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



writers have nothing hut praise of the woman. One of them, who 

 was a pupil at the imisionnat some twenty years after Charlotte 

 Bronte's time, and who knew them well, has declared that Charlotte, 

 " so far as these two people (M. and Madame Heger) are concerned, 

 adopted an unjust literary and historic method." But for Char- 

 lotte she was her hero's wife. She stood very properly between 

 Charlotte, whose "heart was breaking," and M. Heger, who was 

 thinking of a new pair of boots. She may even by a little in- 

 tellectual shouldering have been trying to push Charlotte Bronte 

 out of the pensionnat and back to Haworth, both for Charlotte's 

 own sake and for the sake of her school. All this seems to me as 

 very natural, but in the eyes of a passionate woman like Charlotte 

 Bronte it was enough to make her hate her ; and she did ! The 

 portrait of Madame Beck in " Viilette " is painted from her hate, and 

 not from the hfe. But so well did Charlotte Bronte hate as well as 

 love, that she was not content to throw ink at ]\Iadame Heger in the 

 " Professor," and again in " Yillette," we find her even irrelevantly 

 in " Shirley " saying : " I remember seeing a pair of blue eyes that 

 were usually thought sleepy, secretly on the alert, and I knew by 

 their expression — an expression which chilled my blood, it was in that 

 quarter so wonderously unexpected— that for years they had been 

 accustomed to silent soul-reading. The world called the owner of 

 these blue eyes honne petite femme (she was not an English woman). 

 I learned her nature afterwards — got it off by heart, studied it in its 

 furthest and most hidden recesses — she was the finest, deepest, 

 subtlest schemer in Europe." Now this hatred of Madame Heger, 

 which was, as I say, natural enough in this woman, made a poor 

 dictator of many pages in her novels, and these have really led to an 

 unjust view of the character of this woman, that Charlotte not only 

 hated but maligned. 



Long afterwards she induced even a sane critic like Wemyss Reid 

 to l^elieve her, and to form quite an erroneous opinion of the woman. 

 In a letter he sent me "after the publication of his " Monograph," he 

 said, "Now, do you not see what a painful time that must have l)een at 

 Brussels ? Charlotte, perfectly pure in mind and heart, and yet captive 

 to a clever, shrewd, eccentric man, the Paul Emanuel of the picture ; 

 dogged day and night by a jealous, lying, unscrupulous old Belgian 

 woman, forced to feed upon herself, for she had no confidante until 

 after her return to England (' I cannot write what I want to say,' 

 she cries in one of her letters) ; and debarred from every social 

 pleasure, went through a perfect agony of snffering during these 

 dark years. She returned to Haworth a changed and disillusioned 

 woman." Now, I do not think one of the ei)ithets which he applies 

 to Madame Heger is justified. He has been over-persuaded by 

 Charlotte Bronte, who had })een quite unfair l)oth in her estimate of 

 the woman, and quite unwise in writing her hate in a l)Ook in 

 ,,'arallel columns^ tis it w.ere. to her great unreturned love. Still, I 



