On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:
Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula). (1.20)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Floeberg: Flaubert’s style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.
Mademoiselle Rouault (in Flaubert's novel, Emma's maiden name) was brought up at the Ursuline Convent:
Dans les premiers temps que Charles fréquentait les Bertaux, madame Bovary jeune ne manquait pas de s’informer du malade, et même sur le livre qu’elle tenait en partie double, elle avait choisi pour M. Rouault une belle page blanche. Mais quand elle sut qu’il avait une fille, elle alla aux informations; et elle apprit que mademoiselle Rouault, élevée au couvent, chez les Ursulines, avait reçu, comme on dit, une belle éducation, qu’elle savait, en conséquence, la danse, la géographie, le dessin, faire de la tapisserie et toucher du piano. Ce fut le comble!
During the first period of Charles’s visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to make inquiries, and she learnt that Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called “a good education”; and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw. (Part One, chapter 2)
Floeberg means "an accumulation of ice floes resembling an iceberg." In a letter of March 3, 1852, to Louise Colet Flaubert describes his work on Madame Bovary and mentions an old engraving showing people stranded on ice floes:
I have just reread several children’s books for my novel. I am half crazy tonight, after all the things I looked at today – from old keepsakes to tales of shipwrecks and buccaneers. I came up on old engravings that I had coloured when I was seven or eight and that I hadn’t seen since. There are rocks painted blue and trees painted green. At the sight of some of them (for instance a scene showing people stranded on ice floes) I re-experienced feelings of terror that I had as a child. I should like something that would put it out of my mind; I am almost afraid to go to bed. There is a story of Dutch sailors in ice-bound waters, with bears attacking them in their hut (this picture used to keep me awake), and one about Chinese pirates sacking a temple full of golden idols. My travels and my childhood memories, colour off from each other, fuse, whirl dazzlingly before my eyes and rise up in a spiral…
For two days now I have been trying to live the dreams of young girls, and for this purpose I have been navigating in milky oceans of books about castles and troubadours in white-plumed velvet caps. Remind me to speak to you about this. You can give me exact details that I need.
Flaubert once remarked: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." The author of Lolita (1955), VN could have said: "Dolores Haze is me." On Demonia VN's Lolita is known as The Gitanilla, a novel by the Spanish writer Osberg:
For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday and Ida’s forty-second jour de fête, the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one), a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt, with red poppies or peonies, ‘deficient in botanical reality,’ as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream.
(Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.) (1.13)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).
Describing Lucette's visit to Kingston (Van's American University), Van mentions the title of Osberg's novel:
'Van, it will make you smile’ [thus in the MS. Ed.].
‘Van,’ said Lucette, ‘it will make you smile’ (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled), ‘but if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.’
What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, Clichy Clichés, Six Pricks, The Bible Unabridged, Mertvago Forever, The Gitanilla... He was known in the beau monde for asking that question the very first time he met a young lady. (2.5)
The question Van asks Cordula in that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand is "are you a virgin:"
‘My cousin Ada,’ said Van, ‘is a little girl of eleven or twelve, and much too young to fall in love with anybody, except people in books. Yes, I too found her sweet. A trifle on the bluestocking side, perhaps, and, at the same time, impudent and capricious — but, yes, sweet.’
‘I wonder,’ murmured Cordula, with such a nice nuance of pensive tone that Van could not tell whether she meant to close the subject, or leave it ajar, or open a new one.
‘How could I get in touch with you?’ he asked. ‘Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?’
‘I don’t date hoodlums,’ she replied calmly, ‘but you can always "contact" me through Ada. We are not in the same class, in more ways than one’ (laughing); ‘she’s a little genius, I’m a plain American ambivert, but we are enrolled in the same Advanced French group, and the Advanced French group is assigned the same dormitory so that a dozen blondes, three brunettes and one redhead, la Rousse, can whisper French in their sleep’ (laughing alone).
‘What fun. Okay, thanks. The even number means bunks, I guess. Well, I’ll be seeing you, as the hoods say.’ (1.27)
Saint Ursula was a legendary Romano-British Christian saint who was killed (in 383 AD), with a group of 11 000 holy virgins who accompanied her, at Cologne.
Ada's and Cordula's school for girls, Brownhill brings to mind the Ursuline Convent where Emma Rouault was brought up. Van's prep-school for boys, Riverlane makes one think of Mlle Larivière, Lucette's governess. Dr. Larivière is a character in Madame Bovary (Charles Bovary's colleague who fails to save his wife).