Heger's movements were always attended with shock and excitement; only to me, Madame Heger appeared always a friendly rather than an adverse presence--an abiding influence of serenity that reassured one, after sudden recurrent gusts of nerve-disturbing storms. And I would point out that the value of my testimony about the personal impressions I derived, quite independently of any knowledge of Charlotte Brontë's residence in what was for me _my_ school, and of her enthusiasm for _my_ Professor, or her dislike of _my_ schoolmistress, is enhanced both by the resemblances and by the differences of our several points of view. Thus--like Charlotte--I was an English pupil and a Protestant in this Belgian and Catholic school. Like her--my vocation was to be that of a woman of letters. And although, when she was brought under M. Heger's influence, she was a woman of genius, already well acquainted with good literature, and not without experience as a writer, whereas I was only an unformed girl, with very little reading and no culture: and merely by force of an inborn desire to follow a certain purpose in life that filled me with happiness, even in anticipation, justified in supposing that I had a literary vocation at all, and although no doubt I have not turned my advantages to account as Charlotte did, yet I myself owe to M. Heger, not only admirable rules for criticism and practice, that have always claimed and still claim my absolute belief, but also I owe to him, as she did, a full enjoyment of beautiful thoughts, beautifully expressed, and of treasures of the mind and of the imagination, that, lying outside of the recognised paths of English study, I might never have found, nor even have recognised as treasures, had I not been cured of insularity of taste by M. Heger. So that upon this point I am able to say of M. Heger what Charlotte said: he was the only master in literature I ever had; and up to the present hour I esteem him, in this domain of literary composition, the only master whose rules I trust.