On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Paris is also known as Lute:
In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)
Darkbloom (“Notes to Ada”): Lute: from ‘Lutèce’, ancient name of Paris.
Lute also seems to hint at le rose lutin (the rosy hobgoblin) mentioned by Baudelaire in his sonnet La Muse malade (“The Sick Muse”):
Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu'as-tu donc ce matin?
Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes,
Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint
La folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.
Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin
T'ont-ils versé la peur et l'amour de leurs urnes?
Le cauchemar, d'un poing despotique et mutin
T'a-t-il noyée au fond d'un fabuleux Minturnes?
Je voudrais qu'exhalant l'odeur de la santé
Ton sein de pensers forts fût toujours fréquenté,
Et que ton sang chrétien coulât à flots rythmiques,
Comme les sons nombreux des syllabes antiques,
Où règnent tour à tour le père des chansons,
Phoebus, et le grand Pan, le seigneur des moissons.
My poor Muse, alas! what ails you today?
Your hollow eyes are full of nocturnal visions;
I see in turn reflected on your face
Horror and madness, cold and taciturn.
Have the green succubus, the rosy elf,
Poured out for you love and fear from their urns?
Has the hand of Nightmare, cruel and despotic,
Plunged you to the bottom of some weird Minturnae?
I would that your bosom, fragrant with health,
Were constantly the dwelling place of noble thoughts,
And that your Christian blood would flow in rhythmic waves
Like the measured sounds of ancient verse,
Over which reign in turn the father of all songs,
Phoebus, and the great Pan, lord of harvest.
(tr. W. Aggeler)
Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin (the greenish succubus and the rosy hobgoblin) bring to mind Dawn en robe rose et verte (in a pink and green dress) mentioned by Van as he and Ada discuss Ada’s dramatic career:
Van glanced through the list of players and D.P.’s and noticed two amusing details: the role of Fedotik, an artillery officer (whose comedy organ consists of a constantly clicking camera)’, had been assigned to a ‘Kim (short for Yakim) Eskimossoff’ and somebody called ‘John Starling’ had been cast as Skvortsov (a sekundant in the rather amateurish duel of the last act) whose name comes from skvorets, starling. When he communicated the latter observation to Ada, she blushed as was her Old World wont.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was quite a lovely lad and I sort of flirted with him, but the strain and the split were too much for him — he had been, since pubescence, the puerulus of a fat ballet master, Dangleleaf, and he finally committed suicide. You see ("the blush now replaced by a matovaya pallor") I’m not hiding one stain of what rhymes with Perm.’
‘I see. And Yakim —’
‘Oh, he was nothing.’
‘No, I mean, Yakim, at least, did not, as his rhymesake did, take a picture of your brother embracing his girl. Played by Dawn de Laire.’
‘I’m not sure. I seem to recall that our director did not mind some comic relief.’
‘Dawn en robe rose et verte, at the end of Act One.’
‘I think there was a click in the wings and some healthy mirth in the house. All poor Starling had to do in the play was to hollo off stage from a rowboat on the Kama River to give the signal for my fiancé to come to the dueling ground.’ (2.9)
At the end of his poem Le Crépuscle du Matin (“Morning Twilight”) Baudelaire mentions L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte (the dawn, shivering in her green and rose garment) and calls Paris vieillard laborieux (laborious old man):
L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte
S'avançait lentement sur la Seine déserte,
Et le sombre Paris, en se frottant les yeux
Empoignait ses outils, vieillard laborieux.
Aurora, in a shift of rose and green,
Came shivering down the Seine's deserted scene
And Paris, as he rubbed his eyes, began
To sort his tools, laborious old man.
(transl. Roy Campbell)
Describing a game of poker that he played at Chose (Van’s English University), Van mentions rosy aurora and laborious old Chose:
‘Same here, Dick,’ said Van. ‘Pity you had to rely on your crystal balls. I have often wondered why the Russian for it — I think we have a Russian ancestor in common — is the same as the German for "schoolboy," minus the umlaut’ — and while prattling thus, Van refunded with a rapidly written check the ecstatically astonished Frenchmen. Then he collected a handful of cards and chips and hurled them into Dick’s face. The missiles were still in flight when he regretted that cruel and commonplace bewgest, for the wretched fellow could not respond in any conceivable fashion, and just sat there covering one eye and examining his damaged spectacles with the other — it was also bleeding a little — while the French twins were pressing upon him two handkerchiefs which he kept good-naturedly pushing away. Rosy aurora was shivering in green Serenity Court. Laborious old Chose. (1.28)
Green Serenity Court seems to hint at les trésors de sa sérénité (the treasures of her serenity) mentioned by Baudelaire in his poem Lesbos:
— Plus belle que Vénus se dressant sur le monde
Et versant les trésors de sa sérénité
Et le rayonnement de sa jeunesse blonde
Sur le vieil Océan de sa fille enchanté;
Plus belle que Vénus se dressant sur le monde!
