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but, as she was wont to say, “I can make out more and more what’s moving around in my fog.”
    She could increasingly discern outlines, then, still somewhat roughly, features. It was as if someone had placed thick pieces of distorting glass over her eyes.
    She had a few surprises, some of them pleasant, like the sight of Mesmer’s dog, a brown spaniel with long ears and sad eyes. She took a liking to it. She also loved pigeons, ducks, and all animals, generally speaking.
    She had a harder time getting used to humans. It was the nose that bothered her most. It disrupted the harmony of the face. She saw it as a visible sign of a person’s personality. Madame Mesmer had a small nose? “A short nose for an arid heart.” Anna’s was flat? Fitting for a young woman whom Maria Theresia considered “even-tempered.” As for Mesmer’s, straight with perfectly rounded nostrils, she decided that it was “masterful.”
    Maria Theresia had ambivalent feelings concerning her cure. There was the thrill of novelty, the daily discovery of a more clear-cut horizon, even if she could never fully grasp the distance separating herself from what was within her view: She could not tell the difference in distance, for example, between Mesmer’s face and the hill in the window frame, and she thought them both within reach of her hand.
    Nevertheless, despite the thrill of waking up every day and being able to focus more and more on the objects and landscapes in her midst, she was again thrust into a state of anxiety that she couldn’t shake off. She tried to reason with herself, to account it to fatigue, because, in addition to learning to see, she had to learn the names of everything she saw. She had a hard time keeping track of this divvying up of words that seemed to her perfectly subjective and, quite honestly, nonsensical. Why a “chest of drawers” and a “wardrobe”? Why give a different word to each since both of them served the same purpose in her room? What made some words masculine and others feminine?
    What discouraged her most was this newly acquired awkwardness of hers. Blind, she had always been admired for the ease with which she moved from one place to another. Now she was a clumsy creature, banging into furniture that she used to skirt around gracefully. Anna insisted that it was a matter of time, that she was too impatient, that the patients in the pavilion encountered similar difficulties getting over similar hurdles. Regardless, Maria Theresia felt diminished. Trying to assimilate all these new aspects of everyday life seemed beyond her.
    Franz Anton Mesmer was infinitely patient, alternating strictness and gentleness, authority and humor. If he had an idea of the feelings she bore him, he never let it show. However, she felt that the bond uniting them was different from the usual one between doctor and patient. The results obtained and the efforts required would have justified that he allow a certain familiarity to develop. This was not the case. On the contrary. Mesmer forced upon himself a formality that betrayed an ambivalence he wanted to hide from her.

Chapter 14
    O NE EVENING ON HIS WAY BACK FROM SUPPER, HE
heard her crying from the entrance hall. He called Anna, who told him that Mademoiselle Paradis had blocked her door with the armchair. It was after midnight. The spaniel was whimpering in unison with her, running back and forth between the legs of his master and the rooms of his new friend.
    It took a lot of persuading on Mesmer’s part, but after a few long minutes he heard a piece of furniture being moved. He pushed open the door, only to come across a red face still moist with tears. Her eyes were so swollen that her gaze was inscrutable, but her demeanor left no doubt as to her utter distress.
    He carried her almost all the way to her bed and sat down beside her. Her body was writhing in spasms as she wrenched her hands and dug her nails into her palms, unaware of the pain. He took her hands in