Did Snape set up the Pensieve scene?

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 169432

Magpie wrote:
 <snip> The Trio knows what happened to Montague, and they don't think
it's suspicious that he's still befuddled from being in the broken
Vanishing Cabinet. No one else thinks it's odd either. Montague wasn't
shut in a Cabinet, he was sent into a limbo world, floating back and
forth.
> 
> That doesn't mean, of course, that we couldn't learn that the
befuddlement was actually the result of some sort of foul play, but
there's no evidence of it so far--I don't think we can take the
befuddlement as evidence that foul play was involved just because we,
as readers who know nothing about magical injuries anyway, don't think
it's possible. Nobody else has ever experienced what Montague has.
> 
> More importantly, there's never any indication from anyone that
Montague has lost his memory once he comes out of it, since he tells
everyone, eventually, what happened to him. <snip> What Montague says
happened is validated in HBP when Draco bases his plan on what
happened to Montague, as reported by Montague himself.
<snip>
> We're not told the Apparition caused the befuddlement. We are told
that apparently a day and a half in limbo *is* enough to cause
befuddlement, perhaps when there's also a quasi-Apparition escape into
a non-Apparition zone out of it. I wouldn't automatically say Montague
should be confused after that experience, but it also makes sense to
me that he would be since the point is the Cabinet is broken and he is
in limbo. It's like if a character were stuck in another dimension for
a day and a half--sure that could cause long-term confusion. <snip>
> 
> We're also given another reason his confusion lasts so long: nobody
knows what happened to him except people who aren't telling. If he was
actually found in the toilet, which is the only information we have,
no one would connect him to the Cabinets at all. Apparition is
impossible in Hogwarts, but so is coming out of the Vanishing Cabinet
when it's broken. <snip> According to what we know Montague wasn't
able to come out of the Cabinets because one was broken.
> 
> I don't see any independent evidence that he was being befuddled
afterwards by Pomfrey or by Snape, Potion aside. There's no signs of
Snape interfering there, eventually Montague tells his story, and what
is Snape's motive for keeping him befuddled for several weeks? Not to
keep the Cabinet story secret, since it isn't secret to the Slytherins
and on the contrary it potentially is a secret to Snape.

<snip>
> The Befuddlement Potions definitely interested me too--and I well
remembered Montague's longterm confusion because it shocked me at the
time. I do expect that Potion might be coming up later in some way. If
it was given to Montague I'd want to know why we didn't see him acting
hot-headed and reckless. <snip>
> 
> For Snape, there's no pressing reason for him to end the Occlumency
lessons we know of, and his behavior indicates true anger and
humiliation at what Harry saw, imo. As I've said before, I find it
hard to believe that Snape would intentionally let Harry see him in
his underwear. It was also incredibly convenient that Umbridge and
Draco happened to discover Montague and send for Snape at just the
right moment. 
> 
> Suggesting that Snape doesn't want Dumbledore to find out about the
Cabinets opens an even bigger can of worms. An important element of
HBP both thematically and technically is that Draco is the only one
who knows what the Cabinets mean--a way into Hogwarts. Snape doesn't
know what he's up to there. 
> 
> Draco himself tells us that everyone heard the story from Montague,
so Draco isn't hiding the information from anybody either. He listened
to the story along with other people but only he realized that it
meant fixing the Vanishing Cabinet meant having a portal into Hogwarts
from B&B.
> 
<snip>

Carol responds: I agree with everything in this post. Let me just
reiterate the points I agree with a few additions of my own.

Snape had no known reason to end the Occlumency lessons, which had
been interrupted before (Trelawney's screams) and resumed. In fact,
the last thing Snape does before he leaves to help Montague is
reschedule the lesson.

Snape doesn't know that the Vanishing Cabinets form a link between
Hogwarts and Borgin and Burkes. Only Draco figures that out, and he
uses it to bring in back-up DEs in HBP. But Snape doesn't know about
that aspect of the plan, only that Voldemort has assigned Draco to
kill Dumbledore. Draco uses his newly learned Occlumency to keep him
from finding out.

Until Montague tells his Slytherin friends that he was trapped in
limbo between Hogwarts and B&B, no one even knows that he was in the
Vanishing Cabinet (except, of course, the Twins and their friends, who
don't bother to tell Madam Pomfrey this important information). Draco
doesn't even tell his Slytherin cronies, Crabbe and Goyle, that he's
fixing the Vanishing Cabinet in HBP. Neither they nor Snape know what
he's up to in HBP. They just think, as the other Slytherin kids do,
that Montague's adventure was an entertaining story.

There's no hint that Snape is involved in the treatment of Montague at
all. I'm not even sure that he prepares the potions for Madam Pomfrey
in HBP since he's no longer the potions master. And surely, she would
know a Befuddlement Potion when she saw one, not only from its effects
but from its appearance. She probably doesn't brew her own potions,
but she still needs to know which potion to administer and what its
properties are. She's not going to let Snape (or Slughorn) diagnose
her patients for her (unless there's Dark magic involved and she needs
Snape's expertise) any more than Snape would let Lockhart brew the
Mandrake Restorative Potion for him. And to be a Healer, Madam Pomfrey
would have had to score high on her Potions NEWT. Whatever that blue
potion is, she knows exactly what it is and why she's giving it. And,
as Magpie says, there's no indication that Montague, once he recovers,
has forgotten what happened to him or that he's behaving in a reckless
 way like that described as being the effect of a Befuddlement Draught.

A day and a half in limbo followed by a supposedly impossible
Apparition (by a kid who probably only recently passed his Apparition
test) might be enough in itself to cause befuddlement of the type he
does suffer. I'm not sure that the anti-Apparition rule was fully in
effect because he was technically already in Hogwarts, or, at least,
the broken cabinet was. So between the broken cabinet and that
anti-Apparition spell, he ended up in the last place he wanted to
be--stuck, presumably headfirst, in a toilet.

And that, my friends, would be enough to make *anyone* suffer from
befuddlement or PTST or whatever he was suffering from. He's lucky he
didn't drown.

Carol, who BTW meant the Longbottoms, not the Lestranges, in her
sign-off for her previous post!