harlotte and Emily Bronte in February 1842, when they made
their first appearance in Brussels. The Rue Fossette of _Villette_, the
Rue d'Isabelle of _The Professor_, is the veritable Rue d'Isabelle of
Currer Bell's experience.

What, however, shall we say of the people who wandered through these
rooms and gardens--the hundred or more children, the three or four
governesses, the professor and his wife? Here there has been much
speculation and not a little misreading of the actual facts. Charlotte
and Emily went to Brussels to learn. They did learn with energy. It was
their first experience of foreign travel, and it came too late in life
for them to enter into it with that breadth of mind and tolerance of the
customs of other lands, lacking which the Englishman abroad is always an
offence. Charlotte and Emily hated the land and people. They had been
brought up ultra-Protestants. Their father was an Ulster man, and his
one venture into the polemics of his age was to attack the proposals for
Catholic emancipation. With this inheritance of intolerance, how could
Charlotte and Emily face with kindliness the Romanism which they saw
around them? How heartily they disapproved of it many a picture in
_Villette_ has made plain to us.

Charlotte had been in Brussels three months when she made the friendship
to which I am indebted for anything that there may be to add to this
episode in her life. Miss Laetitia Wheelwright was one of five sisters,
the daughters of a doctor in Lower Phillimore Place, Kensington. Dr.
Wheelwright went to Brussels for his health and for his children's
education. The girls were day boarders at the Pensionnat, but they lived
in the house for a full month or more at a time when their father and
mother were on a trip up the Rhine. Otherwise their abode was a flat in
the Hotel Clusyenaar in the Rue Royale, and there during her later stay
in Brussels Charlotte frequently paid them visits. In this earlier
period Charlotte and Emily were too busy with their books to think of
'calls' and the like frivolities, and it must be confessed also that at
this stage Laetitia Wheelwright would have thought it too high a price
for a visit from Charlotte to receive as a fellow-guest the apparently
unamiable Emily. Miss Wheelwright, who was herself fourteen years of age
when she entered the Pensionnat Heger, recalls the two sisters, thin and
sallow-looking, pacing up and down the garden, friendless and alone.