Il a la parole facile, et possde a
un haut degre l'eloquence du bon sens et du coeur. Il n'est point
auteur. Homme de zele et de conscience, il vient de se demettre des
fonctions elevees et lucratives qu'il exercait a l'Athenee, celles de
Prefet des Etudes, parce qu'il ne peut y realiser le bien qu'il avait
espere, introduire l'enseignement religieux dans le programme des etudes.
J'ai vu une fois Madame Heger, qui a quelque chose de froid et de
compasse dans son maintien, et qui previent peu en sa faveur. Je la
crois pourtant aimee et appreciee par ses eleves."
There were from eighty to a hundred pupils in the pensionnat, when
Charlotte and Emily Bronte entered in February 1842.
M. Heger's account is that they knew nothing of French. I suspect they
knew as much (or as little), for all conversational purposes, as any
English girls do, who have never been abroad, and have only learnt the
idioms and pronunciation from an Englishwoman. The two sisters clung
together, and kept apart from the herd of happy, boisterous,
well-befriended Belgian girls, who, in their turn, thought the new
English pupils wild and scared-looking, with strange, odd, insular ideas
about dress; for Emily had taken a fancy to the fashion, ugly and
preposterous even during its reign, of gigot sleves, and persisted in
wearing them long after they were "gone out.
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