Charlotte Brontë's poems, "Frances,"[82] "Gilbert," and "Preference" (wherein we have literature in allegory preferred to a lover), show there had been to her a season of darkest misery when, to quote _Villette_ concerning herself as Lucy Snowe, "all her life's hope was torn by the roots out of her riven outraged heart." Whether this was the time when, in the words of herself as Jane Eyre, "faith was blighted, confidence destroyed": a time to her when Mr. Rochester (M. Héger) was not to her "what she had thought him," the reader shall decide. But in _Villette_ and _Jane Eyre_ she "would not ascribe vice to him; ... would not say he had betrayed" her. She forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at [her] heart's core. See the phase of M. Pelet in the _The Professor_. Evidence shows it was in her dark season when Charlotte Brontë wrote _Wuthering Heights_, and that she portrayed M. Héger therein with all the vindictiveness of a woman with "a riven outraged heart," the wounds in which yet rankled sorely. Thus may we understand her saying in her famous preface to _Wuthering Heights_:-- Heathcliffe betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is _not_ his love for Catherine, which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman: a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius [see my reference to "Robin-a-Ree"; and to the Craven Satyr, page 142]; a fire that might form the tormented centre--the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him ... we should say he was a man's shape animated by demon life.... Whether it is right or advisable to create a being like Heathcliffe I do not know; I scarcely think it is. Even in _Villette_ there were recurrences of the spasmodic spirit of vindictiveness responsible for Charlotte Brontë's harsh portrayal of M. Héger as Heathcliffe, though "at her heart's core she then forgave him." In _Villette_, Chapter XX., she refers to M. Paul (M. Héger) antithetically, and all the more significantly, in a comparison of him with Dr. John Bretton, of whom she says:-- Who could help liking him? _He_ betrayed no weakness which harassed all your feelings with considerations as to how its faltering must be propped; from _him_ broke no irritability which startled calm and quenched mirth; _his_ lips let fall no caustic that burned to the bone; _his_ eye shot no morose shafts that went cold, and rusty, and venomed through your heart.