But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable thing.  Talent in a woman you can understand, there’s a formula for it—­tout talent de femme est un bonheur manque.  So when a woman’s talent baffles you, your course is plain, cherchez l’homme.  Charlotte’s critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man you would have the key to the mystery.  This, of course, was arguing that her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything more?  So they began to look for the man.  They were certain by this time that there was one.

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well.  But they found him at last in M. Constantin Heger, the little Professor of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d’Isabelle.  Sir Wemyss Reid had suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte’s depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life.  Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment’s misery.  They made misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes.  Mr. Angus Mackay in The Brontes, Fact and Fiction, gives us this fiction for a fact.  He is pleased with what he calls the “pathetic significance” of his “discovery”.  There was somebody, there had to be, and it had to be M. Heger, for there wasn’t anybody else.  Mr. Mackay draws back the veil with a gesture and reveals—­the love-affair.  He is very nice about it, just as nice as ever he can be.  “We see her,” he says, “sore wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will.  The discovery ... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well....  The moral of her greatest works—­that conscience must reign absolute at whatever cost—­acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with no stain on her soul.”

This is all very well, but the question is:  Did Charlotte come through a furnace? Did she suffer from a great and tragic passion?  It may have been so.  For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another.  Only (apart from gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the question) we have no evidence to prove it.  What we have points all the other way.

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have nourished their theory chiefly on that celebrated passage in a letter of Charlotte’s to Ellen Nussey:  “I returned to Brussels after Aunt’s death, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse.  I was punished for my selfish folly by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.”

Here we have the great disclosure.  By “irresistible impulse” and “selfish folly”, Charlotte could only mean indulgence in an illegitimate passion for M. Heger’s society.  Peace of mind bears but one interpretation.