“There’s worse to come. I should tell you that ever since I’d been alone, I had not once looked in the mirror. I wasn’t avoiding it deliberately, for I had no reason to do so; it was an unconscious impulse, a dread of finding two of me, at the same time, in that solitary house. If that is the true explanation, then there is no better proof of man’s contradictory nature, for, a week later, I got it into my head to look at the mirror with precisely the aim of seeing myself twice over. I looked and recoiled. The glass itself seemed to be conspiring with the rest of the universe; it didn’t show me as a sharp, complete image, but as something vague and hazy, diffuse, a shadow of a shadow. The laws of physics will not allow me to deny that the mirror did indeed reproduce my shape and features accurately, for it must have done, but that was not what my senses told me. Then I did feel afraid; I attributed the phenomenon to my strained nerves; I feared I would go mad if I stayed any longer. ‘I must leave,’ I said to myself. And I raised my arm in a gesture that was both ill-tempered and decisive. I saw the gesture repeated in the mirror, but it was somehow dispersed, frayed, mutilated . . . I began to get dressed, muttering to myself, clearing my throat, shaking my clothes brusquely, and cursing my recalcitrant buttons, just in order to say something. From time to time, I glanced furtively at the mirror, only to see the same blurred outlines, the same confused shapes. I carried on getting dressed. Suddenly some inexplicable flash of inspiration, some spontaneous impulse, planted an idea in my head. Can you guess what it was?”

“No, tell us.”

“I was staring desperately at the mirror, contemplating my own dissolving, incomplete features, a mass of loose and shapeless lines, when the idea came to me . . . No, you’ll never guess.”

“Go on, tell us.”