and secretly searching her bureau, as meanly abstracting her letters and
reading them to others, as immodestly laying herself out to entrap the
man to whom she had given her love unsought. In letters to her friend
Ellen, Miss Bronte complains that "Madame Heger never came near her" in
her loneliness and illness.

It was, obviously, some accession to the existing animosity between
herself and Madame Heger which precipitated Miss Bronte's final
departure from the _pensionnat_. Mrs. Gaskell ascribes their mutual
dislike to Charlotte's free expression of her aversion to the Catholic
Church, of which Madame Heger was a devotee, and hence "wounded in her
most cherished opinions;" but a later writer, in the "Westminster
Review," plainly intimates that Miss Bronte hated the woman who sat for
Madame Beck because marriage had given to _her_ the man whom Miss Bronte
loved, and that "Madame Beck had need to be a detective in her own
house." The recent death of Madame Heger has rendered the family, who
hold her now only as a sacred memory, more keenly sensitive than ever to
anything which would seem by implication to disparage her.

For himself it would appear that M. Heger has less cause for resentment,
for, although in "Villette" he (or his double) is pictured as "a waspish
little despot," as fiery and unreasonable, as "detestably ugly" in his
anger, closely resembling "a black and sallow tiger," as having an
"overmastering love of authority and public display," as basely playing
the spy and reading purloined letters, and in the Bronte epistles
Charlotte declares he is choleric and irritable, compels her to make her
French translations without a dictionary or grammar, and then has "his
eyes almost plucked out of his head" by the occasional English word she
is obliged to introduce, etc., yet all this is partially atoned for by
the warm praise she subsequently accords him for his goodness to her and
his "disinterested friendship," by the poignant regret she expresses at
parting with him,--perhaps wholly expiated by the high compliment she
pays him of making her heroine, Lucy, fall in love with him, or the
higher compliment it is suspected she paid him of falling in love with
him herself. One who reads the strange history of passion in "Villette,"
in conjunction with her letters, "will know more of the truth of her
stay in Brussels than if a dozen biographers had undertaken to tell the
whole tale."

Still, M. Heger can scarcely be