As for my own ignorance of all these circumstances there is nothing strange in that. Fifty-four years ago a schoolgirl of my age was not very likely to have read _Villette_. But what one may pause to inquire is whether if by any accident the book _had_ come into my hands, and thus revealed to me my true position, should I have gone down on my bended knees to my mother, or to express the case more exactly, should I have flung my arms round her dear neck, and prayed, '_Don't send me to this school; I am afraid of Professor Paul Emanuel; I loathe Madame Beck; I shall never make friends with these horrid Lesbassecouriennes?_' Well, really, I don't think I should have done anything of the sort! At fourteen one adores an adventure. It seems to me probable that the excitement of going to the same school, and learning my lessons in the same class-rooms, and treading the paths of the same garden, and being instructed by the same teachers as a writer of genius, who had left these scenes haunted by romance, would have made me hold under all apprehensions of the Lesbassecouriennes as school-fellows, of the perfidious Directress with her stealthy methods of espionage, of the explosive, nerve-wrecking Professor, always breaking in upon one like a clap of thunder. Yes; but though held under, the apprehension would have troubled my inner soul a good deal all the same; and this would have been a pity. Because, in so far as the real Directress and real Belgian schoolgirls whom I was going to know in the Rue d'Isabelle went, these apprehensions would have been superfluous and misleading. But now if there were no danger of my finding in the real Pensionnat any spiritual counterparts of either the fictitious Madame Beck, or of the perverted Lesbassecouriennes pupils, was it equally certain that, if I had read _Villette_, I should not have recognised and been justified in recognising in Monsieur Heger the original model and living image of that immortal figure in English fiction, '_the magnificent-minded, grand-hearted, dear, faulty little man_'--Professor Paul Emanuel? We shall perhaps be able to decide this question better at the end of these reminiscences than here. But what must be realised is, that the very fact that lends some general interest to my mother's first impressions and my own about M. Heger is chiefly this: that it expresses observations made from a purely personal standpoint; out of sight of any literary views about 'Paul Emanuel,' or historical judgments upon his relations with Charlotte Brontë. The perfectly simple purpose we had in view was to see clearly what sort of a Professor M. Heger was going to prove, and whether I was going to do well as his pupil, and get on satisfactorily, amongst these foreign surroundings.