ee _The Key to the Bronte 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 Heger 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. Heger. 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 Heger was a Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid-Victorian
mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an attachment, a flagrant
attachment, to M. Heger. 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. Heger and not
Charlotte who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, but
sufficient for Madame Heger. 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. Heger confessed as much when he
asked Charlotte to address her letters to him at the Athenee Royale
instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he said, was disagreeable
to his wife.

Why, in Heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame Heger suspected Charlotte
of an absurd and futile passion? And why should Madame Heger have been
jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a woman who had seen so little of
Madame Heger's husband, and who was then in England? I cannot agree with
Mr. Shorter that M. Heger 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.