Professor, if not quite a deity, at least, in my own opinion, the keeper of the keys of palaces where dwelt the Immortals? And that my opinion of M. Heger's personality, as that of a 'Terror' (in the childish and popular sense) did really show me the man apart from the Professor very much as he really was, is confirmed by the first impression he made upon Charlotte herself before the glamour of romantic love had interfered with her critical perspicacity. Here is the original description of M. Heger, in the early days of her residence in Bruxelles: 'There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken,' she wrote to Ellen Nussey, 'M. Heger, the husband of Madame. He is Professor of rhetoric: a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament, a little black being, with a face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the lineaments of a tom-cat: sometimes those of a delirious hyena: occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above one hundred degrees removed from mild and gentleman-like. He is very angry with me just now, because I have written a translation which he stigmatises as _peu correct_. He did not tell me so, but wrote the word on the margin of my book and asked me, in very stern _phrase_, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations, adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable. The fact is that three weeks ago in a high-flown humour he forbade me to use either dictionary or grammar when translating the most difficult English composition into French. This makes the task rather arduous, and compels me every now and then to introduce an English word, which nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it. Emily and he don't draw well together at all.' I am quoting this view of M. Heger's personality, taken by Charlotte Brontë before she became a partial witness, because, by and by, when I am giving my own reminiscences, it will be found that in 1842 M. Heger was very much the same Professor whom I knew in 1861. And Madame Heger? Here too my impressions are obtained from a point of view unquestionably more impartial than Charlotte Brontë's. And it will be found that, when the alteration of clear power of vision that personal prejudices make has been realised, my opposite judgment of the Directress of the Pensionnat to the judgment of the authoress of _Villette_, is not the result of any difference in the _facts_ of Madame Heger's characteristics and behaviour, but in the difference between the standpoints from which we severally judge them.