It was, obviously, some accession to the existing animosity between herself and Madame Heger which precipitated Miss Bronte’s final departure from the pensionnat.  Mrs. Gaskell ascribes their mutual dislike to Charlotte’s free expression of her aversion to the Catholic Church, of which Madame Heger was a devotee, and hence “wounded in her most cherished opinions;” but a later writer, in the “Westminster Review,” plainly intimates that Miss Bronte hated the woman who sat for Madame Beck because marriage had given to her the man whom Miss Bronte loved, and that “Madame Beck had need to be a detective in her own house.”  The recent death of Madame Heger has rendered the family, who hold her now only as a sacred memory, more keenly sensitive than ever to anything which would seem by implication to disparage her.

For himself it would appear that M. Heger has less cause for resentment, for, although in “Villette” he (or his double) is pictured as “a waspish little despot,” as fiery and unreasonable, as “detestably ugly” in his anger, closely resembling “a black and sallow tiger,” as having an “overmastering love of authority and public display,” as basely playing the spy and reading purloined letters, and in the Bronte epistles Charlotte declares he is choleric and irritable, compels her to make her French translations without a dictionary or grammar, and then has “his eyes almost plucked out of his head” by the occasional English word she is obliged to introduce, etc., yet all this is partially atoned for by the warm praise she subsequently accords him for his goodness to her and his “disinterested friendship,” by the poignant regret she expresses at parting with him,—­perhaps wholly expiated by the high compliment she pays him of making her heroine, Lucy, fall in love with him, or the higher compliment it is suspected she paid him of falling in love with him herself.  One who reads the strange history of passion in “Villette,” in conjunction with her letters, “will know more of the truth of her stay in Brussels than if a dozen biographers had undertaken to tell the whole tale.”

Still, M. Heger can scarcely be pleased by the ludicrous figure he is so often made to cut in the novels by having members of his school set forth as stupid, animal, and inferior, “their principles rotten to the core, steeped in systematic sensuality,” by having his religion styled “besotted papistry, a piece of childish humbug,” and the like.

Something of the displeasure of the family was revealed in the course of our conversation with Mademoiselle Heger, but the specific causes were but cursorily touched upon.  She could have no personal recollection of the Brontes; her knowledge of them is derived from her parents and the teachers,—­presumably the “repulsive old maids” of Charlotte’s letters.  One of the present teachers in the pensionnat had been a classmate of Charlotte’s here.  The Brontes had not been popular with the school.