Thornfield Hall

Jane Eyre's Hidden Story

Preface

In Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre there lives a little…

part one

one

We lived in Paris, in a house on a long,…

two

The eighteenth card illustrates the dark realm of Hecate, the…

three

I am a murderer. Under French law, at least. In…

four

It was hotter, this past month, in Paris than had…

five

I am in danger of losing my marriage, my hopes…

six

I detest the creature Papa has ordered from a seminary…

seven

Here's the story of how a good plan can misfire…

eight

There was a house in Paris at the time of…

nine

So there is to be a wedding at Thornfield Hall…

ten

It was all like a dream, from the hour I…

eleven

It was not difficult to gain access to the attic,…

part two

twelve

It is five years since Thornfield Hall was rebuilt, after…

thirteen

It was something in the region of two months after…

fourteen

I confess that it is hard, from time to time,…

fifteen

The sun shines, the crowd spreads out, sprawls, enjoys itself.

sixteen

Jenny Colon had a flat on the fourth floor in…

seventeen

They say when you drown, your life unfolds before you.

part three

eighten

It was growing dark by the time I had lost…

nineteen

We sat silent for a long while, Nadar and I,…

twenty

Soon all will be ready for Yorkshire's wedding of the…

About the Author

Other Books by Emma Tennant

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
n Charlotte Brontë's novel
Jane Eyre
there lives a little French girl, Adèle. Jane was her governess at Thornfield Hall.

Brought over from Paris by Edward Rochester, the eight-year-old Adèle was saved from the danger and miseries of a child alone on the streets of Europe's most corrupt and decadent capital. Her mother, circus trapeze artist and comedy actress Céline Varens, had abandoned her and run off to Italy with a musician. Adèle had nowhere to go.

Whether life is better for the eight-year-old at Thornfield Hall than it was in France is hard to say. England—and the moors surrounding the old house—seemed cold and foreign to Adèle. And there's the added terror of finding a secret existence at the Hall, in the attic and out on the battlemented roof.

For Adèle Varens, the child who comes to Thornfield as Mr. Rochester's ward, uncovers a hidden history in the fabric of Thornfield Hall.

The story opens in Paris, in Adèle's time before her world changes and falls apart—and before she meets Jane Eyre, the young woman who will eventually be her governess and savior.

Here are Jane Eyre's words, in the concluding section of Charlotte Brontë's novel, on the subject of Adèle:

But perhaps, as is often found in the lives of girls as they grow into women, it was all a little more complicated than that.

This is Adèle's story.

Adèle

Tomorrow is the Pierrot in our pantomimes.

All facts look so much the more like fairy stories because, in our time, fairy stories take unconscionable pains to look like the truth.

—BALZAC,
Cousin Pons

W
e lived in Paris, in a house on a long,
gloomy street, the rue Vaugirard in Montparnasse, but our house was far from being somber or sad. There were three stories: the maid Bettina under the eaves, with a little child's bedroom next to it that I seldom occupied, as Maman allowed me to sleep on the chaise in the sitting room next to the pretty bedroom she had to herself. On the first floor lived old Tante Irène, who some said was the cousin of Herr Graff, whose house this really was—he who made a fortune from promoting the railroads in Baden. But in reality
Tante Irène was a milliner, and I would search for scraps for her all day: a feather from the park for a hat for the Comtesse Popinot, a twist of silk from Jenny's latest costume (Jenny was Jenny Colon, the famous actress). She was Maman's best friend, and when she came to visit, she would laugh at the new conservatory. This was on the ground floor, just off what had once been a dingy little salon with no space for more than a table and four chairs: “Céline Varens!” Jenny would cry in astonishment—though of course you couldn't tell whether she was in earnest or not. “
Ma chère
Céline! Has the milord from England bought you this? How many francs did this cost to erect, I ask you?” And she would sweep around the glorious ballroom of glass, with its pink frosted chandelier and the parrot shrieking on its perch. “When is he coming to take you to his castle,
ma chérie
? One thing is certain, you can't take this contraption with you—the frost in
Angleterre
would crack it and the snow would come drifting in!” And Jenny, making a scene so realistic of the glass igloo where my mother would be forced to live that we'd both shiver in the heat of a Parisian afternoon, would go off into more peals of laughter. She was afraid, I believe, that she would lose Maman to the country over the gray sea—but I didn't like to think of her going there, and, with a regularity that must have been tiresome to both friends, I burst into tears at this point, and Maman was forced to lay her finger over her lips. She and Jenny weren't in the profession for nothing, however, and they'd mime the life Céline would be subjected to if she went to this fabulous castle in the north of a cold country—picking icicles from the windows, throwing around their shoulders the cashmere shawls the milord sent Maman from his travels to India, and making a pretense of building a fire in the little paved garden beyond the walls of the conservatory.

