on a churchyard paved with graves. Her father was a kindly man, but
essentially moody and solitary. He took all his meals alone, walked
alone, sate alone. Her mother died of cancer, when she was but a
child. Then she was sent to an ill-managed austere school, and here
when she was nine years old her two elder sisters died. She took
service two or three times as a governess, and endured agonies of
misunderstanding, suspicious of her employers, afraid of her
pupils, longing for home with an intense yearning. Then she went
out to a school at Brussels, where under the teaching of M. Heger,
a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and she formed for
him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion, half an
unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind. Her
sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded
by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the
relation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had
aroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways
attractive boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried
to console himself with drink and opium. After three years of this
horrible life, he died, and within twelve months her two surviving
sisters, Emily and Anne, developed consumption and died. As Robert
Browning says, there indeed was "trouble enough for one!"

Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturally
hypochondriacal.

Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it is
undoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into
which Charlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary
experiences in Brussels. She is left alone at the pensionnat in the
vacation, strained by work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion,