In VN’s novel Ada (1969) Van and Ada find out that they are brother and sister thanks to Marina’s old herbarium that they discovered in the attic of Ardis Hall:
The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex, a mountain resort, not far from Brig, Switzerland, where she had sojourned before her marriage, mostly in a rented chalet. The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants collected at random, in August, 1869, on the grassy slopes above the chalet, or in the park of the Hotel Florey, or in the garden of the sanatorium neat: it (‘my nusshaus,’ as poor Aqua dubbed it, or ‘the Home,’ as Marina more demurely identified it in her locality notes). Those introductory pages did not present much botanical or psychological interest; and the fifty last pages or so remained blank; but the middle part, with a conspicuous decrease in number of specimens, proved to be a regular little melodrama acted out by the ghosts of dead flowers. The specimens were on one side of the folio, with Marina Dourmanoff (sic)’s notes en regard.
Ancolie Bleue des Alpes, Ex en Valais, i.IX.69. From Englishman in hotel. ‘Alpine Columbine, color of your eyes.’
Epervière auricule. 25.X.69, Ex, ex Dr Lapiner’s walled alpine garden.
Golden [ginkgo] leaf: fallen out of a book’ The Truth about Terra’ which Aqua gave me before going back to her Home. 14.XII.69.
Artificial edelweiss brought by my new nurse with a note from Aqua saying it came from a ‘mizernoe and bizarre’ Christmas Tree at the Home. 25.XII.69.
Petal of orchid, one of 99 orchids, if you please, mailed to me yesterday, Special Delivery, c’est bien le cas de le dire, from Villa Armina, Alpes Maritimes. Have laid aside ten for Aqua to be taken to her at her Home. Ex en Valais, Switzerland. ‘Snowing in Fate’s crystal ball,’ as he used to say. (Date erased.)
Gentiane de Koch, rare, brought by lapochka [darling] Lapiner from his ‘mute gentiarium’ 5.I.1870.
[blue-ink blot shaped accidentally like a flower, or improved felt-pen deletion] (Compliquaria compliquata var. aquamarina. Ex, 15.I.70.
Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse. Ex, 16.II.1870, made by a fellow patient, at the Home, which is no longer hers.
Gentiana verna (printanière). Ex, 28.III.1870, on the lawn of my nurse’s cottage. Last day here.
The two young discoverers of that strange and sickening treasure commented upon it as follows:
‘I deduce,’ said the boy, ‘three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her. married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance; that Marina had her own Dr Krolik, pour ainsi dire; and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
‘I can add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Dr Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s — an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this’ (American finger-snap). ‘You will be grateful,’ she continued, embracing him, ‘for my not mentioning its scientific name. Incidentally the other foot — the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand — possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.’
‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea.’ (1.1)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Dr Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French ‘lapin’ in Lapiner is matched by the Russian ‘Krolik’, the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p.13, et passim) and the Russian ‘zayats’ (hare) sounds like ‘Seitz’ (the German gynecologist on page 181); there is a Latin ‘cuniculus’ in ‘Nikulin’ (‘grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov’, p.341), and a Greek ‘lagos’ in ‘Lagosse’ (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p.298.
mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of ‘miserable’ in the sense of ‘paltry’.
c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.
lieu de naissance: birthplace.
pour ainsi dire: so to say.
Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.
‘Bear-Foot’, not ‘bare foot’: both children are naked.
Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called ‘Spring’) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.
Lapochka Lapiner (Marina’s Swiss doctor mentioned in her herbarium notes en regard) brings to mind "Chateaubriand’s lapochka" mentioned by Ada with regard to Van's novel Letters from Terra:
Letters from Terra, by Voltemand, came out in 1891 on Van’s twenty-first birthday, under the imprint of two bogus houses, ‘Abencerage’ in Manhattan, and ‘Zegris’ in London.
(Had I happened to see a copy I would have recognized Chateaubriand’s lapochka and hence your little paw, at once.) (2.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Abencerage, Zegris: Families of Granada Moors (their feud inspired Chateaubriand).
According to Van, "Ada’s letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van’s Letters from Terra, ‘a philosophical novel,’ showed no sign of life whatsoever" (ibid.). In her first letter to Van (written after Van left Ardis forever) Ada compares herself to a bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off:
When I said I could not speak and would write, I meant I could not utter the proper words at short notice. I implore you. I felt that I could not produce them and arrange them orally in the necessary order. I implore you. I felt that one wrong or misplaced word would be fatal, you would simply turn away, as you did, and walk off again, and again, and again. I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding. But now I think that I should have taken the risk of speaking, of stammering, for I see now that it is just as dreadfully hard to put my heart and honor in script — even more so because in speaking one can use a stutter as a shutter, and plead a chance slurring of words, like a bleeding hare with one side of its mouth shot off, or twist back, and improve; but against a background of snow, even the blue snow of this notepaper, the blunders are red and final. I implore you. (2.1)
In Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) old Rouault (Emma’s father) invites Charles Bovary (a young doctor who just lost his wife) to his place and says "nous vous ferons tirer un lapin" (we'll have some rabbit-shooting):
Un matin, le père Rouault vint apporter à Charles le payement de sa jambe remise : soixante et quinze francs en pièces de quarante sous, et une dinde. Il avait appris son malheur, et l’en consola tant qu’il put.
— Je sais ce que c’est ! disait-il en lui frappant sur l’épaule ; j’ai été comme vous, moi aussi ! Quand j’ai eu perdu ma pauvre défunte, j’allais dans les champs pour être tout seul ; je tombais au pied d’un arbre, je pleurais, j’appelais le bon Dieu, je lui disais des sottises ; j’aurais voulu être comme les taupes, que je voyais aux branches, qui avaient des vers leur grouillant dans le ventre, crevé, enfin. Et quand je pensais que d’autres, à ce moment-là, étaient avec leurs bonnes petites femmes à les tenir embrassées contre eux, je tapais de grands coups par terre avec mon bâton ; j’étais quasiment fou, que je ne mangeais plus ; l’idée d’aller seulement au café me dégoûtait, vous ne croiriez pas. Eh bien, tout doucement, un jour chassant l’autre, un printemps sur un hiver et un automne par-dessus un été, ça a coulé brin à brin, miette à miette ; ça s’en est allé, c’est parti, c’est descendu, je veux dire, car il vous reste toujours quelque chose au fond, comme qui dirait… un poids, là, sur la poitrine ! Mais puisque c’est notre sort à tous, on ne doit pas non plus se laisser dépérir, et, parce que d’autres sont morts vouloir mourir… Il faut vous secouer, monsieur Bovary ; ça se passera ! Venez nous voir ; ma fille pense à vous de temps à autre, savez-vous bien, et elle dit comme ça que vous l’oubliez. Voilà le printemps bientôt ; nous vous ferons tirer un lapin dans la garenne, pour vous dissiper un peu.
One morning old Rouault brought Charles the money for setting his leg—seventy-five francs in forty-sou pieces, and a turkey. He had heard of his loss, and consoled him as well as he could.
“I know what it is,” said he, clapping him on the shoulder; “I’ve been through it. When I lost my dear departed, I went into the fields to be quite alone. I fell at the foot of a tree; I cried; I called on God; I talked nonsense to Him. I wanted to be like the moles that I saw on the branches, their insides swarming with worms, dead, and an end of it. And when I thought that there were others at that very moment with their nice little wives holding them in their embrace, I struck great blows on the earth with my stick. I was pretty well mad with not eating; the very idea of going to a cafe disgusted me—you wouldn’t believe it. Well, quite softly, one day following another, a spring on a winter, and an autumn after a summer, this wore away, piece by piece, crumb by crumb; it passed away, it is gone, I should say it has sunk; for something always remains at the bottom as one would say—a weight here, at one’s heart. But since it is the lot of all of us, one must not give way altogether, and, because others have died, want to die too. You must pull yourself together, Monsieur Bovary. It will pass away. Come to see us; my daughter thinks of you now and again, d’ye know, and she says you are forgetting her. Spring will soon be here. We’ll have some rabbit-shooting in the warrens to amuse you a bit.” (Part One, chapter 3)
The characters in Flaubert’s novel include old Dr Larivière (Charles’s more efficient colleague who fails to save poor Emma’s life). The governess of Van’s and Ada’s half-sister Lucette, Mlle Larivière (nicknamed Belle by Lucette) writes fiction under the penname Guillaume de Monparnasse (sic):
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!’
