those occupied by the Brontés was pointed out to us at the extreme end
of the long room. It was here that Lucy suffered the horrors of
hypochondria, so graphically portrayed in "Villette," and found the
discarded costume of the spectral nun lying upon her bed, and here Miss
Bronté passed those nights of "dreary, wakeful misery" which Mrs.
Gaskell describes.

A long and rather narrow room in front of the class-rooms was shown us
as the _réfectoire_, where the Brontés, with the other boarders, took
their meals, presided over by M. and Madame Héger, and where, during the
evenings, the lessons for the ensuing days were prepared. Here were held
the evening prayers, which Charlotte used to avoid by escaping into the
garden. This, too, was the scene of M. Paul's whilom readings to
teachers and pupils, and of some of his spasms of petulance, which
readers of "Villette" will remember. From the _réfectoire_ we passed
again into the corridor, where we made our adieus to our affable
conductress. She gave us her card, and explained that, whereas this
establishment had formerly been both a _pensionnat_ and an _externat_,
having about seventy day-pupils and twenty boarders when Miss Bronté was
here, it is now, since the death of Madame Héger, used as a day-school
only,--the _pensionnat_ being at some little distance, in the Avenue
Louise, where Mademoiselle is a co-directress.

The genuine local color Miss Bronté gives in "Villette" enabled us to be
sure that we had found the sombre old church where Lucy, arrested in
passing by the sound of the bells, knelt upon the stone pavement,
passing thence into the confessional of Père Silas. Certain it is that
this old church lies upon the route she would naturally take in the walk
from the Rue d'Isabelle to the Protestant cemetery, which she had set
out to do that dark afternoon, and the narrow streets of picturesque old