Madame Lefevre

Mrs. Lefay is Andrew Ketterley’s godmother, a woman with a hidden connection to magic whose box becomes the starting point for his experiments with the Magic Rings. Remembered chiefly through Andrew’s account and a faded photograph, she sets events in motion without appearing directly in the main action; her guarded knowledge also contrasts with Andrew’s confidence about powers he does not understand.

Identity and Background

Andrew identifies Mrs. Lefay as his godmother, correcting Digory’s guess that she was a great-aunt. A faded photograph in Andrew’s room shows an old woman in a bonnet. Digory recognizes the same face from a photograph he had seen in a drawer at home, where his mother had seemed reluctant to discuss it. The portrait gives Digory an uneasy impression, though he allows that early photographs are difficult to judge.

Andrew describes her as a remarkable woman who had fairy blood, and claims she was among the last mortals in the country to have it. He says she told him there had been two others in her time, a duchess and a charwoman, and presents himself as perhaps the last man to have had a fairy godmother. These details come from Andrew’s own recollection, which frames Mrs. Lefay as a link to an older, obscure tradition of magic.

The Box and Andrew’s Disobedience

In her final illness, Mrs. Lefay allowed only a very few people to visit her; Andrew says she disliked ordinary, ignorant people, while he shared her interests. Shortly before her death, she sent him to a bureau in her house to retrieve a little box from a secret drawer. Andrew says he sensed that it held a great secret as soon as he picked it up.

Mrs. Lefay gave Andrew the box with a specific instruction: after her death, he was to burn it unopened and perform certain ceremonies. He broke that promise. When Digory objects, Andrew argues that ordinary rules do not apply to people like himself, whom he casts as profound students and great thinkers with a high and lonely destiny. Digory sees through the grand language and recognizes it as Andrew’s excuse for doing whatever he wants.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Andrew says that he feared opening the box for a long time because it might be dangerous. He eventually identified it as Atlantean, older than the civilizations he lists, and treated its contents as a subject for study. The box thus connects Mrs. Lefay’s concealed knowledge to Andrew’s experiments, though the subsequent explanation of the Rings makes clear that he does not truly understand how they work: he mistakes their functions, while their powers arise from the material from which they are made and its relation to the Wood between the Worlds.

Mrs. Lefay’s significance lies in this chain of inheritance and misuse. She entrusts Andrew with an object and a clear restriction; he rejects the restriction in the name of exceptional wisdom, then proceeds on mistaken assumptions. Her history remains largely unelaborated, but the secret drawer, the box, and the broken promise establish the conditions for the story’s magical encounters and expose the distance between possessing an unusual object and understanding it.