Rochester's Confession — Jane Eyre

One afternoon Rochester meets Jane and Adèle in the grounds and asks Jane to walk the beech avenue while the child plays. He explains that Adèle is the daughter of Céline Varens, a French opera dancer with whom he once had what he calls a grande passion. He installed her in a Paris hotel with servants, carriages, and diamonds, and believed himself her idol despite his plain face. Calling one evening unannounced, he sat in her boudoir, stepped onto the balcony, and watched her return in the carriage he had given her, followed by a spurred cavalier. Jealousy seized him; he broke off to speak of Thornfield, which he both loves and abhors, and declared to a hag-like destiny that he will break obstacles to happiness and be a better man.

When Jane asks whether he left the balcony, he resumes. He drew the curtain and spied through a chink as Céline and a young vicomte entered, removed their cloaks, and mocked him in coarse terms, Céline now calling his features deformities. His love died in that moment. He abandoned Céline, fought the vicomte at the Bois de Boulogne, and thought himself done with the affair. Six months earlier Céline had given him Adèle, claiming paternity; he sees no proof of it but took the child out of Paris mud when the mother ran off to Italy. An agent's call interrupts the story; Rochester finishes in brief and asks whether Jane will quit her post now that she knows Adèle's origins. Jane says she will cling closer to the lonely orphan than to a spoilt pet who hates her governess.

That night in her chamber Jane reviews the tale and notices how Rochester's manner toward her has softened. She cannot sleep. A demoniac laugh sounds at her door; steps retreat toward the third storey. Smoke fills the gallery. Rochester's bed is on fire and he lies stupefied in the blaze. Jane douses him with water from basin and ewer until the flames are out. He wakes calling her a witch and sorceress, then goes alone to the second storey and returns attributing everything to Grace Poole, the sewing woman whose laugh Jane already knows. He asks her to say nothing. As she turns to leave he stops her: she has saved his life and will not go without shaking hands. He holds her hand in both of his and says he feels her benefits no burden. Jane insists there is no debt. She reaches her room but does not sleep, tossed on a sea where billows of trouble roll under surges of joy until morning.