(2.) The statement of Mr. Thomas Baylis, a well-connected gentleman.
(3.) Eugène Sue, in his 1851 volume of Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, gives, with a clouding of mystery, a lover—Gérard de Morville—drawing a portrait of Miss Mary "d'après nature;" and M. Sue's feuilleton, as I showed in The Fortnightly Review for March, identifies Miss Mary and the de Morvilles as phases of Charlotte Brontë and the Hégers.[96]
(4.) Miss Brontë, in Shirley, herself presents M. Héger—Louis Gérard Moore—as an artist, and refers to past drawing episodes.[97]
The authenticity of the inscriptions is not involved in the question as to whether Charlotte Brontë would use careless spelling, for, if she had written them, couching them in the third person, it is clear that she had not desired to be known as the writer. Upon the other hand, it is discovered to be utterly impossible for any one but Charlotte Brontë or M. Héger to have inspired the inscriptions, whosoever wrote them.
Significant Pieces of Evidence.
I find that M. Héger was Paul to none but Charlotte Brontë in 1850, and that before the publication, two years ago, of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters, by Mr. Clement Shorter, who, for reasons which he should explain, calls M. Constantin Gilles Romain Héger "M. Paul Héger," [Throughout that writer's correspondence in The Times, etc., and in Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters: beneath the portrait of M. Héger, facing page 198, and bearing the inscription:—M. Paul Héger: The Hero of Villette and The Professor; and on page 161 of that work] no reference in print had been made to M. Héger but as Constantin. The Hégers state that M. Héger was not called Paul, and that Dr. Paul Héger, his son, was the first member of the family named Paul.
A native of Haworth[98] who lived from 1830 till after the death of Charlotte Brontë in 1855, "within twenty yards of the Haworth Parsonage," her home, has pronounced the Héger portrait of Miss Brontë to be a correct likeness and "just like her." He says that it reminds him of her as he knew her and as she was in her younger days, and he pointed out to me particularly that he had seen her with her hair as in the Héger likeness, "scores of times before she went away"—this giving the clue to the reference in the inscription to a pose in a portrait by Branwell "many years previous" to 1850; and I have seen a reproduction of a sketch by Branwell wherein the Brontë sisters have curls. Moreover, I find that Miss Brontë really liked curls and disliked the other styles, though she conformed to the fashion.
I also find that the paper on which the Héger portrait of Miss Brontë was drawn was that used in 1850 by the house where she was a guest in London in the early June of 1850, at the very time to within a day when, as there is indisputable evidence—despite assertions that she "never under any circumstances during the later period of her life wore a green dress"—Charlotte Brontë was wearing a light green dress. That was "the first occasion on which Miss Brontë wore colours," as the inscription tells us, and fact substantiates, after she had concluded the remarkably long mourning period for her sisters, which began with "the death of Emily" and did not end till twelve months after the death of Anne, who died on May 28th, 1849.
(Signed) J. MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.