Balthazar paused, as if considering mutiny, but after a long moment he sat back in his chair and we began the return crossing. I was more determined than ever to leave in Madeleine not a trace of a memory of what had just occurred, but naturally I was also perturbed. My confidence in my abilities was shaken. The technique of crossing is based on a kind of mental purity. Obstructions, distractions, hindrances can tilt the entire process off-kilter. When the return crossing was complete, Madeleine didn’t say anything untoward, but there was something about her expression that suggested her state of mind was not how it was supposed to be. She beheld me with an expression somewhere between wonder and suspicion, markedly different from that depressed countenance that had characterized her demeanor before the crossing.

“What just happened?” she asked finally.

“You were under hypnosis.”

“How long did it last?”

“A little under thirty minutes, as we discussed.”

“And what happened in that time?”

“You were in a state of deep relaxation the entire time.”

She mentioned nothing more of it, but when we launched into the analysis I found her to be distant and standoffish, and nothing was achieved. I ended the session early.

A fraud lives in perpetual fear of the cataclysm of his unmasking. Days later, I received a letter from the Medical Review Board. I was under investigation, it said, after a patient had made a complaint against me. My methods were to be reviewed by a panel of three specialists the following week: Gustave Roussy, André Léri, and Jacques Jean Lhermitte. Until then, I was suspended from my duties. The board had been stacked against me, as if handpicked specifically for the purpose of discrediting me. I knew I had enemies in both the military and medical hierarchies, all of whom considered my methods suspect. Léri, in particular, was my professional nemesis, a champion of electric shock treatment, hostile to any doctor who advocated analysis as treatment for shellshock. He thought hypnosis was quackery. The letter didn’t name the complainant, but I guessed it was Artopoulos. He was going to force me to hypnotize him in front of the review panel. I would be his ticket out of the war after all: he would make a crossing, and I would be the one to return to the trenches, only in his body. In the seventeen years of our friendship, he’d never shown me the slightest enmity. There had never been any question of violence. If one of us had wished to harm the other, we’d forsaken countless opportunities to do so. As his creator, his only link to the past, I’d always been exempted from his vengeful nature. No longer.

The morning of the review, I was pacing up and down in my office when there was a knock at the door. It was Madeleine.

“Madame,” I said, “I didn’t expect to see you here this morning.”

“Why not?”