Justine Florbelle

"I really should keep this door locked"

- Justine Florbelle locking her dungeon door

Justine Florbelle is the protagonist and anti-heroine of Amnesia: The Dark Descent DLC, Justine.

Amnesia: Justine
The player wakes up in a dungeon and follows cryptic clues left on a series of phonographs by a sadistic woman named Justine, who has apparently kidnapped you. This Justine character has also kidnapped six other people, three of whom have mistaken the player for Justine, and are attempting to kill the player. The other three are hostages encountered at various points in the game. The first hostage is a psychiatrist named Victor Fournier. The player can choose to save him or kill him by pulling a lever, which causes him to be impaled by spikes, which makes a ladder to the ceiling, and the next test appear. Sparing him will require the player to stack boxes up to the ceiling, a longer process.

The second hostage is a priest named Father Hector David. Once again, the player can kill or spare this hostage. If the player spares him, they will need to play a brief memory game. If the player kills him, David will be dismembered alive by torture devices. The third and final hostage is a police officer named Felix Marot. The player can choose to sacrifice him to the cannibalistic, and psychotic Malo de Vigny to save herself, or she can close the door to Malo's room and save both of them, although she risks being mauled to death by Malo.

After the third hostage, it is revealed that the player is in fact Justine who erased her memory with a drug over-dose because she enjoys psychologically abusing herself. Regardless of whether or not she chose to save or kill any of the three hostages, she locks the door to her dungeon and tells her housemaid, Clarice, that everything is okay.

Early Life
Born of French aristocracy, Justine was born with an unspecified mental illness and the child only had one friend growing up, Clarice. Clarice was a girl of similar age from the servants quarters, and was often scolded by the maids for merely playing with Justine. This was common, as nobility around this time period had very obvious minimal contact with those living downstairs.

Her father, Monsieur Florbelle, was an acclaimed psychotherapist. Justine's mother died when she was very young, and as such she cannot even remember what her mother looked like.

Monsieur Florbelle, who was secretly quite mad, was interested in studying the human psyche, so he isolated his daughter for a series of psychiatric tests. This limited contact with Clarice even, so from the age of eight onward Justine's childhood was a completely lonely one.

Justine would often ask questions about what her mother looked like, as it saddened her to have no memory of her. Her father told Justine that her deceased mother's beauty was "blinding" and to recall any memory of her would be too much of a burden for anyone who loved her to bear.

However, little Justine started to develop an inferiority complex for wanting to be as attractive as her mother. To worsen matters, as a result of the constant testing, Justine came to view the results as an important way of judging both herself and her father.

This disparity, and never once pleasing her father with the results of his tests caused a huge rift to grow between them. After four years of isolation which robbed her of a healthy, natural upbringing and development, Justine had become increasingly unstable. She began to show the basic characteristics of being a narcissist and a complete psychopath.

She often tried to gain control of situations in regards to her father's tests, upsetting the chambermaids, and often provoking her father simply to get a reaction out of him.

What happened next can only be interpreted. It would appear that either she, or her father, attempted something sexually indecent and perverted upon the other. Monsieur Florbelle severely scolded her, and also told her not to be "ashamed" as she was only "filling the void left by mother", but Justine was enraged.

Her father could no longer justify his research. Writing to Herbert, he confessed it had done nothing to help him understand Justine's mental illness. He was going to abandon the tests to mend his relationship with his daughter. He never had the chance.

Justine murdered her father with the family's star-shaped soapstone. She buried her father's corpse under the mansion in the family crypt. As the sole heir, she eventually took over the Florbelle estate, though how she was never caught, or what happened for the next twenty-odd years, is all a mystery.

Adulthood
Mademoiselle Florbelle took over her father's research and study rooms underneath the estate, but instead of furthering the knowledge of the human psyche to treat mental disabilities, turned it into her own personal torture chamber, called the "Cabinet of Perturbation", for her own sadistic pleasure.

Justine began to demonstrate that she, even more so than her father, was a complete monster. She relished in the suffering she caused to others, and even subjected herself to that same cruelty by performing pre-arranged tests upon herself after short bouts of self-induced amnesia to see how well she fared without knowledge of who she was or what was happening to her.

Justine hated, and continues to hate, the notion of being held accountable to the law for her actions, and is very elitist, believing the aristocracy does not need to know right from wrong, as "they are always right".

She later began a relationship with Aloïs Racine, the son of a nobleman named Lucien Racine. In addition, it appears that she also had ongoing relationships with Basile Giroux and Malo de Vigny at the same time. Much to her delight, this caused a lot of friction between them. All three men were sincerely in love with Justine, at one point or another, but the same could never be said for Justine herself, as she loved no one, not even herself, and was just using the men to amuse herself.

She pitted the men against one another, eventually leading to their downward spiral into madness and destruction. Her inferiority complex, wanting to be as attractive as her mother, only worsened as time went by; these feelings intensified to the point where she actually blinded the Suitors because she wanted to believe her beauty was quite literally "blinding".

Aloïs was easy to control, he already had a self-destructive fixation on her to begin with. Poor Malo had already gone insane thanks to her deeds. Basile, however, was troublesome and no longer infatuated with her, growing quickly tired of her "games". With assistance from Aloïs, she managed to drug and blind Basile, too, to prevent him from leaving.

Aloïs, Basile, and Malo had unwittingly become her newest test subjects in the Cabinet of Perturbation, where she drugged them with absinthe, tortured them, mutilated their bodies, and finally made them part of the tests on herself during her self-induced fits of amnesia. The three men are now known as the Suitors - serving as the enemies in Amnesia: Justine.

Despite all her cunning and control over the police chief in Calais, after these events, Lucien Racine, Aloïs' father, had become very suspicious of Justine's actions and suspected foul play when she stole his son away. He enlisted the help of Inspector Felix Marot, Dr. Victor Fournier and Father Hector David to find a legal way to reveal her madness and incarcerate her. She abducted these three men as well, and they become the hostages encountered in the Cabinet of Perturbation.

Not even concerned that her dark machinations were nearly discovered by the public, Justine invited other members of the French aristocracy over to her mansion for a banquet. She had devised a test for herself, "the best one yet", to see if she had any trace of humanity left in her. She decided she would be unarmed and completely vulnerable to any threat. Justine also orchestrated several hostage situations to see how she would react.

She moved her prisoners into the manor's torture chambers and created various obstacles throughout the rooms. Then, she prerecorded audio messages onto multiple phonographs to set the scene. Justine then released the Suitors from their cells to roam the Cabinet blindly, but not before locating a secure prison cell so she can voluntarily drug herself. As in all of her other self-tests, the fast-acting concoction she ingests resulted in her having complete, but temporary amnesia as a side effect. The game's events then take place.