Andrée and the Mirror

Andrée began noticing the gaps sometime after the incident at the roadside inn, though she could not, examining her own memory as carefully as she was able, locate the precise moment the noticing itself began, an irony she found unsettling once she recognized it, since a woman attempting to catalogue the failures of her own memory ought reasonably to expect at least that particular starting point to remain clear to her.

What she noticed, initially, were small things easily attributed to ordinary distraction: an afternoon whose events she could not fully reconstruct when her father asked her, in passing, what she had done with her time; a conversation she was told, by a servant who had apparently witnessed it, that she had conducted the previous evening, of which she retained no memory whatsoever. She told herself, in these early instances, that she was simply tired, or preoccupied with the general upheaval the mysterious traveler Balsamo's arrival had brought to the household's ordinary routine. It was only when the gaps began accumulating with a frequency that outstripped any reasonable account of simple distraction that Andrée began, quietly and without informing anyone else in the household, to keep a private record.

The record was simple in its method, if considerably more difficult in its actual execution than Andrée had initially anticipated: each evening, before retiring, she wrote a brief account of her day's activities as she remembered them, and each morning, she compared this account against whatever evidence (a servant's passing comment, an object moved from where she recalled leaving it, a task apparently completed that she had no memory of beginning) might confirm or contradict her own recollection. She found, within the first weeks of this private discipline, a pattern that troubled her considerably more than the individual gaps themselves had: the missing time clustered, with a consistency too precise to attribute to coincidence, around periods when Balsamo had been present in the household, and more specifically, around occasions when she had found herself, for reasons she could not afterward reconstruct, alone in his company.

She did not, in those early weeks of careful record-keeping, draw the conclusion that seems obvious in retrospect to anyone familiar with the novel's eventual revelations about Balsamo's mesmeric influence over her. She lacked, at the time, any framework that might have made such a conclusion available to her. Mesmerism itself was, in the world she inhabited, either dismissed as charlatanism or treated with a superstitious dread that offered no true analytical purchase on what might be happening to her own mind. What she concluded, instead, working within the more limited framework actually available to her, was something considerably more mundane and, in its own way, more painful to consider: that she might be developing some private mental affliction, perhaps hereditary, perhaps simply the result of her own overtaxed nerves, that was slowly eroding her capacity to reliably account for her own experience.

This conclusion, mistaken as it eventually proved to be, produced in Andrée a private terror she shared with no one, not her father, whose capacity for real concern about anything beyond his own immediate interests she had learned, across years of observation, not to overestimate; not the household's other occupants, from whom an admission of failing mental faculties would have carried true social risk in a world that offered women very few protections once their reliability came into serious question. She carried the fear alone, continuing her careful private record-keeping with a discipline that itself began to feel, after some weeks, like the only reliable anchor she retained against a reality she could no longer fully trust her own mind to accurately report.

What she did not yet understand, keeping this careful and increasingly anxious private record, was that the gaps in her memory were not evidence of any failure in her own mind at all, but the precise, deliberate signature of an outside influence being exercised upon her without her knowledge or consent, that she was not losing access to her own experience through some internal deterioration, but having that access actively and skillfully removed by a man whose interest in her extended considerably beyond the ordinary social courtesies he displayed toward her in whatever portions of her own experience he permitted her to consciously retain.

The private record she kept, in those anxious early weeks, would eventually become, though she could not have anticipated this at the time she began it, one of the more valuable pieces of evidence available when the fuller truth of Balsamo's influence finally emerged, since it provided a documented, dated account of exactly when and how frequently her memory had failed her, correlated precisely against his presence in ways that made the eventual explanation considerably harder for anyone to dismiss as mere coincidence or feminine imagination once it finally came time to explain what had been happening to her all along. Andrée herself took little comfort in this eventual vindication, once it arrived. She had spent too many private, terrified weeks believing herself to be losing her own mind to feel much beyond exhaustion at finally learning that the mind had, in fact, remained entirely intact throughout, merely borrowed, without her consent, by someone else who had never once troubled himself to consider what that borrowing might cost her.