According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969), Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess who writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse) knew by experience that nothing kept up the itch of inspiration so well as la chaleur du lit (bed’s warmth):
All went well until Mlle Larivière decided to stay in bed for five days: she had sprained her back on a merry-go-round at the Vintage Fair, which, besides, she needed as the setting for a story she had begun (about a town mayor’s strangling a small girl called Rockette), and knew by experience that nothing kept up the itch of inspiration so well as la chaleur du lit. During that period, the second upstairs maid, French, whose moods and looks did not match the sweet temper and limpid grace of Blanche, was supposed to look after Lucette, and Lucette did her best to avoid the lazy servant’s surveillance in favor of her cousin’s and sister’s company. The ominous words: ‘Well, if Master Van lets you come,’ or ‘Yes, I’m sure Miss Ada won’t mind your mushroom-picking with her,’ became something of a knell in regard to love’s freedom. (1.23)
There is a French saying la chaleur du lit ne fait pas bouillir la marmite (the warmth of bed does not make the cooking pot boil). It brings to mind Pushkin’s marmite mentioned by Nicholas I (who opened for Pushkin the archives). In a letter of July 22, 1831, to Pletnyov Pushkin quotes the tsar’s words about him, puisqu’il est marié et qu’il n’est pas riche, il faut faire aller sa marmite:
Кстати скажу тебе новость (но да останется это, по многим причинам, между нами): царь взял меня в службу — но не в канцелярскую, или придворную, или военную — нет, он дал мне жалование, открыл мне архивы, с тем, чтоб я рылся там и ничего не делал. Это очень мило с его стороны, не правда ли? Он сказал: Puisqu’il est marié et qu’il n’est pas riche, il faut faire aller sa marmite. Ей-богу, он очень со мною мил.
July 21 is Ada’s birthday. At the picnic on Ada's twelfth birthday Mlle Larivière reads her story La Rivière de diamants (that corresponds to Maupassant's La Parure, 1884). Van and Ada call Mlle Larivière's story "a fairy tale:"
‘I can never get used (m’y faire)’ said Mlle Laparure, ‘to the contrast between the opulence of nature and the squalor of human life. See that old moujik décharné with that rent in his shirt, see his miserable cabane. And see that agile swallow! How happy, nature, how unhappy, man! Neither of you told me how you liked my new story? Van?’
‘It’s a good fairy tale,’ said Van.
‘It’s a fairy tale,’ said careful Ada.
‘Allons donc!’ cried Mlle Larivière, ‘On the contrary — every detail is realistic. We have here the drama of the petty bourgeois, with all his class cares and class dreams and class pride.’
(True; that might have been the intent — apart from the pointe assassine; but the story lacked ‘realism’ within its own terms, since a punctilious, penny-counting employee would have found out, first of all, no matter how, quitte à tout dire à la veuve, what exactly the lost necklace had cost. That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair.) (1.13)
In his letter to Pletnyov Pushkin mentions his skazki (fairy tales):
Жаль мне, что ты моих писем не получал. Между ими были дельные; но не беда. Эслинг сей, которого ты не знаешь, — мой внук по лицею и, кажется, добрый малый — я поручил ему доставить тебе мои сказки; прочитай их ради скуки холерной, а печатать их не к спеху.
By skazki Pushkin means his stories, Povesti Belkina ("The Belkin Tales," 1830). At the beginning of his letter to Pletnyov Pushkin mentions Delvig (who died half a year ago):
Письмо твое от 19-го крепко меня опечалило. Опять хандришь. Эй, смотри: хандра хуже холеры, одна убивает только тело, другая убивает душу. Дельвиг умер, Молчанов умер; погоди, умрет и Жуковский, умрем и мы. Но жизнь все еще богата; мы встретим еще новых знакомцев, новые созреют нам друзья, дочь у тебя будет расти, вырастет невестой, мы будем старые хрычи, жены наши — старые хрычовки, а детки будут славные, молодые, веселые ребята; а мальчики станут повесничать, а девчонки сентиментальничать; а нам то и любо. Вздор, душа моя; не хандри — холера на днях пройдет, были бы мы живы, будем когда-нибудь и веселы.
Mlle Larivière’s penname brings to mind vashe Parnasskoe velichestvo (“your Parnassian majesty”), as in a letter of Sept. 10, 1824, to Pushkin Delvig calls Pushkin:
Есть ещё у меня не просьба, но только спрос: не вздумаешь ли ты дать мне стихов двадцать из Евгения Онегина? Это хорошо бы было для толпы, которая не поймёт всей красоты твоей Прозерпины или Демона, а уж про Онегина давно горло дерёт. Подумайте, ваше Парнасское величество!
Delvig says that the crowd will not understand all beauty of Pushkin's poems Proserpina and The Demon. According to Delvig, Proserpina is pure music, a bird of paradise's singing that one can hear for a thousand years without noticing the passage of time:
Прозерпина не стихи, а музыка: это пенье райской птички, которое слушая, не увидешь, как пройдёт тысяча лет. Эти двери давно мне знакомы. Сквозь них, ещё в Лицее, меня [иногда] часто выталкивали из Элизея. Какая искустная щеголиха у тебя истина. Подобных цветов мороз не тронет!
