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?”

“My appointments have all been canceled. Surely you were told. I’ve been suspended. Someone’s made a complaint about me. I’m supposed to meet with the Medical Review Board in the Great Hall this afternoon. I have to defend my methods before a panel of three doctors.”

She looked at me with a confused expression. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I have no complaints about your methods, professor.”

“I wasn’t suggesting it,” I said with a smile, “but I’m glad to hear it all the same.”

“My only complaint,” she continued hesitantly, “although it’s not a complaint at all really, is the one I expressed last time, while I was under hypnosis.”

I played dumb. “Remind me?”

“That if there is the possibility of passing over into another body, I wish to take it.”

I considered my predicament briefly before concluding I had nothing to gain by insisting on the pretense. “Madame, I must be honest with you. Something went wrong. You’re not supposed to remember that.”