‘At Riverlane,’ said Van, ‘we used to call that a Doughnut Truth: only the truth, and the whole truth, with a hole in the truth.’ (1.31)
Mlle Larivière’s story La rivière de diamants (that she reads at the picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday, 1.13) corresponds La Parure (1884), a story by Guy de Maupassant (a writer who does not exist on Demonia, aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). Maupassant is the author of Bel-Ami (1885). When they meet in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia) in 1901, Van tells Greg Erminin that Mlle Larivière’s last novel is called L‘ami Luc and that she just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish:
Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform’ my lord’ that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saïgon and was summoning him to appear.
‘Aha,’ said Van, ‘I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.’
‘Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me — yes, Tobak! — that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?’ (Van bowed,) ‘And how is the guvernantka belletristka?’
‘Her last novel is called L‘ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.’
They parted laughing. (3.2)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.
Lebon is Nobel, Luc is cul (Fr., ass) in reverse. In a letter of June 28, 1853, to Louise Colet Flaubert mentions le grand air froid du Parnasse and uses the phrase mon cul:
Aujourd’hui, par exemple, homme et femme tout ensemble, amant et maîtresse à la fois, je me suis promené à cheval dans une forêt par une après-midi d’automne sous des feuilles jaunes, et j’étais les chevaux, les feuilles, le vent, les paroles qu’on se disait et le soleil rouge qui faisait s’entre-fermer leurs paupières noyées d’amour. Est-ce orgueil ou pitié, est-ce le débordement niais d’une satisfaction de soi-même exagérée ? ou bien un vague et noble sentiment de religion ? Mais quand je rumine après les avoir senties ces journées-là, je serais tenté de faire une prière de remerciement au bon Dieu si je savais qu’il pût m’entendre. Qu’il soit donc béni pour ne pas m’avoir fait naître marchand de coton, vaudevilliste, homme d’esprit, etc. Chantons Apollon comme aux premiers jours, aspirons à pleins poumons le grand air froid du Parnasse, frappons sur nos guitares et nos cymbales, et tournons comme des derviches dans l’éternel brouhaha des formes et des idées.
En fait d’injures, de sottises, de bêtises, etc., je trouve qu’il ne faut se fâcher que lorsqu’on vous le dit en face. Faites-moi des grimaces dans le dos tant que vous voudrez, mon cul vous contemple !
Cymbales and derviches in Flaubert's letter bring to mind the accompaniment of dervish drums and a clash of cymbals in the orchestra mentioned by Van when he describes his performance in variety shows as Mascodagama:
The stage would be empty when the curtain went up; then, after five heartbeats of theatrical suspense, something swept out of the wings, enormous and black, to the accompaniment of dervish drums. The shock of his powerful and precipitous entry affected so deeply the children in the audience that for a long time later, in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the ‘primordial qualm,’ a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage. Into the harsh light of its gaudily carpeted space a masked giant, fully eight feet tall, erupted, running strongly in the kind of soft boots worn by Cossack dancers. A voluminous, black shaggy cloak of the burka type enveloped his silhouette inquiétante (according to a female Sorbonne correspondent — we’ve kept all those cuttings) from neck to knee or what appeared to be those sections of his body. A Karakul cap surmounted his top. A black mask covered the upper part of his heavily bearded face. The unpleasant colossus kept strutting up and down the stage for a while, then the strut changed to the restless walk of a caged madman, then he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (perhaps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head. (1.30)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): inquiétante: disturbing.
See also the updated version of my previous post, “TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, LOVE UNDER LINDENS & TOBAGO ISLANDS IN ADA.”