“What a smart dashing lady is istina (truth) in your poems. Such flowers will be spared by the frost!” In his poem Pushkin calls Proserpina Ada gordaya tsaritsa (the proud queen of Hades):
Ада гордая царица
Взором юношу зовёт,
Обняла — и колесница
Уж к аиду их несёт;
Мчатся, облаком одеты;
Видят вечные луга,
Элизей и томной Леты
Усыпленные брега.
The title of Mlle Larivière’s novel Les Enfants Maudits (“The Accursed Children”) blends un enfant terrible with Paul Verlaine’s Les Poètes Maudits (1884). In poem Art Poétique (1885) Verlaine says that a poet should avoid la Pointe assassine, l'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur (the assassin Pun, the cruel Quip and the impure Laughter):
Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!
Verlaine’s poem begins with the line
De la musique avant toute chose
(Of music before everything)
and ends in the line
et tout le reste est littérature
(and all the rest is literature).
Before the Burning Barn chapter Ada uses the phrase et tout le reste:
‘Fine,’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.’
‘I remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.’
‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.’
‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’
‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.’
‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?’
‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’
‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)
In the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Mlle Larivière is fast asleep:
A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August 4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried? Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait?
No, she was fast ablaze — I mean, asleep. I know, said Van, it was she, the hand-painted handmaid, who used your watercolors to touch up her eyes, or so Larivière said, who accused her and Blanche of fantastic sins.
Oh, of course! But not Marina’s poor French — it was our little goose Blanche. Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase, like Ashette in the English version.
‘And do you remember, Van, how warm the night was?’
‘Eschchyo bï! (as if I did not!). That night because of the blink —’
That night because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping-arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid’s shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts, or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle, and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark, somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called ‘baronial barn,’ a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière without her midday coffee cream had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They’ve all gone and left me behind, as old Fierce mumbles at the end of the Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme Ranevski). (1.19)
Vishnyovyi sad ("The Cherry Orchard," 1904) is a play by Chekhov. In his Pravila dlya nachinayushchikh avtorov ("Rules for Beginning Authors," 1885) Chekhov says that pisatel'skiy zud (the itch of writing) is incurable:
Всякого только что родившегося младенца следует старательно омыть и, давши ему отдохнуть от первых впечатлений, сильно высечь со словами: «Не пиши! Не пиши! Не будь писателем!» Если же, несмотря на такую экзекуцию, оный младенец станет проявлять писательские наклонности, то следует попробовать ласку. Если же и ласка не поможет, то махните на младенца рукой и пишите «пропало». Писательский зуд неизлечим.
Zud ("Itch," 1940) is a self-parody by VN. In Pushkin's Razgovor knigoprodavtsa s poetom ("Conversation of Bookseller with Poet," 1824) the Bookseller says: "not salable is inspiration, but one can sell a manuscript." In his "Rules for Beginning Authors" Chekhov quotes Bookseller's words in Pushkin's Razgovor: "fame is a gaudy patch upon the songster's threadbare rags." Slava ("Fame," 1942) is a poem by VN. According to Mlle Larivière, "fame struck and the roubles rolled, and the dollars poured:"
Yes! Wasn’t that a scream? Larivière blossoming forth, bosoming forth as a great writer! A sensational Canadian bestselling author! Her story ‘The Necklace’ (La rivière de diamants) had become a classic in girls’ schools and her gorgeous pseudonym ‘Guillaume de Monparnasse’ (the leaving out of the ‘t’ made it more intime) was well-known from Quebec to Kaluga. As she put it in her exotic English: ‘Fame struck and the roubles rolled, and the dollars poured’ (both currencies being used at the time in East Estotiland); but good Ida, far from abandoning Marina, with whom she had been platonically and irrevocably in love ever since she had seen her in ‘Bilitis,’ accused herself of neglecting Lucette by overindulging in Literature; consequently she now gave the child, in spurts of vacational zeal, considerably more attention than poor little Ada (said Ada) had received at twelve, after her first (miserable) term at school. Van had been such an idiot; suspecting Cordula! Chaste, gentle, dumb, little Cordula de Prey, when Ada had explained to him, twice, thrice, in different codes, that she had invented a nasty tender schoolmate, at a time when she had been literally torn from him, and only assumed — in advance, so to speak — such a girl’s existence. A kind of blank check that she wanted from him; ‘Well, you got it,’ said Van, ‘but now it’s destroyed and will not be renewed; but why did you run after fat Percy, what was so important?’
‘Oh, very important,’ said Ada, catching a drop of honey on her nether lip, ‘his mother was on the dorophone, and he said please tell her he was on his way home, and I forgot all about it, and rushed up to kiss you!’ (1.31)
In Le réveil ("Waking Up"), the second poem in Les chansons de Bilitis, Pierre Louÿs mentions la chaleur du lit:
Il fait déjà grand jour. Je devrais être levée,
mais le sommeil du matin est doux
et la chaleur du lit me retient blottie.
Je veux rester couchée encore.
Tout à l'heure j'irai dans l'étable.
Je donnerai aux chèvres de l'herbe et des fleurs,
et l'outre d'eau fraîche tirée du puits,
où je boirai en même temps qu'elles.
Puis je les attacherai au poteau
pour traire leurs douces mamelles tièdes;
et si les chevreaux n'en sont pas jaloux,
je sucerai avec eux les tettes assouplies.
Amaltheia n'a-t-elle pas nourri Dzeus ?
J'irai donc. Mais pas encore.
Le soleil s'est levé trop tôt
et ma mère n'est pas éveillée.