everything to her flight from Haworth. In
reality her flight merely coincided with the inevitable shooting of its
wings; and the specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny.

Heaven only knows what would have happened to her genius if, blind to
her destiny, she had remained in Brussels. For, once there, its
wing-feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by every conceivable
hostile and obstructive thing. Madame Heger was hostile, and Monsieur, I
think, purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and denounced his
method as fatal to all originality. Charlotte, to be sure, called him
"my dear master, the only master that I ever had", but if that was not
her "absurd charity", it was only her Brontesque way. There was no sense
in which he was her master. He taught her French; to the very last the
habit of using "a few French words" was the King Charles's head in her
manuscripts; and the French he taught her did her harm. The restraint he
could and would have taught her she never learnt until her genius had
had, in defiance and in spite of him, its full fling.

And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite
of obstacles, Charlotte Bronte's took hold of every man and woman that
crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on
Monsieur and on Madame Heger. Those two were made for peaceful,
honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a
half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius
thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to
make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; for
he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet,
because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he
has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign
and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his
grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once
for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important
only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it
would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way.
Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have
had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all.

There is hardly any hope that Bronte specialists will accept this view.
For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as