IN BELGIAN BRUSSELS (1890)

-January 28, 1890- Rizal left Paris for Brussels, capital of Belgium
-Two reasons impelled Rizal to leave Paris, namely (1) the cost of living in Paris was very high because of the Universal Exposition (2) the gay social life of the city hampered his literary works, especially the writing of his second novel, El Filibusterismo

LIFE IN BRUSSELS
· Rizal was accompanied by Jose Albert when he moved to Brussels. They lived in a modest boarding
house on 38 Rue Philippe Champagne, which was run by two Jacoby sisters (Suzanne and Marie). Later Albert, left the city and was replaced by Jose Alejandro, an engineering student
· Rizal was the first to advocate the Filipinization of its orthography
· Sobre la Nueva Ortografia de la Lengua Tagala (The New Orthography of the Tagalog Language)-
was published in La Solidaridad on April 15, 1890
-in this article, he laid down the rules of the new Tagalog orthography and with modesty and sincerity, he gave credit for the adoption of this new orthography to Dr. Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, author of the celebrated work El Sanscrito en la Lengua Tagala (Sanskrit in the tagalog Language) which was published in Paris, 1884
** “I put this on record,” wrote Rizal, “so that when the history of this orthography is traced, which is already being adopted by the enlightened Tagalists, that what is Caesar’s be given to Caesar. This innovation is due solely to Dr. Pardo de Tavera’s studies on Tagalismo. I was one of its zealous propagandists.”**
· Letters from home which Rizal received in Brussels worried him. (1) the Calamba agrarian trouble was getting worse (2) the Dominican Order filed a suit in court to dispossess the Rizal family of their lands in Calamba
· In his moment of despair, Rizal had bad dreams during the nights in Brussels when he was restless
because he was always thinking of his unhappy family in Calamba
· Rizal feared that he would not live long. He was not afraid to die, but he wanted to finish his second novel before he went to his grave.
· In the face of the sufferings which afflicted his family, Rizal planned to go home. He could not stay in
Brussels writing a book while his parents, relatives, and friends in the distant Philippines were persecuted
· July 29, 1890- another letter to Ponce written at Brussels by Rizal, he announced that he was leaving
Brussels at the beginning of the following month and would arrive in Madrid about the 3rd or 4th (August)
· “To my Muse’” (A Mi…)- 1890, Rizal wrote this pathetic poem, it was against a background of mental anguish in Brussels, during those sad days when he was worried by family disasters