Note 53 — Chapter XI
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It is sad indeed to find Charlotte Brontë confessed, shortly before her marriage to the Rev Mr. Nicholls, that there was no such sympathy between herself and her prospective husband. See letters of Miss Catherine Winkworth in Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (1908). Miss Winkworth and Miss Brontë discussed the matter personally. Miss Catherine Winkworth wrote of Mr. Nicholls and Charlotte Brontë:—"I am sure she will be really good to him. But I guess the true love was Paul Emanuel [of Villette] after all ... but I don't know, and don't think that Lily [Mrs. Gaskell] knows." I should say that Mrs. Ratcliffe of Haworth—Tabitha Brown: her sister, Martha Brown, was one of the Brontë servants—at whose house Tabitha Aykroyd breathed her last, stated to me on February 21st, 1907, that as to Charlotte Brontë's "wedded life, they lived happily together." Often do we discover references to the elective affinities in regard to M. Héger and Charlotte Brontë in Currer Bell's works. Thus we did not need that Rochester should say in the last chapter but one of Jane Eyre:—"I am not better than the old lightning-struck chestnut," for we had understood by the touching apostrophe in Jane Eyre, Chapter XXV., that he and Jane were implied. The words were:—"The cloven halves were not broken from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; ... they might be said to form one tree—a ruin, but an entire ruin. 'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said, as if the monster splinters were living things; ... 'the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but ... each of you has a comrade to sympathize with.'" And Rochester tells Jane:—"You are my sympathy—my better self; ... a fervent ... passion ... wraps; my existence about you—and kindling in ... powerful flame, fuses you and me in one." M. Héger as M. Paul in Villette strikes the same note we hear in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre:—"We are alike—there is affinity between us.... Tremble! for where that is the case with mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to entangle."