I always associated the play about Bellabestia to the fairty tale about "The Beauty and the Beast" but it seems that A.S's interpretation, blending the two figures, is richer in a special context (I'm thinking of Pausanias's Eros described at first as a "beautiful monster" sent to destroy Psyché....

btw: I found no particular mention of an "epiphany" in PF or in Lolita but, when I reached the spot where Charles Kinbote reports on a childhood experience [ "... I could hear the distant sweet voices interblending in subdued boyish merriment which...one particular lad.. prevented me from joining. The sound of rapid steps made me raise my morose gaze...Into these roses and thorns there walked a black shadow: a tall, pale, long-nosed, dark-haired young minister...Guilty disgust contorted his thin lips...His clenched hands seemed to be gripping invisible prison bars. But there is no bound to the measure of grace which man may be able to receive."] I noticed various references in it to special moments in "Lolita": the prison bars, roses and thorns, a distant choir of voices that he boy was unable to join. As in: " Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play...and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."