The French title of "Le Miroir", besides reflecting the story's Parisian setting, calls attention to the word itself.  The words miroir  and mirror  are ultimately derived from the Latin miror, to wonder at; as is the word miracle.  In the second paragraph of the story, Aickman says of the heroine's decaying, mirror-filled home: "In the end, one would have thought that there remained only the mirrors; the looking glasses, if you insist".  They are looking glasses only out of authorial politeness; the word mirror, with its miraculous connotation, is important.

It is also noted of the mirrors that they "were, of course, mercury-silvered, so that, as well as reflecting, they embellished and discriminated" (TLD 85).  The story's epigraph, "If I persist in gazing, Myself I shall adore", is from William Congreve's Semele, a drama about a woman who aspires to immortality.  The heroine of "Le Miroir", after a lifetime of dreaming and decay, sees her "real" self in a "beautiful mirror's mysterious depths", and begs this younger self, "'Oh, let me join you!'" (TLD 92).

The beautiful mirror is one of four or five purchased in Paris by the ironically-named art student Celia; ironic because the name means blind, and Celia not only spends her life surrounded by mirrors, but is also apparently able to paint "sometimes, at dusk, the Mad Hunt, which all at these times could hear but only those with the Sight could behold" (TLD 86).  The other mirrors are "merely for use each day and . . . backed with nitrate, though certainly not mass-produced or in any way commonplace"; her main acquisition, by contrast, "might have stood in any bedroom at home" (TLD 87) and proves, indeed, to have a decided capacity for embellishment and discrimination.  Besides the fact that "she could not live without it" and the "extremely faded traces of mysterious male and female figures round the upper part of the frame", the mirror's third attraction for Celia is that "the face that had just looked back at her from its shallows and depths had not been her own" (TLD 88).

Having conveyed the mirror to her lodgings, Celia

sat before the beautiful mirror or looking glass, now in one new dress, now in another, and intermittently without troubling to put on a dress at all. She had to seat herself for these transactions, because the looking glass was so short in the frame.  She had heard that our ancestors were more stunted than we are, though even this (she knew) had been contested by a woman who owned an immense collection of very old clothes, all of which she had measured anew, giving years to the work. Possibly the beautiful looking glass had been designed for the Gonzaga dwarfs, men and women even as the faded figures gambolling round the top of the frame? Celia wondered if she would ever visit their tiny suites at Mantua; of which her father had shown her small yellow photographs taken years before with early flashbulbs.  In the meantime, she would have to find a chaise longue  that was stumpier in the shanks.  Her own limbs were as long as they were lovely. (TLD 88)

The passage of time in "Le Miroir" is a rather mysterious process.  The story's very first sentence states that "Celia's father was old enough to be her grandfather, perhaps her great-grandfather" (TLD 85); he is to be found day by day "struggling up the grand staircases, crawling perilously down them; in every room, on every landing, at every dark corner, gazing in the looking glasses, outstaring time" (TLD 85-86).  He behaves, in other words, much like a curious child: he has difficulty getting up stairs, he crawls about with no apparent concern for safety, and he wanders everywhere.  It even transpires that this aged infant is followed on some of his  excursions by his nurse: "How old Nurse could be, was a subject sedulously eschewed" (TLD 86).

Aickman emphasises the age and illustrious history of Celia's father's house, and its tragic decline, at every opportunity: "The old house was crumbling now, and something beautiful was lost to it with every year that ended" (TLD 85); "the Elizabethan oaks, the Capability Brown beeches, the single exotics planted with ceremony by Mr Palgrave, by Bishop Wilberforce, by the Prince Imperial" (TLD 86); "Celia's cradle had aforetime cradled both the shapely John Dryden and the unproportioned Alexander Pope" (TLD 86).  That note upon the infant poets' looks is singularly apt, since Celia shows artistic talent "right from the cradle", producing "frail, dreamlike drawings" and at the age of sixteen is sent to art school in Paris: "Still in a dream, she found herself enrolled at a long-established and old-fashioned private atelier" (TLD 86).

When Celia arrives in France, her age is precisely sixteen years and eleven days: "('Give me back my eleven days,' she cried out in a brief moment of melancholy)" (TLD 87) - a witty echo of the famous complaint by those who thought they had lost eleven days of life when the English calendar was adjusted from the Julian to the Gregorian.  This is also the only point in the story at which the passage of time is indicated at all precisely.  Celia's perception of time certainly owes little to the bureaucratic pedantries of calendars; after that long and loving description of her  gazing and daydreaming before her newly-acquired mirror, we are told: "So life continued, for Celia could not quite say how long" until "One morning, Celia felt quite certain of something that of late she had more and more suspected: she was not merely looking older, but looking much older" (TLD 88-89).

