To a mind like that the germ of the actual was enough. Charlotte Brontë's genius, in fact, was ardently impatient of the actual: it cared only for its own. At the least hint from experience it was off. A glance, a gesture of M. Héger's was enough to fire it to the conception of Paul Emanuel. He had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he _did_ leave bon-bons) for Charlotte's fire to work on him. She had only to say to herself, "This little man is adorable in friendship; I wonder what he would be like in love," and she saw that he would be something, though not altogether, like Paul Emanuel. She had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful, half-humorous affection for him, and she knew what Lucy felt like in her love-sick agony. As for Madame Héger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy, her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities of behaviour, became the fury, the treachery, the perfidy of Madame Beck. For treachery and perfidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte wanted for _Villette_.
And yet it is true that _Villette_ is a novel of experience, owing its conspicuous qualities very much to observation. After all, a contemporary novel cannot be made altogether out of the fire of the great writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Brontë relied too much on the fire of her own soul that in _Jane Eyre_ and parts of _Shirley_ she missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again, she accomplished in _Villette_. For the expression of a social _milieu_, for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at the mercy of observation and experience. It was her final mastery of these things that made it possible to praise Charlotte Brontë's powers of observation at the expense of her genius; and this mainly because of M. Paul.
No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more rich in individuality, than M. Paul. He is alive and he is adorable, in his _paletot_ and _bonnet grec_, from the moment when he drags Lucy up three pairs of stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and locks her in, to that other moment when he brings her to the little house that he has prepared for her. Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, and pathos as pure. It is in this utter purity, this transparent simplicity, that _Villette_ is great. There is not one jarring note in any of the delicious dialogues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those passages which must be erased if quotation is not to fail of its effect. Take the scene where Lucy breaks M. Paul's spectacles.