Happily, however, attention to facts proves that none of the conditions that, if they had existed, would have rendered the writing of these Letters discreditable to Charlotte's reputation, can be accepted as in the least credible. It is not credible that her sentiment for M. Heger was that of intellectual enthusiasm for a great man double her age; because, to begin with, M, Heger was _not_ double Charlotte Brontë's age, but only seven years her senior. About this question there can be no dispute. M. Heger was born in 1809; and Charlotte Brontë in 1816. In 1844 Charlotte then was twenty-eight, and M. Heger thirty-five years of age, and given the fact that women lose their youth first, M. Heger had precisely the age that would render him most sympathetic to a woman who was still young but who had left girlhood behind her. Again, M. Heger was not a '_Great Man_,' in the sense of being either a celebrity, or an original genius with gifts or qualities of an order calculated to kindle intellectual hero-worship; and he was further a dictatorial and ingrained Professor, the very last person on earth to offer literary comradeship to a former pupil. The Director of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle, and the former _Préfet des Études_ at the Brussels _Athénée_ (who had resigned this post when religious instruction, made a free subject, was excluded, as a compulsory Catholic training from the college curriculum) was a man of talent, who had weight in Catholic circles, and was recognised in his character of a Professor as one with an admirable gift for teaching, even by the enemies of his religious convictions; but he was not in any way, save as a teacher, a distinguished or famous personage; and in all probability if this English writer of genius had not immortalised him in the character of 'Paul Emanuel,' M. Heger would not have outlived the affectionate and respectful remembrance of his family and personal friends. The method of testing the question of whether intellectual enthusiasm, or tragical romantic love is the sentiment revealed in these Letters is _to read the Letters themselves--in the light of a true impression of the real relationships (when they were written) between Charlotte Brontë and M. Heger_, that is to say in the first twelve months that followed Charlotte's farewell to the Director and the Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle, in January 1844. And to obtain this right impression, we have to see what had taken place, to alter the original entirely friendly terms between Madame Heger and the English under-mistress, who during the first year of her stay in Brussels had been a parlour-boarder:--for the story told in _Villette_ of Lucy Snowe's arrival at the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle late at night, and with no place of shelter, having lost her box and been robbed of her purse on the voyage, is, to start with, an incident that has no place in the true history. CHAPTER III CHARLOTTE'S LAST YEAR AT BRUSSELS