— Lovelier than Venus dominating the world,
Pouring out the treasures of her serenity
And the radiance of her golden-haired youth
Upon old Ocean, delighted with his daughter;
Lovelier than Venus dominating the world!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
According to Baudelaire, Lesbos chose him of all men on earth to sing the secret of her virgins in their bloom:
Car Lesbos entre tous m'a choisi sur la terre
Pour chanter le secret de ses vierges en fleurs,
Et je fus dès l'enfance admis au noir mystère
Des rires effrénés mêlés aux sombres pleurs;
Car Lesbos entre tous m'a choisi sur la terre.
For Lesbos chose me among all other poets
To sing the secret of her virgins in their bloom,
And from childhood I witnessed the dark mystery
Of unbridled laughter mingled with tears of gloom;
For Lesbos chose me among all other poets.
(tr. W. Aggeler)
Chose is French for “thing.” At the end of his poem Élévation (“Elevation”) Baudelaire mentions le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes (the language of flowers and silent things):
Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!
He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
— Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!
(tr. W. Aggeler)
I notice that in Ada ou l'Ardeur (1975) VN renders the word "hobgoblins" as lutins:
Les détails du désastre « El » (et ce n’est pas « Elysée » que j’entends), qui, au beau milieu du siècle précédent, eut l’effet singulier de déclencher aussi bien que de rendre maudite l’idée d’une « Terra », sont bien trop connus des historiens et sont bien trop obscènes du point de vue religieux pour être traités à fond dans un ouvrage qui s’adresse à de jeunes amateurs ou amants et non à des gens très posés ou trépassés.
Aujourd’hui, naturellement, après que les grandes années anti-El aux lubies réactionnaires se sont écoulées (plus ou moins), et que nos coquets petits engins (que Faradieu les bénisse !) bourdonnent presque aussi bien qu’au début du dix-neuvième siècle, l’aspect purement géographique de l’affaire est racheté par son côté farce comme le sont ces marquetteries de cuivre, ce bric-à-Braques, cet infect or moulu, que le manque d’humour chez nos ancêtres leur permettait de nommer « art » ; car enfin qui ne sent ce qu’il peut y avoir de hautement grotesque dans la configuration des tachettes versicolores qui furent solennellement proposées à la crédulité générale comme la représentation géographique de la planète Terra ? Ved’ (n’est-il pas je vous prie) du dernier ridicule d’imaginer que le nom de « Russie », au lieu d’être un synonyme désuet d’ »Estotie », cette province américaine qui s’étend depuis le cercle non plus vicieux mais seulement polaire jusqu’aux Etats-Unis proprement dits, devenait sur la planète Terra le nom d’un territoire transporté, par on ne sait quel tour d’eskimotage et par-delà le ha-ha d’un double océan, dans l’hémisphère adverse où il s’étalait sur toute l’étendue de notre moderne Tartarie, de la Courlande jusqu’aux Couriles. Mais (et ceci nous paraît plus absurde encore), si dans l’ordre de l’espace terrestre l’Amérussie d’Abraham Milton devait renoncer à la cohésion de ses parties constitutives (les entités Amérique et Russie, moins poétiques au reste que politiques, étant désormais séparées par une étendue matérielle d’eau et de glace), dans l’ordre du Temps, l’incongruité du fait créait une situation plus abstruse et plus irrationnelle encore, non seulement parce que l’histoire de chacune des parties de l’amalgame ne s’adaptait pas à l’histoire de sa contrepartie mais encore parce qu’il existait entre une terre et l’autre un décalage d’une bonne centaine d’année (dans un sens ou dans l’autre), décalage rendu sensible par une confusion bizarre des panneaux de signalisation aux carrefours du Temps-qui-passe ou les « pas encore » ne correspondaient pas aux « jamais plus » de l’autre. C’est (entre autres raisons) à cause de ce concours de divergences « scientifiquement insaisissables » que les esprits bien rangés, peu habiles à lutter avec des lutins, rejetèrent Terra comme un phantasme ou un dada tandis que les esprits dérangés, prêts à plonger dans tous les abîmes, l’acceptèrent comme le gage et le support de leur propre irrationalité.
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality. (1.3)