The little legends and the little theories have gone far enough. And had they gone no farther they would not have mattered much. They would at least have left Charlotte Brontë's genius to its own mystery. But her genius was the thing that irritated, the enigmatic, inexplicable thing. Talent in a woman you can understand, there's a formula for it--_tout talent de femme est un bonheur manqué_. So when a woman's talent baffles you, your course is plain, _cherchez l'homme_. Charlotte's critics argued that if you could put your finger on the man you would have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was arguing that her genius was, after all, only a superior kind of talent; but some of them had already begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything more? So they began to look for the man. They were certain by this time that there was one. The search was difficult; for Charlotte had concealed him well. But they found him at last in M. Constantin Héger, the little Professor of the Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir Wemyss Reid had suggested a love-affair in Brussels to account for Charlotte's depression, which was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished his theory that Branwell was an innocent lamb who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery. They _made_ misery for themselves out of his harmless peccadilloes. Mr. Angus Mackay in _The Brontës, Fact and Fiction_, gives us this fiction for a fact. He is pleased with what he calls the "pathetic significance" of his "discovery". There _was_ somebody, there had to be, and it had to be M. Héger, for there wasn't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the veil with a gesture and reveals--the love-affair. He is very nice about it, just as nice as ever he can be. "We see her," he says, "sore wounded in her affections, but unconquerable in her will. The discovery ... does not degrade the noble figure we know so well.... The moral of her greatest works--that conscience must reign absolute at whatever cost--acquires a greater force when we realize how she herself came through the furnace of temptation with marks of torture on her, but with no stain on her soul." This is all very well, but the question is: _Did_ Charlotte come through a furnace? _Did_ she suffer from a great and tragic passion? It may have been so. For all we know she may have been in fifty furnaces; she may have gone from one fit of tragic passion to another. Only (apart from gossip, and apart from the argument from the novels, which begs the question) we have no evidence to prove it. What we have points all the other way.