She assumes the season is to blame, although the ageing is not confined to her appearance in the glass:

She knew that spring is the season of maximum self-slaughter; and who could wonder?  It was the season when doubt was no longer possible.  Momentarily, she clutched at the neckline of her dress, and managed to inflict an actual rent.  Even the fabric of her garments seemed to have weakened slightly; and this had been an expensive garment, once.  (TLD 89)

Celia recovers from her shock; she buys new dresses to replace the damaged one, and although she avoids looking in any of her glasses, she "was finding more and more of herself in her art" (TLD 89).

There follows another lengthy paragraph of sartorial acquisitions and dreamy aspirations,  including the possibility of marriage: "Sometimes she dwelt upon what it would be like to nurture eight or nine children, the fruit of her womb; upon their complex teething and schooling; upon some brusque, shadowy figure to pay for it all and act as head of the household" (TLD 89). The cliché "fruit of her womb", the complications of parenthood and the vague but loveless "head of the household" conspire to make this fantasy less than appetising; and Celia's dream of marriage ends in the same fashion as her earlier dreams of the beautiful mirror's exotic past:

How long could it have been before Celia, despite her precautions, caught her own eye in the glass and realized that she must be middle-aged and beyond all chance of concealment? And, needless to say, it had happened at that same dreadful morning hour when the brightness of the sun is equalled only by the blackness of the heart.

Other faces had continued glinting back at her from time, but now she recognised that a stranger had intruded for ever.

She opened a letter that morning, and even though dust had settled on it quite deeply.  (TLD 89)

It is not clear whether this "stranger", presumably her middle-aged self, is the same as the face which she saw on buying the mirror, and which she did not recognise as her own.  In any case, it is clear that time is creeping up on Celia, pouncing cruelly upon her when mood (her "tendency to melancholy") and light ("the first bright light of spring") combine against the aspiring painter (TLD 89).

As indicated by the dust on the letter, the decay which Celia has seen in the mirror now begins to affect her perception of the outside world.  Aickman beautifully conveys this in three separate descriptions of the conditions at the art school Celia is attending.  When she had first arrived: "seven-eighths of the attendance were excessively youthful; too young to be taken quite seriously as yet by anyone.  The remaining one-eighth was composed of shaky eccentrics and inadequates who had been attending (and, of course, contributing) since the year Dot" (TLD 86). After Celia's  discovery of her "middle-aged" reflection in the glass, she finds that "most of the pupils were nowadays little more than children"; later still, it transpires that "The other pupils at the art school were either complete babies, feeding from bottles containing cornflour; or, in certain cases, motionless skeletons, also fed with cornflour, though not from bottles, because they could not suck."  Meanwhile, "there were crab-sized holes in Celia's petticoat, and, up and down the staircase, rats on the rampage for food".  Nevertheless, "Celia knew that she still had her art, as well as her beautiful looking glass.  She realized that her art must mean more to her with every day that sped past", and she "felt that she could hold her own with the looking glass by a continuous act of will: unremitting, resolute, robust" (TLD 90).

Nevertheless, the days do move rapidly, and Aickman's hated modern world makes a raucous intrusion:

It did not take long, by any standard, for the point to be reached where Celia's ever smaller allowance was intersected by the ever larger cost of everything.  Sometimes the watchful could see her white hair and white face at the edge of the rotting curtain as she looked out at the march past for social justice.  Through hunting glasses and telescopes they could see plainly that her eyes were at once animated and frightened by the coarse thumping of the drums, the amateur screaming of the brass, the bellowing of the inebriated. (TLD 91)

Aickman's attitude to social reformers is never very charitable.  In his autobiography, he writes concerning his lost paradise of 1880-1914: "Of course it was a world for the few; but almost all good things are for the few, and almost everything is depreciated when too many people have it" (AR 25).  The frightening modern marchers - intrusive with their hunting glasses, scientific with their telescopes, noisy and barbaric in their behaviour - make a telling contrast with the elegiac melancholy of the earlier passages detailing the rich, tragically fading cultural heritage which permeates Celia's early life.

As S. T. Joshi has noted (MWT 226), Aickman's longing for the past is singular because the past he longs for is one outside his experience, namely the quarter-century before his own birth.  Celia is similarly adrift in time, thrust without warning into an epoch where she has no place; but she is also adrift in another sense, perhaps more commonly experienced: passing her life in a dream, she keeps finding herself suddenly older, while the world around her abruptly changes and coarsens while she isn't looking.  The decay of her body forces her to take extreme measures: "She began cutting away the gangrene from her limbs, or what she assumed to be gangrene." Also, "The times had become so harsh, and the people so indifferent, that the art school, after all those years, was in real danger of shutting."

