And so, for an instant, she saw us in the mirror, herself and me, side by side.

What did she think as she discovered this feminine shape next to “Bonny”? She stood motionless and began to snarl as she had done when she first saw me with Dorothy. She snarled for some time at her own immobile image next to mine, then she began to move. She walked to the looking glass, and her reflection, moving toward her, growled ever more strongly. And suddenly she pounced on the intruder. The result was a great racket of broken glass and Sylva, flabbergasted, sitting amid the splinters on the ground.

I saw at once that she was not hurt, but also that she was staring at all those pieces with the keenest surprise. She looked at her hand lying on a splinter of glass, withdrew it, put it back, withdrew it again, moving her fingers a little, must have seen her fingers move in the broken shards, rose quickly as if frightened, ran to where she thought she had seen me, stopped dead when she no longer saw me, turned back toward the cheval glass which was now merely an empty frame, gropingly touched (if one can say so) the emptiness inside with her hand, gave a start, ran behind it as if in a panic, suddenly saw me in the frame on the side where she was not expecting me, gave a cry, and fled into her room.

I had watched the whole scene without stirring or speaking, too curious to see what would happen. Nothing more did happen, as a matter of fact. Sylva did not reappear. I picked up the pieces and took them down to the dustbin, mounted the stairs again to go to bed, once more disappointed by this persistent lack of comprehension. I put out the light and tried to sleep.

I could not manage to fall asleep and my idle thoughts soon left my disappointing vixen to return to Dorothy. It was like that almost every night since her last visit. What was the matter with the young woman? What had happened between this last time and the one before? That wan complexion, those tired features. Had these changes something to do with me? But her father’s tone had been so startled and almost sarcastic when he said, “You, my poor boy!” Ought I to be relieved or offended by it? Did I love her or didn’t I? Everybody knows how one’s thoughts turn in circles in one’s half-sleep, and incessantly return to their point of departure. They prevent you from falling asleep but don’t progress an inch. That’s what happened this night too, and I was dozing fitfully.

And then, like a shock, I sensed a presence in the room. I heard nothing. Not a sound. But opening my eyes, I saw a shadow quite close to me, motionless at my bedside. The moon was shining into the room through the slatted shutters, shedding a milky, tiger-striped light, and the silhouette leaned slowly forward amid those bars of moving shadows. I pretended to be asleep but through my eyelashes I could see Sylva’s face approaching mine, and that face—there is no other word for it—was observing, scrutinizing mine. As she had never done before. As if she were trying to discover in it something unknown. With such an unwonted insistence that I hardly dared to breathe while, oddly enough, the doctor’s words came back to me, urging me to think of the invisible work which day after day was accomplished in this blank brain—what junctions, he said, what concatenations of frustrated impressions, forgotten emotions, lost visions, what dim associations, what sudden flashes… And then Sylva left my side, returned to the cheval glass, looked at it, doggedly groped in the empty space.

With a twinge of my heart, I thought I understood what was happening. I arose, took her in my arms. She allowed herself obediently to be led into the bathroom. Before the big wall mirror, I put on the light and for a moment—very brief or very long, I don’t know—she looked at herself at my side. Her eyes slowly widened. Was she going to recognize herself at last? But how could she, since she had never yet seen herself? And indeed, as always, she began to wriggle to escape me. I sought to hold her back, but then, in an upsurge of fear or rage, she bit my hand with a sort of dull bark, short as a cry, and I let her go, annoyed. But… what’s that? What’s she doing? For the first time for many a week, she huddled up between the wall and the little bow-fronted chest of drawers, where she remained trembling as she used to, her dilated eyes clinging to me.

I approached her; she did not move. I squatted down next to her. I pressed her to my shoulder. She did not protest. She was shaking. I murmured quite close to her ear, “Come… come now… what’s the matter?” But I knew, I knew too well that neither her vocabulary nor her embryonic intelligence would enable my vixen to answer such a question. However, she turned a stricken face toward mine. And meanwhile her hand rose with unsteady, almost frightened slowness, moved gropingly for a moment over her body, over the soft curve of her breast. And then her fingers began to climb along the slender, supple throat, like a quivering spider. They hesitated on her cheeks, her chin, her ears, her nose—a blind man’s exploring fingers gently deciphering a face. She thus deciphered it slowly and fearfully—discovered it or verified it?—and at last, at last she murmured, in a very small voice, in the tone of a question she might put to me in a quite small, anguished voice:

“Syl… va?”

For the very first time she was stammering her own name, and her hand, her fingers became motionless. And she waited, pressed more tightly against me, visibly expecting me to answer, “Why yes, my little Sylva, it’s you, of course…” and indeed that’s what I said. I said it very softly and then she was clinging to my chest with the abruptness of a child who feels the ground giving way under its feet, and I decided to push her a little. I got up and dragged her once more toward the bathroom. But she resisted, and I had the greatest trouble in making her move forward. She protested, “No! No!” in a stifled tone of dread, and I began to get irritated, to think that she was really too stupid. Why, what a to-do about recognizing oneself in a mirror! What an idiotic fear! In a moment she would be amused by it, would laugh with pleasure.

As if in response to my unspoken thoughts, she seemed momentarily to yield, but then, stepping closer, she suddenly dived, slipped between my hands, escaped me, ran toward the door, left, slamming it behind her, and I heard her dashing along the corridor and clambering up the stairs that led to the attic.

Should I go after her or not? Was I wrong to force her? But, for heaven’s sake, what a bizarre idea, to be frightened to death by one’s own likeness! I decided to let her sulk if she felt like it, and returned to bed.

But sleep evaded me more than ever, and strangely, I become more stirred, more intrigued by my vixen’s behavior than I had ever been before. Gradually, in this state of semiconsciousness in which I hovered once again, it seemed to me that I could guess or understand her better, that I could better identify myself with her, with what she felt. Or rather, I imagined what she had been, half an hour ago: an unconscious, carefree little being, absent from itself, who, as Dr. Sullivan had said, lived and acted without even knowing that it existed, without really distinguishing itself from the rest of things.

Ever since childhood, we ourselves have been accustomed to, been trained to, see ourselves and distinguish ourselves in this way, and this separateness is so natural to us that we never think of it. But a fox! Had I ever figured to myself what it could be like to discover suddenly that one is isolated, separated, exiled from tutelary nature with whom one had hitherto formed one warmth, one breath, one flesh? And I imagined too for the first time the dreadful revelation it must have been for our distant Neanderthal ancestors, for those bearded, shaggy primates who had no mirrors, to become self-conscious, who had to discover themselves in the eyes of others, in their shouts, their threats, their gesticulations and their hostility—and who discovered themselves as they were—fragile and naked and solitary, with nothing but their own strength in the midst of frightening forests…