In November: "Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and then." On holidays "the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs down one's spirits like lead…. Madame Héger, good and kind as I have described her" (i.e. for all her goodness and kindness), "never comes near me on these occasions." … "She is not colder to me than she is to the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am." But the situation is becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. "I fancy I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure of it I will tell you."
There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure; but there is no record of her ever having told.
The evidence from the letters is plain enough. But the first thing that the theorist does is to mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which tell against his theory. When these torn and bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are destructive to the legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clement Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels Charlotte Brontë saw hardly anything of M. Héger. They also show that before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And they show that from first to last she was incurably homesick.
Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or violently in love with M. Héger, she would have been as miserable as you like in M. Héger's house, but she would not have been homesick; she would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame's behaviour; and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.
To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and silly.
[Footnote A: See The Key to the Brontë Works, by J. Malham-Dembleby, 1911.]
It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful gossip and conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip in Brussels, conjecture all round. Above all, it rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame Héger and her family. Charlotte's friends were always playfully suspecting her of love-affairs. They could never put their fingers on the man, and they missed M. Héger. It would never have occurred to their innocent mid-Victorian minds to suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to suspect herself of it. But Madame Héger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant attachment, to M. Héger. It is well known that Madame made statements to that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that Madame had been jealous. It may fairly be conjectured that it was M. Héger and not Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but sufficient for Madame Héger. She did not understand these Platonic relations between English teachers and their French professors. She had never desired Platonic relations with anybody herself, and she saw nothing but annoyance in them for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude is the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte found. She accused the dead Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion for her husband; she stated that she had had to advise the living Charlotte to moderate the ardour of her admiration for the engaging professor; but the truth, as Charlotte in the end discovered, was that for a certain brief period Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Héger confessed as much when he asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athénée Royale instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable to his wife.
Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Héger suspected Charlotte of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Héger have been jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of Madame Héger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with Mr. Shorter that M. Héger regarded Charlotte with indifference. He was a Frenchman, and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank admiration of his brilliant pupil appealed to it vividly in moments of conjugal depression. Charlotte herself must have had some attraction for M. Héger. Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out. Madame, in fact, suspected, on her husband's part, the dawning of an attachment. We know nothing about M. Héger's attachment, and we haven't any earthly right to know; but from all that is known of M. Héger it is certain that, if it was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that "affection presque paternelle" that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and innocent and honourable. It is Madame Héger with her jealousy who has given the poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind—extremely temporary—probably accounted for "those many odd little things, queer and puzzling enough", which Charlotte would not trust to a letter; matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.
Of course there is the argument from the novels, from The Professor, from Jane Eyre, from Villette. I have not forgotten it. But really it begs the question. It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte must have loved and suffered there. And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and for Jane.
No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Brontë's character, and its tremendous power of self-repression. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had raised its head it wouldn't have had a chance to grow an inch. But Charlotte had large and luminous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly pure from all the illusions and subtleties and corruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and vehemences that she would never have allowed to love. If she let herself go in her infrequent intercourse with M. Héger, it was because she was so far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. That was why she could say, "I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested a friend." That was how she could bring herself to write thus to Monsieur: "Savez-vous ce que je ferais, Monsieur? J'écrirais un livre et je le dédierais à mon maître de littérature, au seul maître que j'aie jamais eu—à vous Monsieur! Je vous ai dit souvent en français combien je vous respecte, combien je suis redevable à votre bonté à vos conseils. Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglais … le souvenir de vos bontés ne s'effacera jamais de ma mémoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera le respect que vous m'avez inspiré durera aussi." For "je vous respecte" we are not entitled to read "je vous aime". Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte said "respect" she meant it. Her feeling for M. Héger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said religion was, an affair of "morality touched with emotion". All her utterances, where there is any feeling in them, no matter what, have a poignancy, a vibration which is Brontësque and nothing more. And this Brontësque quality is what the theorists have (like Madame Héger, and possibly Monsieur) neither allowed for nor understood.