Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is interested in it, intellectually, not emotionally.

In November:  “Twinges of homesickness cut me to the heart, now and then.”  On holidays “the silence and loneliness of all the house weighs down one’s spirits like lead....  Madame Heger, good and kind as I have described her” (i.e. for all her goodness and kindness), “never comes near me on these occasions.” ...  “She is not colder to me than she is to the other teachers, but they are less dependent on her than I am.”  But the situation is becoming clearer.  Charlotte is interested.  “I fancy I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty distance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh, and at other times nearly cry.  When I am sure of it I will tell you.”

There can be no doubt that before she left Brussels Charlotte was sure; but there is no record of her ever having told.

The evidence from the letters is plain enough.  But the first thing that the theorist does is to mutilate letters.  He suppresses all those parts of a correspondence which tell against his theory.  When these torn and bleeding passages are restored piously to their contexts they are destructive to the legend of tragic passion.  They show (as Mr. Clement Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her last year at Brussels Charlotte Bronte saw hardly anything of M. Heger.  They also show that before very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Madame had arranged it so, and that it was not so much the absence of Monsieur that disturbed her as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame.  And they show that from first to last she was incurably homesick.

Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, latently, or increasingly, or violently in love with M. Heger, she would have been as miserable as you like in M. Heger’s house, but she would not have been homesick; she would not, I think, have worried quite so much about Madame’s behaviour; and she would have found the clue to it sooner than she did.

To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if the story were not revived periodically, if it had not been raked up again only the other day,[A] there would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful and silly.

[Footnote A:  See 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