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. Heger.  Madame perceived the appeal and the attraction, and she was jealous; therefore her interpretation of appearances could not have been so unflattering to Charlotte as she made out.  Madame, in fact, suspected, on her husband’s part, the dawning of an attachment.  We know nothing about M. Heger’s attachment, and we haven’t any earthly right to know; but from all that is known of M. Heger it is certain that, if it was not entirely intellectual, not entirely that “affection presque paternelle” that he once professed, it was entirely restrained and innocent and honourable.  It is Madame Heger with her jealousy who has given the poor gentleman away.  Monsieur’s state of mind—­extremely temporary—­probably accounted for “those many odd little things, queer and puzzling enough”, which Charlotte would not trust to a letter; matter for curl-paper confidences and no more.

Of course there is the argument from the novels, from The Professor, from Jane Eyre, from Villette.  I have not forgotten it.  But really it begs the question.  It moves in an extremely narrow and an extremely vicious circle.  Jane Eyre was tried in a furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must have been tried.  Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri loved and suffered in Brussels.  Therefore Charlotte must have loved and suffered there.  And if Charlotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace of temptation, that would account for Frances and for Lucy and for Jane.