1842-43 What were Charlotte Brontë's real relationships with Monsieur and Madame Heger when, in January 1844, she bade them, what was to prove, a final farewell? This is what has to be understood before we can read with a full sense of their true meaning the tragical impassioned Letters to M. Heger, written within the first two years of Charlotte's return to England, Letters that not only place the authoress of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ (as a devotee, and an exponent of Romantic love) on a 'higher pedestal than ever,' but that, also, explain at what cost of personal anguish she attained as a writer her extraordinary power of translating emotions into words, that, by the impression they produce retranslate themselves to her readers' imagination and sensibilities as feelings. We have always to remember that the relationships between Charlotte and her former Professor were not those that existed between Lucy Snowe and her 'Master.' Paul Emanuel was unmarried, and in love with Lucy, although Madame Beck and the Jesuit, Père Silas,--and in the end Destiny--prevented the love-story from reaching a happy ending. Nor were these relationships, as the facts of the case reveal them, those imagined by Mr. Clement Shorter; where '_it was no cause of grief to Charlotte that M. Heger was married_,' because her enthusiasm for him was that of simple hero-worship for a great man. Nor yet were these relationships, when she left Bruxelles in 1844 (nor had they been for some ten months before that date), the same relationships (of trustful friendship on the one hand and sympathetic interest on the other) that had existed between Charlotte and the Director and Directress of the Pensionnat in the Rue d'Isabelle when, a year earlier (in January 1843), Charlotte had returned to Bruxelles alone, _in response to Madame's as well as Monsieur's invitation_, to perfect her own French, and to receive a small salary as English Mistress. These first relationships had continued untroubled for the first few months after Charlotte's return. Thus, in March 1843, writing to her friend Ellen Nussey, she qualifies her complaints of loneliness in the Pensionnat (without the companionship she had enjoyed the previous year of her dearly loved sister Emily) by reference to the kindness of Madame, as well as of Monsieur Heger.