For all their clowning, I couldn't be persuaded to smile. I didn't know the milord—though Maman told me I'd met him when I
was very small. I knew I never wanted to meet him—“
Cher
Edouard,” as Jenny mockingly named my mother's protector and lover of times gone by. Then she'd set off for the theater. Like Maman, Jenny could turn her hand to most kinds of acting and singing, whether vaudeville or
opéra comique
. But only Maman, the beautiful and famous Céline Varens, daughter of the old Funambules Theater before it was transformed,
danseuse de corde
—tightrope walker many leagues in the air—could master all of them. Maman could sing like a nightingale, and she could play the great tragic roles as well. She would be Phèdre, pacing the glass cage the new conservatory now became—waiting for her young lover, and I the incestuous stepson Hippolyte. How proud I was of Maman! There was literally no one like her—for it was impossible to know what she would next be like.

Our days in Paris, so far as the changing nature of her roles permitted, followed a pattern of which I never tired. After a morning in the sunny glass room, banked high with roses and freesias from Maman's admirers, we would abandon the attempt at lessons (I was supposed to learn English, but the thick, ugly language stuck in my mouth like unchewed meat) and set off for the park. It might be the Luxembourg Gardens, neat and yet with secret twists and turns, box hedges and laurel cut in half-human shapes, so that Maman would bow gravely, feigning acquaintance with a topiary bush. Passersby would stare at us, and of this I was also proud, for I knew by their gaze that I was pretty, too, and that my good looks accentuated Maman's. Sometimes a man would say in a hushed voice to his companion, “Surely that must be Céline Varens!” and I would be prouder still. I was the spitting image of my mother—so Jenny and all Maman's friends said. On our outings to the park, walking the dark length of rue Vaugirard to the Luxembourg Gardens, I glowed in the knowledge that I wore the same dress—pale blue like forget-me-knots, with rose pantalettes—as the cele
brated Céline Varens. “Madame is today, mademoiselle is tomorrow,” said our dandy, a
flâneur
or boulevard walker known slightly to Maman; a man who searched endlessly for novelty and amusement. And Paris could provide them: I loved to feel, in those moments, a part of the great city, the capital of luxury. I loved to be tomorrow, walking always a few feet behind today. Little did I know then the cruel pantomime I would be coerced into making come true.

 

When my mother was in a piece at the Funambules Theater, I
would go and watch—a panto or a fairy-tale play, as they called them—and whichever one of Maman's admirers was in attendance at the time would carry me right up to the gods, the seats high in the roof of the old theater in the boulevard du Temple. I was spoiled, I knew it—but her lovers knew they must please me if they were to win the love of my mother—and what I knew and they knew made for a kind of laughing friendship between us with the young men (they were invariably younger than Maman, though I didn't know it then) vying with one another to buy me ice cream made from pistachio nuts, or lollipops with the face of Pierrot painted on, or whatever novelty I craved. They knew, too, that they were as much a passing fancy for Maman as the new Italian ices were for me, and as quick to melt away. I was in love with the sad man with the tragic, kohl-rimmed eyes, who was a figure of fun, romantic, and pathetic: the great Pierrot of Paris, Dubureau. He would bow for me alone, in his white clown's costume staring first up at “paradise,” where he knew me to be installed, and then down at his feet, clad in slippers with pom-poms of red and blue. And Maman's admirers knew that she was in love with no one, counting Jenny Colon as her great friend and confidante and needing nothing from a man. So I was foolish enough to believe at the
time. “Adèle, I trust you to follow me in more ways than one,” my mother said to me when she saw the admiring glances of the men of the Funambules at the pretty picture we made together. “I expect you to go as far as I have”—and she gestured at the stage and the rope where she danced nightly, slung at an audacious height between two poles—“even further,
ma cherie,
for my greatest wish is for my child to become a true actress…to play in Corneille and Racine…like the great Rachel.” And before I could ask her more about these grand-sounding names, Maman had swept away to her dressing room—or to dinner with a new suitor. It was rare for the famous Céline Varens to speak to me directly—so, thinking of those days, it seems to me. She loved to kiss and fondle, and then she would set me down again with a preoccupied air. I suppose I was too young then to understand her ambitions for me—but I knew I adored it when she called me her
cherie
.

Pierrot was my friend and understood my tears and tantrums, and when the show was over (the month I'm thinking of is April, and Maman would run to her dressing room to change before taking me backstage to see Jenny in the
opéra comique;
she was starring in
Piquillo
), I hugged Pierrot and said good night before we set off. Everything about the evening was fine and full of promise, a Paris evening that has its blue hour, the hour my other friend Félix calls “between dog and wolf,” and when he says it, he looks at my mother and laughs. For there is something unlikely about a woman as beautiful as Céline—Félix compares her to a heroine painted by Delacroix, and with her dark hair in ringlets at her neck and her flashing black eyes she could lead a battalion into war—there was perhaps something a little strange about the fact that Maman professed to be perfectly happy living alone with her daughter and a fussy old woman like Tante Irène when she could have the world's most exciting city at her feet. “Céline loves no new man as much as her new conservatory,” Jenny says, laughing
as Félix does, and she comes to pick me up and carry me to bed on the chaise with the rose cretonne coverlet, in the room next to Maman's.

