Describing his meeting with Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in October, 1905, in Mont Roux, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) mentions his dialogue with Lucien (the concierge at Les Trois Cygnes):
arriving mont roux bellevue sunday
dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows
Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van’s stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien’s discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.
‘Lucien,’ said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, ‘I may have — as your predecessor would know — all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen — que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.’
‘Merci infiniment,’ said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought. (3.8)
"Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?") was Michel de Montaigne's motto, and he railed constantly against the cocksure certainty with which many lived their lives. In his essay Du repentir ("Of Repentance") Montaigne contrasts Socrates (who famously said "all I know is that I know nothing") with Alexander the Great and, in the next paragraph, mentions Tamerlane:
Le peuple reconvoye celuy-là, d’un acte public, avec estonnement, jusqu’à sa porte : il laisse avec sa robbe ce rolle : il en retombe d’autant plus bas, qu’il s’estoit plus haut monté. Au dedans chez luy, tout est tumultuaire et vil. Quand le reglement s’y trouveroit, il faut un jugement vif et bien trié, pour l’appercevoir en ces actions basses et privees. Joint que l’ordre est une vertu morne et sombre : Gaigner une bresche, conduire une Ambassade, regir un peuple, ce sont actions esclatantes : tancer, rire, vendre, payer, aymer, hayr, et converser avec les siens, et avec soy-mesme, doucement et justement : ne relascher point, ne se desmentir point, c’est chose plus rare, plus difficile, et moins remerquable. Les vies retirees soustiennent par là, quoy qu’on die, des devoirs autant ou plus aspres et tendus, que ne font les autres vies. Et les privez, dit Aristote, servent la vertu plus difficilement et hautement, que ne font ceux qui sont en magistrat. Nous nous preparons aux occasions eminentes, plus par gloire que par conscience. La plus courte façon d’arriver à la gloire, ce seroit faire pour la conscience ce que nous faisons pour la gloire. Et la vertu d’Alexandre me semble representer assez moins de vigueur en son theatre, que ne fait celle de Socrates, en cette exercitation basse et obscure. Je conçois aisément Socrates, en la place d’Alexandre ; Alexandre en celle de Socrates, je ne puis : Qui demandera à celuy-là, ce qu’il sçait faire, il respondra, « Subjuguer le monde » : qui le demandera à cettuy-cy, il dira, « Mener l’humaine vie conformément à sa naturelle condition » : science bien plus generale, plus poisante, et plus legitime. Le prix de l’ame ne consiste pas à aller haut, mais ordonnément.
Sa grandeur ne s’exerce pas en la grandeur : c’est en la mediocrité. Ainsi que ceux qui nous jugent et touchent au dedans, ne font pas grand’recette de la lueur de noz actions publiques : et voyent que ce ne sont que filets et pointes d’eau fine rejallies d’un fond au demeurant limonneux et poisant. En pareil cas, ceux qui nous jugent par cette brave apparence du dehors, concluent de mesmes de nostre constitution interne : et ne peuvent accoupler des facultez populaires et pareilles aux leurs, à ces autres facultez, qui les estonnent, si loin de leur visee. Ainsi donnons nous aux demons des formes sauvages. Et qui non à Tamburlan, des sourcils eslevez, des nazeaux ouverts, un visage afreux, et une taille desmesuree, comme est la taille de l’imagination qu’il en a conceuë par le bruit de son nom ? Qui m’eust faict veoir Erasme autrefois, il eust esté mal-aisé, que je n’eusse prins pour adages et apophthegmes, tout ce qu’il eust dit à son vallet et à son hostesse. Nous imaginons bien plus sortablement un artisan sur sa garderobe ou sur sa femme, qu’un grand President, venerable par son maintien et suffisance. Il nous semble que de ces hauts thrones ils ne s’abaissent pas jusques à vivre.
See this functionary whom the people escort in state, with wonder and applause, to his very door; he puts off the pageant with his robe, and falls so much the lower by how much he was higher exalted: in himself within, all is tumult and degraded. And though all should be regular there, it will require a vivid and well-chosen judgment to perceive it in these low and private actions; to which may be added, that order is a dull, somber virtue. To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown: to reprehend, laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with a man’s own family, and with himself; not to relax, not to give a man’s self the lie is more rare and hard, and less remarkable. By which means, retired lives, whatever, is said to the contrary, undergo duties of as great or greater difficulty than the others do; and private men, says Aristotle, serve virtue more painfully and highly, than those in authority do: we prepare ourselves for eminent occasions, more out of glory than conscience. The shortest way to arrive at glory, would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory: and the virtue of Alexander appears to me of much less vigor in his great theater, than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure employment. I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates, I cannot. Who shall ask the one what he can do, he will answer, “Subdue the world:” and who shall put the same question to the other, he will say, “Carry on human life conformably with its natural condition;” a much more general, weighty, and legitimate science than the other.
