These Romanists are strange beings. Such a one among them—whom you know no more than the last Inca of Peru, or the first emperor of China—knows you and all your concerns; and has his reasons for saying to you so and so, when you simply thought the communication sprang impromptu from the instant’s impulse: his plan in bringing it about that you shall come on such a day, to such a place, under such and such circumstances, when the whole arrangement seems to your crude apprehension the ordinance of chance, or the sequel of exigency. Madame Beck’s suddenly recollected message and present, by artless embassy to the Place of the Magi, the old priest, accidentally descending the steps and crossing the square, his interposition on my behalf with the bonne who would have sent me away, his reappearance on the staircase, my introduction to this room, the portrait, the narrative so affably volunteered—all these incidents, taken as they fell out, seemed each independent of its successor; a handful of loose beads; but threaded through by that quick-shot and crafty glance of a Jesuit-eye, they dropped pendant in a long string, like that rosary on the prie-dieu. Where lay the link of junction, where the little clasp of this monastic necklace? I saw or felt union, but could not yet find the spot, or detect the means of connection.
The kinds of machinations Charlotte Brontë in her 1853 novel Villette here associates with popery might better be understood in relation to the particular institution, the pensionnat (boarding school), run by the Madame Beck mentioned above, and to its Continental setting. The old priest (Père Silas) may have his role in Madame Beck’s scheme, which is the prevention of marriage between heroine Lucy Snowe and the cantankerous professor M. Paul Emanuel, and even M. Paul’s dear departed Justine Marie seems to have animated herself to haunt Lucy as the apparition of a nun, but it is Madame Beck who effectuates M. Paul’s displacement to the West Indies, closing the action of the novel.
The intelligent but not beautiful Lucy Snowe grows up in Bretton under the care of her reassuringly named godmother Mrs. Bretton, alongside the son, John Graham, and for a time the precocious Polly Home, an additional ward. After some narratively obscured family tragedy she is moved to the care of a Miss Marchmount, who promptly dies, and at 23, a bereft and penniless Lucy has to leave via London for the fictional “Labassecour”, really Belgium. In the capital, “Villette” she will find herself employed by Madame Beck to teach English. There her Bretton childhood will be in some way reiterated with the reappearance of John Graham and his mother, and eventually, Paulina Mary de Bassompierre, formerly Polly, whom Lucy will hold in warm sisterly regard for two hundred pages before comparing her (regretfully) to M. Paul’s spaniel, Sylvie.
In introducing the formidable owner and headmistress, Brontë is pleased to suggest that in the selection process for French loanwords, specifically “surveillance” and “espionage”, there may be something said about the Francophone character which could not be said for the English, or indeed in an unenriched English language. Madame Beck, then, for whom these were “watchwords”, would “glide ghost-like through the house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every keyhole, listening behind every door.” Only under such vigilance can the place be thus:
a great house, full of healthy, lively girls, all well-dressed and many of them handsome, gaining knowledge by a marvelously easy method, without painful exertion or useless waste of spirits; not, perhaps, making very rapid progress in anything; taking it easy, but still always employed, and never oppressed.
There is an obvious contrast to be made here with the cruelty and austerity of Jane Eyre’s Lowood School. With Madame Beck’s supervision, the girls can even be “taken out for a long walk into the country, regaled with gaufres and vin blanc, or new milk and pain bis, or pistolets au beurre (rolls) and coffee.” Once Lucy has been promoted from governess to English teacher, with a bit-part to play in Madame Beck’s régime, the moralist’s eye is engaged closer, and the denominational theme is brought forward, though with a rather intrusive accusation predictable from the Victorian Anglican quarter (see John Henry Newman on the “cautious dispensation of the truth”):
“Not a soul in Madame Beck’s house, from the scullion to the directress herself, but was above being ashamed of a lie; they thought nothing of it: to invent might not be precisely a virtue, but it was the most venial of faults. “J’ai menti plusieurs fois,” formed an item of every girl’s and woman’s monthly confession: the priest heard unshocked, and absolved unreluctant.
Perhaps the intrusion lies in the assumption from outside the seal that the offenses are even confessed, though it is to be trusted that Lucy concerns herself with other consciences, and notices their failings accurately, through observation readily available among the gossip and confidences of this place where “the young countesse and the young bourgeoise sat side by side.”