If Pierrot was silent, as he must be, with all life's tragedy expressed in those kohl-rimmed eyes and sad, springing walk, then Félix never stopped talking, and he loved to talk to me. Especially today: we're going to the
foire du pain d'épice
together, the fair where they sell bread spiced with cloves and nutmeg and poppy seeds, all my favorites, and a sign that Easter, the time of year Maman loved best, was coming soon. Félix is a genius, and I'm proud to be seen with him when he's talking, so concentrated and solemn. We've spent some time in his studio, the garret room where Félix makes his pictures on the quai des Grands Augustins, and we're walking fast to Saint-Germain. I smelled the hot, spicy bread already, and I'm pretending that what happened in Félix's studio hasn't taken place at all. For Félix—who makes pictures of real people, not with paint but with a machine that takes their exact likeness and after that he plunges the likeness into a bath of strong-smelling stuff I am never allowed to go near—has shown me a picture I don't want to see at all. “It's a process known as wet-collodion,” Félix says as we stride along. “Your father has come out well, don't you think? Now take care of it—Maman will find you a frame.”

If Pierrot was thin and curved, like a crescent moon in his white clown's suit, then here's another contrast with my good friend Félix—for Nadar, as he's known by all the poets and painters who come to have their faces stolen by him, is large and bulky. He's a giant who seems to take up most of the street, and today, with his great head looming above a shapeless brown coat and a cravat that's all over the place because he hasn't bothered to tie it properly, he looks like nothing so much as one of his own daguerreotypes—or whatever name he gives the new invention,
the “wet-collodion” plate he boasts of these days. He looks only partly developed, with a brush of hair that could be a swirl of the brown chemical that has his landlady threatening eviction from the room high under the eaves in the rue de l'Ancienne Comédie.

Today I find I have as little to say to him in reply as I would to the image, frowning, half apologetic, of the madman Félix has recently put on his plate, Monsieur de Nerval. I can no more ask for an explanation of those dreadful words “your father” from Félix Nadar than I could from the lunatic poet who walks his pet lobster in the gardens of the Tuileries, the man they say has verse coming out of his head like the water in the great stone fountains there. I'm walking with a stranger, now the subject of close family has been raised: doesn't Félix know that no one ever mentions a father—or an Englishman—in our house? And that Tante Irène, when she made some witticism about hats
à l'anglais
, was severely reprimanded by Jenny, who looks after Maman's sensibilities as if they were her own. Even then, with Jenny scolding and Maman red-eyed (though I refused to admit this), it never occurred to me that I did have a father, and that he is an Englishman. “I am on the verge of a revolution, a great invention,” Félix says joyously, having noticed nothing at all of my new sulky mood. “Come, we'll go to the place de la Nation,” he adds when my silence begins to alarm him, “the fair where they sell gingerbread and honey, eh, Adèle?” But before I have time to decide I like him again, Félix is back with his wet-collodion plate and his impression of Théopile Gautier, which a satirical magazine will attempt to reproduce. “People will be grateful one day,” the good Nadar enthuses. “They will say Félix Nadar was inventor of a new science of memory—what do you think of that, child?”

The truth was, I had no wish for a science of memory, and least of all for a discipline that would re-create memories of a man I had no interest in at all. Félix couldn't know I carried the picture of a
face I didn't recognize and had determined never to look at closely again, purely out of friendship for this old family friend. Once I was home, I would throw it in the deep basket where Tante Irène discards the scraps of silk and taffeta, the trimmed violet petals and fabric twigs for a corsage ordered by the “actresses,” as Maman's female acquaintances like to be known. The frowning visage of a man to whom I bore no kind of relation in my heart would then be carried to the municipal rubbish dump and burned. Maman would never know that her longtime companion Félix had brought the man who had caused her great unhappiness (this much I could and did know) right into her home.

However, hard as I tried, I couldn't make that day just before Easter go well. I said I didn't want to go to the big fair in the place de la Nation—and this had Félix staring down at me, for the first time genuinely worried. I wanted to go home and dispose of this new invention, the evidence of my paternity. I saw myself, eyes closed, consigning the angry, darkly shadowed face—which reminded me of nothing so much as the illustration for Bluebeard, in my book of Perrault's fairy tales—to Tante Irène's willow basket. Then I would go and curl up next to my mother in the glass conservatory, where the jasmine and orchids sent by admirers made a heady scent like summer. I wanted to discuss our next trip—out to Versailles, perhaps, or to the races where Maman and I, dressed in identical costumes, would cheer the win of the vicomte's fine gray. The vicomte was the latest handsome Frenchman to succumb to the charms of the famous and lovely Céline Varens. I like to portray the admirers in this way, like the gossip columnists do when they write about Maman and Jenny Colon—though they sneer at Jenny's strange admirer, the poet Gérard de Nerval, with his lobster on a blue ribbon when he comes to call. He left a parrot as a gift for us at the door once, and Monsieur Punch
now lives in the conservatory, speaking in mincing tones like the vicomte when he pleases or shrieking like de Nerval himself.