So much for the identifications.  Mr. Malham-Dembleby has been tempted to force them thus, because they support his theory of M. Heger and of the great tragic passion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, supports his identifications.  His procedure is to quote all the emotional passages he can lay his hands on, from the Poems, from Wuthering Heights, from Jane Eyre, from Villette and The Professor, “... all her life’s hope was torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged heart...” (Villette) “... faith was blighted, confidence destroyed...” (Jane Eyre) ...  “Mr. Rochester” (M.  Heger, we are informed in confidential brackets) was not “what she had thought him”.  Assuring us that Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he builds his argument.  “Evidence” (the evidence of these passages) “shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, and that she portrayed M. Heger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with ‘a riven, outraged heart’, the wounds in which yet rankled sorely.”  So that, key in hand, for “that ghoul Heathcliff!” we must read “that ghoul Heger”.  We must believe that Wuthering Heights was written in pure vindictiveness, and that Charlotte Bronte repudiated its authorship for three reasons:  because it contained “too humiliating a story” of her “heart-thrall”; because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modified animus of her portrait of M. Heger as Rochester and as M. Paul), and for certain sound business considerations.  So much for internal evidence.

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it altogether.  He draws largely upon legend and conjecture, and on more “sensational discoveries” of his own.  He certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjecture in Brussels began at a very early date.  Naturally enough it fairly flared after the publication of Jane Eyre.  So far there is nothing new in his discoveries.  But he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugene Sue’s extinct novel of Miss Mary, ou l’Institutrice, and gives us parallel passages from that.  For in Miss Mary, published in 1850-51[A] we have, not only character for character and scene for scene, “lifted” bodily from Jane Eyre, but the situation in The Professor and Villette is largely anticipated.  We are told that Eugene Sue was in Brussels in 1844, the year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat.  This is interesting.  But what does it prove?  Not, I think, what Mr. Malham-Dembleby maintains—­that M. Heger made indiscreet revelations to Eugene Sue, but that Eugene Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who took his own where he found it, either in the pages of Jane Eyre or in the tittle-tattle of a Brussels salon.  However indiscreet M. Heger may have been, he was a man of proved gravity and honour.  He would, at any rate, have drawn the line at frivolous treachery.  Nobody, however, can answer for what Madame Heger and her friends may not have said.  Which disposes of Eugene Sue.