Please present to Madame the assurance of my esteem. I fear that Maria, Louise and Claire will have forgotten me. Prospère and Victorine never knew me, but I remember all five of them, and especially Louise. There was so much character, so much naïveté expressed in her little face. Farewell, Monsieur—Your grateful pupil,
C. Brontë.
July 24.—I have not begged you to write to me soon, because I am afraid of troubling you, but you are too kind to forget how much I desire it. Yes! I do desire it so much. But that is enough. After all, do as you like, Monsieur, for if I received a letter from you and I thought you wrote it out of pity, it would hurt me very much.... Oh I shall certainly see you some day. It must come to pass. Because as soon as I earn any money, I shall go to Bruxelles—and I shall see you again, if only for a moment.
It is all of no avail! No answer does M. Heger vouchsafe. October comes round, and she writes again. This time she imagines that she has found a means of making her Letter reach its destination. In other words, she is convinced, or tries to be convinced, that it is all Madame Heger's fault again; she it is who will not allow her husband to receive Charlotte's Letters.
October 24.—Monsieur—I am quite joyous to-day. A thing that has not often happened during the last two years.[7] The reason is that a gentleman amongst my friends is passing through Bruxelles, and he has offered to take charge of a letter for you, and to give this same letter into your hands; or else his sister will do this, so that I shall be quite certain that you receive it.
Now comes the final blow to this faithful worshipper. Up to this hour, she has hoped and waited, waited and hoped. But all this time there has been the suspicion of Madame Heger—that has kept alive in her the belief in M. Heger's friendship, who (perhaps?) writes, although his letters never arrive: who (perhaps?) never receives her letters, although whenever she dares, and even in defiance of the terms laid down for her, she writes him letters where the vibration of her passionate attachment is felt. Now, however, he has received her letter placed in his own hand. Had he written she would now have held in her turn the talisman of the beloved handwriting her eyes were weary with waiting to see again. But he remained obdurate and silent.
Mr. Taylor has returned (she writes): I asked him if he had no letter for me. 'No: nothing.' Be patient, I told myself: soon his sister will return. Miss Taylor came back: 'I have nothing for you from Monsieur Heger,' she said; 'neither letter, nor any message.'
Understanding only too well what this meant, I told myself just what I should have told any one else in the same circumstances: Resign yourself to what you cannot alter, and before all things do not grieve for a misfortune that you have not deserved. I would not allow myself to weep nor complain. But when one refuses to oneself the right to tears and lamentations in certain cases, one is a tyrant; and natural faculties revolt; so that one buys outward calm at the price of an inner conflict that cannot be subdued.
Neither by day, nor by night can I find rest nor peace: even if I sleep, I have tormenting dreams, where I see you, always severe, gloomy, angry with me. Forgive me, Monsieur, if I am driven to take the course of writing to you once more. How can I endure my life, if I am forbidden to make any effort to alleviate my sufferings?
She continues in this piteous strain. She pleads with him not to reprove her again as she has been reproved before, for exaggeration, morbidness, sentimentality. She tells him all this may be true—she is not going to defend herself—but the case is as she states it. She cannot resign herself to the loss of her master's friendship without one last effort to preserve it.
I submit to all the reproaches you may make against me; if my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall remain without hope; if he keeps a little for me (never mind though it be very little) I shall have some motive for living, for working.
Monsieur (she continues), the poor do not need much to keep them alive; they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table, but if these crumbs are refused them, then they die of hunger! For me too, I make no claim either to great affection from those I love; I should hardly know how to understand an exclusive and perfect friendship, I have so little experience of it! But once upon a time, at Bruxelles, when I was your pupil, you did show me a little interest: and just this small amount of interest you gave me then, I hold to and I care for and prize, as I hold to and care for life itself....
... I will not re-read this letter, I must send it as it is written. And yet I know, by some secret instinct, that certain absolutely reasonable and cool-headed people reading it through will say:—'She appears to have gone mad.' By way of revenge on such judges, all I would wish them is that they too might endure, for one day only, the sufferings I have borne for eight months—then, one would see, if they too did not 'appear to have gone mad.'
One endures in silence whilst one has his strength to do it. But when this strength fails one, one speaks without weighing one's words. I wish Monsieur all happiness and prosperity.
Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire, 8th January.
The Letter obtained no answer. And thus the end was reached. We now know where in Charlotte Brontë's life lay her experiences that formed her genius and made her the great Romantic—whose quality was that she saw all events and personages through the medium of one passion—the passion of a predestined tragical and unrequited love.
END OF PART I.