The dilemma: it is 1892, you are a 30-year-old female shop assistant in a small silk manufacturing concern in Geneva, the city of your birth. You live with your parents in a modest but pleasant suburban house; you travel to work on the streetcar. You have no suitors, but don't really mind: you have a spiritual protector named 'Léopold', a reincarnation of the 18th-century magician Cagliostro, who appears to you in visions in the long brown robe of a monk, offering advice and emotional solace. Your main hobbies are embroidery - of mystic shapes and patterns bearing no resemblance to anything in the visible world - and the obsessive cultivation of states of 'obnubilation', during which 'strange multicoloured landscapes, stone lions with mutilated heads, and fanciful objects on pedestals' float before your eyes.

LRB 23 May 1996 | PDF Download