In a vulnerable moment after a spell of delirious anxiety, Lucy finds her own way to the confessional booth, with the impossibly kind Père Silas on the other side, though clearly she seeks counsel rather than the Catholic sacrament. She knows that if she allows herself to be influenced by him, that “he would have shown me all that was tender, and comforting, and gentle, in the honest Popish superstition,” and that she could well be confirmed and convent-bound by the end of the narrative. Later she finds respectable both M. Paul’s faith and his attempt to convert hers, acknowledging that “this Romanist held the purer elements of his creed with an innocency of heart which god must love.” Yet in connection with the pensionnat, and in particular the oversight of children, she thinks otherwise.
“There, as elsewhere, the CHURCH strove to bring up her children robust in body, feeble in soul, fat, ruddy, hale, joyous, ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning. “Eat, drink, and live!” she says. “Look after your bodies; leave your souls to me. I hold their cure—guide their course: I guarantee their final fate.” A bargain, in which every true Catholic deems himself a gainer. Lucifer just offers the same terms[.]
The slippery misattribution here of fault to the Church rather than where it surely belongs, the educational customs of the country, is repeated in Lucy’s instinctive defense of what she still maintains late in the novel is a true friendship with M. Emanuel.
We were under the surveillance of a sleepless eye: Rome watched jealously her son through that mystic lattice at which I had knelt once, and to which M. Emanuel drew nigh month by month—the sliding panel of the confessional.”
Just prior to M. Emanuel’s departure, the foolish and giddy Ginevra Fanshaw, a student at Madame Beck’s, elopes with Count Alfred de Hamal. The aftermath at the pensionnat confirms Lucy’s understanding of Madame Beck’s basic constitution. “Never had I seen Madame Beck so pale or so appalled. Here was a blow struck at her tender part, her weak side; here was damage done to her interest.” Such an embarrassment to Madame Beck’s régime will not be suffered to repeat itself. M. Emanuel will sail west, delayed or not, and Lucy shall be left to a self-denying solitude. Though Lucy’s narration cannot by its singular nature tell us whose interests were dominant in the concordat of sorts between Madame Beck, Père Silas, and the relatives of M. Paul’s dead fiancée, it is Madame Beck who stands to gain as much as any financially, stands also to protect the reputation of her pensionnat, and who “preferred in her own breast her own secret reason for desiring expatiation,” namely her wish that since she cannot marry M. Paul, none may. And when he must leave, it is Madame Beck whose will, though it may bend to allow M. Paul and Lucy a languorous goodbye, most impresses upon Lucy the impossibility of her hopes.
This time, in the “leave me”, there was an intonation so bitter and so imperative, I wondered that even Madame Beck could for one moment delay obedience; but she stood firm, she gazed upon him dauntless; she met his eye, as forbidding and fixed as stone.”
Lucy encounters here something fixed and without guile, entirely unassimilable to her scheme of the rosary beads “threaded through by that quick-shot and crafty glance of a Jesuit-eye.” In view of Madame Beck’s stony eyes it is possible to diminish Père Silas’ fear of M. Paul’s apostasy through marriage to Lucy as a primary mover in the story, and rather to see the will behind those eyes, not a religious conviction but a conviction of how the story must end, as the real thing. If this conviction issues simply from a stern nature inborn, or whether the pensionnat has conditioned Madame Beck into such strength, we are not told enough about the lady’s past to know. Lucy certainly argues for the former, writing that the school “offered her for her powers too limited a sphere; she ought to have swayed a nation: she should have been the leader of a turbulent legislative assembly.” When the anti-marriage conspirators herald Justine Marie, the mystery of the nun in the attic is to be solved, or the ghost to be confirmed as the presence of the fantastic within the story, but the creature, being another woman named after the deceased, disappoints. She is everything that Lucy, a product of England and austerity, as well as Protestantism, is not:
Homely, though, is an ill-chosen word. What I see is not precisely homely. A girl of Villette stands there—a girl fresh from her pensionnat. She is very comely, with the beauty indigenous to this country. She looks well-nourished, fair, and fat of flesh. Her cheeks are round, her eyes good; her hair is abundant.