International copyright and Villette, or could Charlotte prevent a French translation?

“How much George Smith had to be initiated into the secret shrouding of the Brussels origin of the book can only be guessed from the fact that Charlotte pledged him to refuse and to prevent a French translation. He kept his word till after her death, but it was of little avail to check the pirates,” Winifred Gérin wrote in her biography of Charlotte Brontë. In her biography of Mrs. Gaskell she writes that Charlotte “had made a special agreement with George Smith.”  It is a widely held belief that Charlotte did her best to prevent a French translation, but did she really? And just as important, what could George Smith have done? This article deals with the latter question.

Gérin gave no source but she was at least partly inspired by Clement Shorter, by what he wrote in his Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (London, 1896). She must certainly have seen this book.
"But,” Shorter wrote, “in justice to the creator of these scathing portraits [of Madame Heger in The Professor and Villette], it may be mentioned that Charlotte Brontë took every precaution to prevent Villette from obtaining currency in the city which inspired it. She told Miss Wheelwright, with whom naturally, on her visits to London, she often discussed the Brussels life, that she had received a promise that there should be no translation, and that the book would never appear in the French language. One cannot therefore fix upon Charlotte Brontë any responsibility that immediately after her death the novel appeared in the only tongue understood by Madame Heger."