[1] From Mlle. Louise Heger I have this note: '_Les cloches de St. Jacques et non pas St. Jean Baptiste, église qui se trouve à l'autre côté de la ville près du canal: quartier du Père Silas dans "Villette."_' [2] _Villette_, chapter xii. [3] Esprit de Sagesse, conduisez-nous: Esprit de Vérité, enseignez-nous: Esprit de Charité, vivifiez-nous: Esprit de Prudence, préservez-nous: Esprit de Force, défendez-nous: Esprit de Justice, éclairez-nous: Esprit Consolateur, apaisez-nous. Here is the invocation, sent me by Mlle. Heger; who has, with extreme kindness, endeavoured to recover it for me. CHAPTER V THE STORY OF A CHAPEAU D'UNIFORME In connection with the particular Belgian schoolgirls whom I knew, who still, in 1860, learnt their lessons in the class-rooms where Charlotte Brontë once taught, and who were still taught by M. Heger, and still surrounded with the benign and serene influences of Madame Heger, let me prove that these schoolgirls had not the characteristics of the _Lesbassecouriennes_; and that Charlotte Brontë displayed insular prejudice, as well as an imagination coloured by the distress of an unhappy passion, when she said of them, '_The Continental female is quite a different being to the insular female of the same age and class._'[1] Inasmuch as the story I have to tell is the story of a Bonnet, it will be recognised as one that is calculated to display the qualities and intimate and essential peculiarities of the 'Continental female' (under sixteen) in a light, and under the stress and strain of passions and interests, too serious to permit of any tampering with, or disguise of, nature. One has to realise, also, that the question is not merely of a bonnet, but of a Best Bonnet, a Sunday Bonnet. For, in the remote days of which I am now writing modern young people should realise even schoolgirls of ten or twelve wore bonnets on Sunday, and even upon week-days, when they went beyond the borders of their garden: a hat was thought indecorous on the head of any girl in her 'teens--a form of undress rather than of dress. To wear a hat was like wearing a pinafore--a confession that one had not forgotten the nursery. To save one's best Sunday Bonnet, in the garden, one might go about in a hat, and in the bosom of one's family wear a pinafore to save a new dress; but in the same way that one did not go into the drawing-room with a pinafore on, one did not, in those days, pay visits in a hat: and to go to church in one would have been thought irreverent. So that a Sunday Bonnet meant that childish ways were done with, and that one had attained the age of reason. Like a barrister's wig it imposed seriousness on the wearer, who had to live up to it. Madame Heger, when establishing the rules for the uniform that was worn by all the pupils of the school in the Rue d'Isabelle, paid great attention to the Sunday Bonnet. Following the sense she lent to the law of her system of