The Moores) is one of these three "commencements," and that perhaps the little known and as yet unpublished earlier "Preface" (in the Bonnell Collection) is still another (222, 223). We might now speculate that the "professeur de pensionnat" fragment in the Pierpont Morgan is a portion of the third of the three "commencements" made late in 1847.
On the other hand, we must not overlook the likelihood that Charlotte was tinkering with The Professor as late as January of 1851 as she raised the question of its publication once again with Smith, Elder and optimistically prepared the (Pierpont Morgan) "Preface" against its presumed acceptance. Indeed, she remarked in the "Preface" that "to have reached him [the reader] in the form of a printed book, this brief narrative must have gone through
The first of the two fragments at the Pierpont Morgan—"C'est possible'"—is at once more elusive and more suggestive. Elusive, in that we do not know the principals involved and therefore cannot even hazard a date. But the fragment is also suggestive in its directness: it has the force of a waking dream, and unlike the "professeur de pensionnat" fragment, it is written without difficulty or correction of any kind. Moreover, it captures attention by means of its alliterative patterning and unusual lexical choices.[7]
But, for Brontë scholars, this passage has more importance than its possible relationship to The Professor. True, since it is on the same sheet of paper not only with the "Preface" but also with the evident developing of The Professor's protagonist, the "professeur de pensionnat," it may in some way be related to that early novel. On the other hand, one might argue an even stronger relationship to what that same Brussels material would eventually become: Villette.
In support of this conjecture, we should note that the first language of the man in this passage is French, not English. Moreover, his habits of cigarsmoking and self-dramatization disqualify him as little William Crimsworth and his "demure Quaker countenance" (SHB 3:207). Finally, the sexual tension in the passage is reminiscent of scenes between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, between Lucy Snowe and M. Paul. However, the question which "Mademoiselle" puts to the man, "And can I marry or not?" is not consonant with the conditions of being a governess in someone else's home; nineteenth-century governesses simply did not work and marry simultaneously. It is, however, just the question which a young, would-be headmistress might put to her mentor. Charlotte's experience in England had been with headmistresses who did not marry, but in Brussels she saw Mme. Heger functioning daily as both headmistress and married woman. The fragment, then, might be the first groping toward the character of M. Paul in Villette, specifically towards the kind of baiting he indulges in with Lucy Snowe in the chapters titled "A Burial" and "The Watchguard." Tonally, there are similarities between this tiny fragment and the finished novel.
The two fragments reproduced here are not mentioned in the card catalogue at the Pierpont Morgan. Herbert Cahoon, Curator of Autograph MSS,
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