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity. As they who judge and try us within, make no great account of the luster of our public actions, and see they are only streaks and rays of clear water springing from a slimy and muddy bottom: so, likewise, they who judge of us by this gallant outward appearance, in like manner conclude of our internal constitution; and cannot couple common faculties, and like their own, with the other faculties that astonish them, and are so far out of their sight. Therefore it is, that we give such savage forms to demons: and who does not give Tamerlane great eyebrows, wide nostrils, a dreadful visage, and a prodigious stature, according to the imagination he has conceived by the report of his name? Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus, I should hardly have believed but that all was adage and apothegm he spoke to his man or his hostess. We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool, or upon his wife, than a great president venerable by his port and sufficiency: we fancy that they, from their high tribunals, will not abase themselves so much as to live. As vicious souls are often incited by some foreign impulse to do well, so are virtuous souls to do ill; they are therefore to be judged by their settled state, when they are at home, whenever that may be; and, at all events, when they are nearer repose, and in their native station. (Essays, Book III, 2)
A Tartar conqueror in western and southern Asia, ruler of Samarkand, Tamerlane (1336-1405) is also known as Timur. On the day preceding Ada's sixteenth birthday Greg Erminin brings Ada a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok (VN's Tartar ancestor):
Ada had declined to invite anybody except the Erminin twins to her picnic; but she had had no intention of inviting the brother without the sister. The latter, it turned out, could not come, having gone to New Cranton to see a young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off into the sunrise with his regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after all: on the previous day he had called on her bringing a ‘talisman’ from his very sick father, who wanted Ada to treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow ivory carved in Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (1.39)
Grace Erminin (Greg's twin sister) marries a Wellington:
As if she had just escaped from a burning palace and a perishing kingdom, she wore over her rumpled nightdress a deep-brown, hoar-glossed coat of sea-otter fur, the famous kamchatstkiy bobr of ancient Estotian traders, also known as ‘lutromarina’ on the Lyaska coast: ‘my natural fur,’ as Marina used to say pleasantly of her own cape, inherited from a Zemski granddam, when, at the dispersal of a winter ball, some lady wearing vison or coypu or a lowly manteau de castor (beaver, nemetskiy bobr) would comment with a rapturous moan on the bobrovaya shuba. ‘Staren’kaya (old little thing),’ Marina used to add in fond deprecation (the usual counterpart of the Bostonian lady’s coy ‘thank you’ ventriloquizing her banal mink or nutria in response to polite praise — which did not prevent her from denouncing afterwards the ‘swank’ of that ‘stuck-up actress,’ who, actually, was the least ostentatious of souls). Ada’s bobrï (princely plural of bobr) were a gift from Demon, who as we know, had lately seen in the Western states considerably more of her than he had in Eastern Estotiland when she was a child. The bizarre enthusiast had developed the same tendresse for her as he had always had for Van. Its new expression in regard to Ada looked sufficiently fervid to make watchful fools suspect that old Demon ‘slept with his niece’ (actually, he was getting more and more occupied with Spanish girls who were getting more and more youthful every year until by the end of the century, when he was sixty, with hair dyed a midnight blue, his flame had become a difficult nymphet of ten). So little did the world realize the real state of affairs that even Cordula Tobak, born de Prey, and Grace Wellington, born Erminin, spoke of Demon Veen, with his fashionable goatee and frilled shirtfront, as ‘Van’s successor.’ (2.6)
Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon in the battle of Waterloo (1815). In his mock epic in octaves Domik v Kolomne ("The Small Cottage in Kolomna," 1830) Pushkin compares the poet to Tamerlane or even to Napoleon himself:
Как весело стихи свои вести
Под цифрами, в порядке, строй за строем,
Не позволять им в сторону брести,
Как войску, в пух рассыпанному боем!
Тут каждый слог замечен и в чести,
Тут каждый стих глядит себе героем,
А стихотворец... с кем же равен он?
Он Тамерлан иль сам Наполеон. (V)
It seems that, like Maupassant (whose story La Parure is known on Demonia as La rivière de diamants, by Guillaume de Monparnasse, the penname of Mlle Larivière, the governess of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette), Napoleon did not exist on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set). During Van's first tea party at Ardis Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother) mentions Queen Josephine (Napoleon's first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, was the Empress of the French). A kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis, Kim Beauharnais is blinded by Van for spying on him and Ada and attempting to blackmail Ada (2.11). On Demonia England annexed France in 1815:
The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you.’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe.’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada. (1.40)
Merci infiniment (the concierge's words to Van) brings to mind the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline (the Irish actress mentioned by Van when he describes Ada's dramatic career):
Van had seen the picture (the Hollywood version of Four Sisters, as Chekhov's play is known on Demonia) and had liked it. An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline —
Oh! qui me rendra ma colline
Et le grand chêne and my colleen!
— harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a California patio just before the film was released. Varvara, the late General Sergey Prozorov’s eldest daughter, comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady, to have tea with Olga, Marsha, and Irina on the latter’s name day. Much to the nun’s dismay, her three sisters dream only of one thing — leaving cool, damp, mosquito-infested but otherwise nice and peaceful ‘Permanent’ as Irina mockingly dubs it, for high life in remote and sinful Moscow, Id., the former capital of Estotiland. In the first edition of his play, which never quite manages to heave the soft sigh of a masterpiece, Tchechoff (as he spelled his name when living that year at the execrable Pension Russe, 9, rue Gounod, Nice) crammed into the two pages of a ludicrous expository scene all the information he wished to get rid of, great lumps of recollections and calendar dates — an impossible burden to place on the fragile shoulders of three unhappy Estotiwomen. Later he redistributed that information through a considerably longer scene in which the arrival of the monashka Varvara provides all the speeches needed to satisfy the restless curiosity of the audience. This was a neat stroke of stagecraft, but unfortunately (as so often occurs in the case of characters brought in for disingenuous purposes) the nun stayed on, and not until the third, penultimate, act was the author able to bundle her off, back to her convent. (2.9)
When Van meets Greg Erminin in 1901, in Paris (also known as Lute on Demonia), Van tells Greg that he never saw Ada (who played the gitanilla in Yuzlik's film Don Juan's Last Fling) on the screen:
On a bleak morning between the spring and summer of 1901, in Paris, as Van, black-hatted, one hand playing with the warm loose change in his topcoat pocket and the other, fawn-gloved, upswinging a furled English umbrella, strode past a particularly unattractive sidewalk café among the many lining the Avenue Guillaume Pitt, a chubby bald man in a rumpled brown suit with a watch-chained waistcoat stood up and hailed him.
Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks, that black goatee.
‘Ne uznayosh’ (You don’t recognize me)?’
‘Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!’ cried Van tearing off his glove.
‘I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You’d never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish, Van.’
‘Diet of champagne, not beer,’ said Professor Veen, putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his ‘umber.’ ‘Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.’
‘I’m also very fat, yes?’
‘What about Grace, I can’t imagine her getting fat?’
‘Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly, too.’
‘Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?’
‘About two years.’
‘To whom?’
‘Maude Sween.’
‘The daughter of the poet?’
‘No, no, her mother is a Brougham.’
Might have replied ‘Ada Veen,’ had Mr Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject. Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever.
‘I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony — no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!’
‘Yes — Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!’
‘You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long —’
‘Neither did she. I was terribly —’
‘How long are you staying —’
‘— terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’
Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bed makers.
‘How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me —’
‘So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius — dead, dead, all dead!’
‘I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.’
‘Arkadievich,’ said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.
‘Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?’
‘He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?’
‘In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I gather. Perhaps I’m mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very well: I visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years ago.’
‘Somebody told me she’s a movie actress.’
‘I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen.’
‘Oh, that would be terrible, I declare — to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.’
Likes the word ‘terrible,’ I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting — and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double.
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’): So you are married, etc.: see Eugene Onegin, Eight: XVIII: 1-4.
za tvoyo etc.: Russ., your health.
guvernantka etc.: Russ., governess-novelist.
When Van offers Ada (who refuses to leave her sick husband) a clean handkerchief, she takes it with a childish 'merci:'
She asked for a handkerchief, and he pulled out a blue one from his windjacket pocket, but her tears had started to roll and she shaded her eyes, while he stood before her with outstretched hand.
‘Part of the act?’ he inquired coldly.
She shook her head, took the handkerchief with a childish ‘merci,’ blew her nose and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.
She could not tell her husband while he was ill. Van would have to wait until Andrey was sufficiently well to bear the news and that might take some time. Of course, she would have to do everything to have him completely cured, there was a wondermaker in Arizona —
‘Sort of patching up a bloke before hanging him,’ said Van.
‘And to think,’ cried Ada with a kind of square shake of stiff hands as if dropping a lid or a tray, ‘to think that he dutifully concealed everything! Oh, of course, I can’t leave him now!’
‘Yes, the old story — the flute player whose impotence has to be treated, the reckless ensign who may never return from a distant war!’
‘Ne ricane pas!’ exclaimed Ada. ‘The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?’
As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.
‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’
‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’
‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet —’
‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).
‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène —’
‘Ach, perestagne!’
‘— et le phalène.’
‘Je t’emplie ("prie" and "supplie"), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘But, but, but’ — (slapping every time his forehead) — ‘to be on the very brink of, of, of — and then have that idiot turn Keats!’
‘Bozhe moy, I must be going. Say something to me, my darling, my only one, something that might help!’
There was a narrow chasm of silence broken only by the rain drumming on the eaves.
‘Stay with me, girl,’ said Van, forgetting everything — pride, rage, the convention of everyday pity.
For an instant she seemed to waver — or at least to consider wavering; but a resonant voice reached them from the drive and there stood Dorothy, gray-caped and mannish-hatted, energetically beckoning with her unfurled umbrella.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ll write you,’ murmured my poor love in tears.
Van kissed her leaf-cold hand and, letting the Bellevue worry about his car, letting all Swans worry about his effects and Mme Scarlet worry about Eveline’s skin trouble, he walked some ten kilometers along soggy roads to Rennaz and thence flew to Nice, Biskra, the Cape, Nairobi, the Basset range —
And oe’r the summits of the Basset — (3.8)