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To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte Brontë's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A glance, a gesture of M. Héger's was enough to fire it to the conception of Paul Emanuel.
"It is an act of great charity to her, and I do not think it will be unrewarded, for she is very faithful, and will always serve you, when she has occasion, to the best of her abilities; besides, she will be company for Emily, who, without her, would be very lonely." I gave a devoir, written after she had been four months under M. Heger's tuition.
Thus, although there was never any explanation of Madame Heger's change of manner, this may be given as one great reason why, about this time, Charlotte was made painfully conscious of a silent estrangement between them; an estrangement of which, perhaps, the former was hardly aware.
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.
An English physician, with a large family of daughters, went to reside at Brussels, for the sake of their education. He placed them at Madame Heger's school in July, 1842, not a month before the beginning of the grandes vacances on August 15th.
Lucy Snowe is Jane Eyre, otherwise Charlotte Brontë, placed amidst different surroundings; and Ginevra Fanshawe was sketched from one of the pupils in Héger's school. The materials used in "Villette" were taken, in part, from an earlier work, "The Professor," which suffered rejection nine times at the hands of publishers.
In the thirteenth century, the Rue d'Isabelle was called the Fosse-aux- Chiens; and the kennels for the ducal hounds occupied the place where Madame Heger's pensionnat now stands.
We shall see the progress Charlotte had made, in ease and grace of style, a year later. In the choice of subjects left to her selection, she frequently took characters and scenes from the Old Testament, with which all her writings show that she was especially familiar. To use M. Heger's expression, "Elle etait nourrie de la Bible."
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.
They visited Louis Philippe at the Chateau d'Eu; they visited King Leopold in Brussels. It happened that a still more remarkable Englishwoman was in the Belgian capital, but she was not remarked; and Queen Victoria passed unknowing before the steady gaze of one of the mistresses in M. Heger's pensionnat.
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