Still she "spent most of her time gazing", and meanwhile "reflected that one's art is strictly one's own, and that never should it mean more to her than it meant now, or shudderingly seldom."  She sees faces which she assumes to be those of painters ("Raphael, Luca Giordano, and Frederick Leighton"), and which "looked upon her, exaltedly and exhortingly, from within the beautiful looking glass".  She also sees "shapes for which no name was possible", which occasionally "had to be driven back with implements . . . presumably intended for the meat trade in one of its aspects".  The demands of art, she realises, "are notoriously boundless; nor are they subject to appeal" (TLD 92).

The silent exhortation of the painters' faces induces her, once again, to take consolation in her art: "Celia knew perfectly well that if she was to stand any chance of making a permanent mark, as the faces expected of her, then she should practise much more" (TLD 91).  She sees her younger self, "the real Celia within the beautiful mirror's mysterious depths" and begs, " 'Oh, let me join you!' ". At an earlier stage of her decay, Celia had taken to "painting pictures entitled Son of St Louis, ascend to Heaven!  At these times, she could feel the divine benediction cloaking her shoulders, like a soft stole" (TLD 90).  St Louis is presumably King Louis IX of France, patron of the arts and member of the Capetian dynasty; the "real Celia" is wearing a dress with a pattern "known as Capet".  In hope of benediction, Celia reasons, "there would be no harm done if she continued to supplicate, to beseech" (TLD 92).

During the (unspecified, naturally) period of Celia's beseeching, the outside world makes its final intrusion in the form of a letter from Mr Burphy, the "chief clerk in Totlands, her father's solicitors, and of course her own too" (TLD 87).  Burphy it was who first escorted her to France, and letters from Totlands have arrived at intervals throughout the story, generally in connection with Celia's allowance or the reduction thereof (TLD 88, 89).  Mr Burphy, whom Celia had previously recalled as being "more frightened of her than anything else" (TLD 88) writes to say:

that he had often thought of their romantic trip to Paris together, that he fancied there might be no harm in his recalling it now, that her father unfortunately needed more trained nurses all the time, that there was almost no money left from which to pay for anything, and that he, Mr Burphy, was about to retire after generations of service to the firm . . .  The rest of the staff had subscribed to buy him a small electric clock, which had taken him completely by surprise, and particularly when Mr Daniel himself had found a few moments to participate in the presentation! (TLD 92).

The small electric clock, the reward for "generations of service", is a particularly fine touch, emphasising pettiness, modernity and the passage of time amid Burphy's flow of poignant triviality.

Celia, for her part, goes off into a final reverie; she "thought for a long, long time" about her father's estate, including "the forty-seven catalogued likenesses of her ancestors and collaterals", one of them (her mother's portrait) turned to the wall.

She thought about the schoolroom with a dozen desks and only one occupant.  She thought of the withered fans in the conservatory, the property of ladies who, for her, had been dead always.  She listened in memory to the Mad Hunt at twilight, and saw it take form.  She smelt the rotting grapes, with the German name; and the ullaged wine, with no name at all.  She felt the wet camel-hair bristles on the back of her slender hand, as she painted the world and herself into a certain transcendence. (TLD 92-93).

There follows only a brief epilogue, in which Celia is "certified to have been dead for something like four or five months before any part of her was actually found by a visitor from the outside world."  The caretakers' nephew, having forced his way into Celia's room, says that "Madame" was visible in the mirror but not in the room itself (TLD 93).

However, this summary proved possibly erroneous on at least two counts.  The figure seen in  the mirror proved . . . to be not Madame at all but Mademoiselle perhaps, and therefore beside the present point.  And Madame was  in the room herself, though as to what had happened to her, the pathologist ultimately declined to make a declaration.  The press thought it might have been rats, and it was mainly that hypothesis which caused the scandal, such as it was. (TLD 93-94)

Aickman here gets in more digs at the crass modern world, which is capable of declaring a young lady in a mirror with no corresponding lady in the room "beside the present point", and which responds to the apparently grisly death of an artist with no more than "a small scandal" (TLD 93) in the press.

Still, we have been told that Celia "painted . . . herself into a certain transcendence", and there is no reason to disbelieve it.  Although the papers spread lurid hypotheses about rats, it is notable that the pathologist is unable to corroborate them; and the "real Celia" is clearly very much alive in the mirror.  Perhaps, as a dreamy artist in a world where time plays evil tricks, Celia's first and obvious reason for buying the mirror in the first place - "she could not live without it" (TLD 88) - is quite literally true.  It is possible, though, that with the help of her memories of her home's illustrious past, and the inspiration of the faces in the beautiful mirror, she finds a new life within it.



Works Cited

Aickman, Robert.  Tales of Love and Death.  London: Victor Gollancz, 1977 (TLD)

Aickman, Robert.  The Attempted Rescue.  Tartarus Press, 2001 (AR)

Joshi, S. T.  The Modern Weird Tale.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001 (MWT)



Philip Challinor
7 September - 9 September 2005