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Un Rat, las de la vie des villes, et des cours; (car il avait joué son rôle aux palais des
rois et aux salons des grand seigneurs) un rat, que l’expérience avait rendu sage,
enfin, un rat qui de courtisan était devenu philosophe, s’était retiré à sa maison de
campagne (un trou dans le tronc d’un grand ormeau) où il vivait en ermite et
dévouait tout son temps et tous ses soins à l’éducation de son fils unique.

Le jeune rat qui n’avait pas encore reçu de ces leçons sévères mais salutaires que donne
l’expérience, était un peu étourdi; les sages conseils de son père lui semblaient ennuyeux;
l’ombre et la tranquillité des bois, au lieu de calmer son esprit, le fatiguaient. Il s’impatientait
de voyager et de voir le monde.

Un beau matin, il se levait de bonne heure, il fit un petit paquet de fromage et de grain, et
sans mot dire à personne l’ingrat abandonna son père et le logis paternel et partit pour des
pays inconnus.

D’abord tout lui parut charmant; les fleurs étaient d’une fraîcheur, les arbres d’une verdure
qu’il n’avait jamais vues chez lui – et puis, il vit tant de merveilles; un animal avec une queue
plus grande que son corps (c’était un écureuil) une petite bête qui portait sa maison sur son
dos, (c’était un limaçon). Au bout de quelques heures il approcha une ferme, un odeur de
cuisine l’attira, il entra dans la basse cour – là il vit une espèce d’oiseau gigantesque qui
faisait un horrible bruit en marchant d’un air fier et orgueilleux. Or, cet oiseau était un
dindon, mais notre rat le prit pour un monstre, et effrayé de son aspect, il s’enfuyait sur le
champ.
Vers le soir il entra dans un bois, lassé et fatigué il s’assit au pied d’un arbre, il ouvrait son
petit paquet, mangeait son souper, et se couchait.

S’éveillant avec l’alouette – il sentit ses membres engourdis de froid, son lit dur le faisait mal;
alors il se souvenait de son père, l’ingrat rappellait les soins, et la tendresse du bon vieux rat,
il formait des vaines résolutions pour l’avenir, mais c’était trop tard, le froid avait gelé son
sang. L’Expérience fut pour lui une maîtresse austère, elle ne lui donna qu’une leçon et
qu’une punition, c’étaient la mort.

Le lendemain un bucheron trouva le cadavre, il ne le regarda que comme un objet dégoutant

et le poussa de son pied en passant, sans penser que là gisait le fils ingrat d’un tendre père.

A rat, weary of the life of cities, and of courts (for he had played his part in the palaces of
kings and in the salons of great lords), a rat whom experience had made wise, in short, a rat
who from a courtier had become a philosopher, had withdrawn to his country house (a hole
in the trunk of a large young elm), where he lived as a hermit devoting all his time and care
to the education of his only son.
The young rat, who had not yet received those severe but salutary lessons that experience
gives, was a bit thoughtless; the wise counsels of his father seemed boring to him; the shade
and tranquillity of the woods, instead of calming his mind, tired him. He grew impatient to
travel and see the world.

One fine morning, he arose early, he made up a little packet of cheese and grains, and
without saying a word to anyone, the ingrate abandoned his father and his paternal abode
and departed for lands unknown.

At first all seemed charming to him; the flowers were of a freshness, the trees of a greenness
that he had never seen at home – and then, he saw so many wonders: an animal with a tail
larger than its body (it was a squirrel), a little creature that carried its house on its back (it
was a snail). After several hours he approached a farm, the smell of cooking attracted him, he
entered the farmyard – there he saw a kind of gigantic bird who was making a horrible noise
as he marched with an air fierce and proud. Now, this bird was a turkey, but our rat took him
for a monster, and frightened by his aspect, he immediately fled.

Towards evening, he entered a wood, weary and tired he sat down at the foot of a tree, he
opened his little packet, ate his supper, and went to bed.

Waking with the lark he felt his limbs numbed by the cold, his hard bed hurt him; then he
remembered his father, the ingrate recalled the care and tenderness of the good old rat, he
formed vain resolutions for the future, but it was too late, the cold had frozen his blood.
Experience was for him an austere mistress, she gave him but one lesson and one
punishment; it was death.

The next day a woodcutter found the corpse, he saw it only as something disgusting – and
pushed it with his foot in passing, without thinking that there lay the ungrateful son of a
tender father.

‘L’Ingratitude’ turned up in the course of my research for a biography of Constantin Heger,

who taught Emily and Charlotte Brontë French during their time in Brussels and with whom
Charlotte fell in love. I’d been trying to find out about his brother Vital, a sales representative
for the royal carpet factory in Tournai and decided to look through the catalogue of the
Musée royal de Mariemont for any mention of him – its eclectic holdings include carpets –
and found a reference to a manuscript by Charlotte Brontë about a rat. It turned out to be the
first piece of French homework Charlotte had written for Heger, lost since the First World
War.
Early in February 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, then aged 25 and 23, went to Brussels
to board at the pensionnat run by Claire Zoë Parent on the long since demolished rue
Isabelle. The sisters went to Belgium to complete their education, in the hope that they might
one day open their own school back in Yorkshire. Parent’s husband, Constantin Heger, who
taught at the nearby Athénée Royal, also taught French literature at the pensionnat. By all
accounts a gifted and dedicated teacher, he gave Emily and Charlotte homework – ​devoirs​ –
based on texts by the authors they had studied in class. They were to compose essays in
French that echoed these models, and could choose their own subject matter: ‘I cannot tell
on what subject your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you,’ Heger told
them, as he told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, after Charlotte’s death. Heger
encouraged the Brontës’ writing, but demanded that they pay attention to their craft. ‘Poet or
not … study form,’ he once admonished Charlotte. He often returned their essays drastically
revised – sadly, there are no comments on this copy of ‘L’Ingratitude’.

It was finished a month after Charlotte arrived in Brussels and is the first known ​devoir​of
thirty the sisters would write for Heger. It contains a number of mistakes, mainly
misspellings and incorrect tenses: the adjective ‘grand’ before ‘seigneurs’ should carry an ‘s’;
‘un odeur’ should be ‘une odeur’; several verbs are in the imperfect, e.g. ‘levait’, when they
should be in the simple past, ‘leva’. Heger told Gaskell that when the sisters came to the
pensionnat, they didn’t know any French. This wasn’t quite true, but Charlotte’s improved
immensely during her time in Brussels.

‘L’Ingratitude’ might well be based on La Fontaine and J.P. Florian. Heger had his pupils at
the Athénée Royal study both writers and probably used a similar curriculum at the
pensionnat. Later they would study more complex writers such as Chateaubriand, Bossuet
and Hugo. La Fontaine’s ‘Le Rat qui s’est retiré du monde’ is somewhere behind
‘L’Ingratitude’ – Charlotte even borrows some of its vocabulary. Florian’s fable ‘La Carpe et
les carpillons’, about disobedient and thoughtless children, may also have come into it.

The sisters’ studies at the pensionnat ended abruptly in November 1842, when they returned
to Haworth on hearing that their Aunt Branwell had died. In January 1843, Charlotte went
back to Brussels, without Emily, to become an English teacher at the pensionnat. By now, she
was deeply in love with Heger: ‘I returned to Brussels … prompted by what then seemed an
irresistible impulse,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey in October 1846. At the time of her
initial arrival in Brussels, Heger was by all accounts happily married with three children.
Two more children were born while Charlotte and Emily were there. Charlotte left Brussels
for ever on 1 January 1844, worn out by her infatuation with Heger, and his wife’s hostility
towards her. Back at home, she longed to see him again. In 1844 and 1845, she wrote him a
series of letters (in French):
 Day or night I find neither rest nor peace – if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you
always severe, always saturnine and angry with me … 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 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 replied to some of her letters, though his replies have never been found. At some point
in 1845, he stopped answering. Charlotte’s novel ​Villette​, published in 1853, reworks her
experiences in Brussels, with the difference that the teacher returns the heroine’s love –
Brontë kills him off at the end of the book.

In June 1913, Paul Heger donated the four surviving letters Charlotte wrote to his father to
the British Museum, and gave permission for them to be published in the​Times​. The
publication caused a sensation and drew the attention of one of Belgium’s most avid art
collectors, Raoul Warocqué. Warocqué’s family had made a fortune from coalmining. In
1829, they bought the ancient royal hunting grounds of Mariemont, where they built a castle
surrounded by parkland. Raoul was said to be the wealthiest man in Belgium, if not Europe;
a banquet at Mariemont in 1903 was attended by more than three thousand guests, including
the future king of the Belgians. An occasional diplomat for Leopold II, Warocqué used his
travels around Europe, Russia, India and China to acquire numerous treasures for
Mariemont. They included a five-ton ‘fragment’ of a sculpture of a Ptolemaic queen and a
Bourgeois de Calais​ by Rodin. He had no heir; and the collections, castle and grounds were
left to the state. In 1960, a fire destroyed the castle but the collections were saved; a new
museum opened in 1975.

Warocqué also collected manuscripts and after reading Charlotte’s letters in the
Times​decided he wanted to add her to his collection. He knew Paul Heger, the rector of
Brussels University, because he’d paid for the university’s anatomy institute in 1891.
Warocqué wrote to Heger, saying he hoped to acquire one of Charlotte’s letters. In August
1913 Heger replied: ‘We don’t have any of Charlotte or Emily’s letters any more, but I could
possibly get hold of another souvenir of their Brussels stay.’ In November, Heger wrote
again: ‘I hope to be able to please you; when we get a chance to meet I will tell you why there
is a delay.’ Six months later, Heger was insisting he hadn’t forgotten: ‘If I have not already
sent it to you, it is because I would like to “situate” it in a way that you will find pleasing. Now
there’s a sentence that will intrigue you; I won’t say any more about it so I can prepare a little
surprise for you.’

Warocqué received his gift the following year. It was a small grey album inscribed with his
name, its two dozen pages filled with facsimiles of Charlotte’s four letters to Heger,
photographs of the pensionnat and the manuscript of ‘L’Ingratitude’.
Brian Bracken