Mary Shelley — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

I write to you, Cornelia, though you are far off and though this letter may find you only after I have quitted this city forever; for I feel, with a certainty that I cannot argue away, that my days of solitary labor here draw to their appointed close, and that what I have seen in the glass of an old café must be set down before the seeing of it dims in me as all things dim. You will say that a crack in silvered glass is no fit subject for confession; you will say that a woman who has spent a twelvemonth answering letters and translating contracts for masters she has never met, alone in rooms not her own, in a capital whose language she speaks but does not dream in, is prone to invent omens where there are only flaws of manufacture. Yet I ask you to suffer me this indulgence, as you have suffered so many others, and to raise your eyes to the page as though I stood before you.

The city, I will confess, gave itself to me at first as a balm rather than a burden: the pale bridges arched over a river the color of tarnished pewter; the spires, black with centuries of soot, keeping their vigil above roofs of a hundred hues; the chestnut trees along the boulevard, whose blossoms fell in the spring like a soft and continual snow. I had come, as so many now come, not for love of any person, but for the freedom of a wage that followed me across borders while I remained tethered to no office, no household, no fixed society; and I had believed, in my vanity, that solitude so chosen could not curdle into loneliness. I was mistaken. The days accumulated like sediment; I spoke, some weeks, to no living soul but the woman who sold me bread and the machine that carried my employer's voice across the wire, thin and metallic, asking always for more than I had given.

It was in search of some human warmth, however borrowed, that I took to frequenting a café near the old quarter, ancient in its fittings, its mirrors clouded with age, its marble tables scarred by the elbows of generations who had sat there before me and would sit there after I was dust. In the largest of its mirrors, set into a frame of tarnished gilt, there ran a single hairline fracture, from the upper corner nearly to the center, so fine that many patrons never marked it; but once I had seen it, I could not look into that glass without my eye finding the flaw before it found my own face. I began to fancy—forgive the fancy—that the fracture was not an accident of the silvering but a mark left by some old grief, incurred long before my coming, that the mirror had simply consented, at last, to show.

It was there that I first observed the man who is the true subject of this letter, though I did not know it then; a stranger of perhaps forty years, dressed with a shabby elegance that suggested better fortunes lately fled, who took his coffee at the table nearest the fractured glass as though he owned some prior claim upon it. He watched me, I think, before I watched him; and when at last our eyes met across that room, he lifted his cup in a manner at once courteous and knowing, and said, in accents too smooth for the sincerity they affected, "You are the only one here who sees the crack, madame. The others look at their own faces and are satisfied." I made some reply of little consequence; but the remark lodged itself in me, a small root beneath the skin, and did not, in all the months that followed, wholly wither. I did not know, that first evening, by what threads he meant to draw me nearer, nor how the fracture in that antique glass would come to seem, before the end, less an ornament of the café than a prophecy of what must pass between us.

That first evening gave me only the crack in the glass and the sound of his voice; it was some days more before I had of him even so slight a thing as a name. His name, when at last he gave it, was Aurèle, though I came to suspect, before the end, that this was but one among several he had worn as a man wears coats according to the season; and he possessed that peculiar gift, common I think to all such itinerant charmers, of making his listener feel herself the sole illuminated object in a room otherwise sunk in shadow. He spoke of journeys to cities I had only read of, of manuscripts he had once handled in the libraries of the south, of a fortune interrupted by a lawsuit whose particulars shifted, I noticed, each time he rehearsed them; and I, starved as I was for the mere sound of a voice addressed to me and not to a ledger, drank in his talk as a traveler in the desert drinks at any water offered, asking not whether the spring be clean.

We fell, by slow and scarcely marked degrees, into a kind of intimacy that had no name I could honestly give it; he would meet me at the café three evenings in the week, always at the table by the fractured glass, always full of some new tale that required, before its telling was done, a small sum advanced against a repayment he swore was imminent. I gave what I gave, Cornelia, not from any delusion that I bought his affection, but from a wish, ignoble perhaps yet human, to believe that my solitary labor in that foreign capital had purchased for me, at last, one soul who waited for my coming. The wire from my employer grew more peremptory in those weeks, demanding contracts I let lie unfinished upon the little table where I worked; I told myself the delay was nothing, that I was owed some measure of neglect after a year of perfect diligence; but the sum in my account dwindled as steadily as the autumn light, and I did not, in my folly, connect the two decays.

It was the mirror itself that undeceived me, though not by any virtue of the supernatural I had half wished to find in it. I came one evening earlier than was my custom, the boulevard already gray with a rain that had commenced without thunder and would end, I think, without any softening of the air; and through the fractured glass, doubled and set slightly askew by the flaw that ran across it, I beheld Aurèle at a table not his accustomed one, bent close to a woman younger than myself, his hand upon hers in the same attitude of courteous, knowing possession he had used with me, his voice, though I could not hear it, evidently shaping some tale I had heard, in its essentials, before. I did not cry out; I did not approach; I stood in the doorway with the rain still upon my shoulders and watched, in that cracked and doubled glass, two images of the same falsehood proceeding at once, and understood that the fracture I had taken for an omen of grief was in truth only a common flaw in old silvering, magnifying nothing, prophesying nothing, guilty of no more than showing plainly what a whole mirror would have shown as well.

I left the city within the fortnight. The pale bridges, the soot-blackened spires, the chestnut trees now bare and dripping into the pewter-colored river—I catalogue them for you, Cornelia, as I first catalogued them for myself in the pride of my arrival, and I confess to you honestly that I could not feel them; they had become for me mere furniture of a season I wished only to have done with. My employer's voice upon the wire grew, in the end, indifferent to my going, as it had been indifferent, I now understand, to my coming; a fortnight's notice, a final transfer of moneys owed, and the tether that had bound me to no household bound me, in the last event, to no one at all.

I do not write this that you should pity me, nor that you should draw from it any comfortable lesson concerning solitude or trust, for I have found none that consoles. I write only that the fracture may be accounted for, once, honestly, before I quit this letter as I have quitted the city; a flaw in glass, nothing more, and yet the truest thing that capital ever showed me. I am not mended by the seeing. I do not think I shall be mended at all.