148 Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne [June 1, 



is not in existence any complaint from the young stoic, Cliarlotte 

 writes of her residence there, " I have had one letter from her since 

 her departm-e ; it gives an appalling account of her duties ; hard 

 labour from six in the morning to eleven at night, with only one 

 half-hour of exercise between them. This is slavery ; I fear she 

 cannot stand it." She was there only six months. Governessing 

 was a failure. But they still looked forward to the school they were 

 to keep, and it was with a view to preparing themselves for the 

 duties that, with pecuniary assistance from Miss Branwell, they went 

 to school in Brussels in 1842. 



It is there that we are on the threshold of the drama. Before 

 she went to Brussels Charlotte had been asked in marriage — he called 

 it, but it was in housekeeperage — by a stick of a clergyman who was 

 the brother of her friend, Ellen Nussey. 



Mrs. Gaskell has it that the proposal was " quietly declined and 

 put aside. Matrimony did not enter into her scheme of life, but 

 good sound earnest labour did." But that seems to me an inept 

 observation. That she quietly put aside a wooden block. of a man 

 who wanted a housekeeper more than a wife seems to me the result 

 of her shrewd common sense. But no woman with a burning heart 

 can leave matrimony out of her scheme of life ; and as for earnest 

 labour, although she worked well, she wanted more than work, and 

 was athirst for sympathy. I find, too, from a letter from Wemyss 

 Reid, which he wrote to me after the publication of his " Monograph," 

 that " as a schoolgirl, she had seen a certain Yorkshire squireen, 

 whose name has never been mentioned by Mrs. Gaskell or myself, 

 from whom she painted Rochester. This person had unquestion- 

 ably attracted her fancy as a schoolgirl, but never her love." 



But the real experience of her life was to come to her after she 

 had been a year in Brussels. Xow she was a woman grown, and in 

 such a one affections can take deeper root than in a schoolgirl. And 

 what a deep root her love for M. Heger, or Paul Emanuel, struck in 

 her heart, can be gathered not only from " Villette," but from the 

 remarkable letters to M. Heger, which only saw the full light — for 

 Mrs. Gaskell only quoted a few words from them — in 1918. Well, 

 what happened in Brussels ? She was a pupil, and afterwards a 

 teacher, at £16 a year in Madame Heger 's pensio7inat, and that, as 

 Sir T. AVemyss Reid tells us, was the " turning-point in her life, 

 which changed its current and gave it a new purpose, a new meaning. 

 She learnt much during her two years' sojourn in the Belgian 

 capital, l)ut the greatest of all lessons she mastered while there was 

 that self-knowledge, the taste of which is so bitter to the mouth, 

 thongh so wholesome to the life." 



In a word, she fell in love with ^I. Heger, and that love, quite 

 unsought 1)y him, unreturned l)y him, was the deepest experience of 

 her life, and left great scars, such as are the memory of wounds, on 

 the quick heart of this wonderful woman. 



