All this should be read as in connection with the departure of Miss
Mary, the other phase of Miss Brontë, towards the end of the book. "I
think, however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M.
Héger cost me," said Charlotte Brontë.[66]
Here is M. Sue's version:--
M. de Morville started, then regarding the governess with stupor,
for he could not believe what he heard, he cried:--
"Quoi! Miss Mary, vous dites?"
"I say, monsieur, that I return to England, where I am recalled by
my family."
The real reason why Miss Brontë left is given in the Lagrange passages
to which I have alluded.
"Partir! but that is impossible! A departure so brusque, si peu
attendu!"
"Pray do not perceive, monsieur," says the Irish governess, "in
this unlooked for departure any want of regard for you; ... il a
fallu des raisons graves, very grave, to compel me to such a
resolution."
"Partir!" wailed M. de Morville. "What! that this should be the
last time that I should see you, that I should speak to you! But
this is not possible! They do not kill a man thus by a single
blow! For you well know that you kill me! You well know that I
love you! Oh! do not say you were unaware of my unhappy love," he
continues, "you know well enough what an irresistible charm has
drawn me towards you, what happiness I have had to tell you my
life, my secret thoughts, my wrongs even! A timid reserve followed
the first entrancement, but it was the struggle of respect, of
honour against a fatal passion. Ah! the traces of that struggle,
should they not have been too evident to your eyes! What! have
not you divined the cause of that sombre discouragement which made
me seek solitude where I isolated myself from all interests, from
all affection? And those nights without sleep passed in consuming
my tears, exaggerating more the consequences of that fatal
passion!... What! you have divined nothing, read nothing of mes
traits, in my eyes red with tears and sleeplessness? Mon Dieu! mon
Dieu! to have suffered so much ... suffered so much, and not to
have even the consolation of saying: She knows that I have
suffered."
The reader of _Miss Mary_ will perceive throughout this scene in the
extant and apparently re-written French volume that M. de Morville's
unhappy love was that of an honourable and a loyal-hearted man, while
the governess was also without reproach. (These extracts do not occur in
the _feuilleton_ as published in English.) As he asks:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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