All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875... out of gratitude and curiousity 'Velvet' Veen traveled once - and only once - to the nearest floramor with his entire family - and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. (Ada, 2.3)

Maupassant's story La Maison Tellier (1881), set in a brothel, is dedicated to Ivan Turgenev. On September 20, 1875,* Turgenev moved to the new-built chalet at his and Viardot's villa Les Frênes in Bougival.

"The most beautiful place in the world, despite its awful name," Bougival is the setting of Maupassant's Yvette (1884) and A. Dumas fils' novel La Dame aux Camélias (1848, adapted for the stage in 1852). "The lady of the camellias," Marguerite Gautier is a courtesan. Verdi's opera La traviata is based on Dumas's play.

At the picnic on Ada's sixteenth birthday Marina ("poor old Traverdiata" who wants to go to Hollywood with her young lover, her children and Larivière-Monparnasse, Lucette's governess and novelist) sings the Green Grass aria: 'Replenish, replenish the glasses with wine! Here's a toast to love! To the rapture of love!' (1.39). While Verdi comes from the Italian word for "green," trava is Russian for "grass."

The floramors were built by the Flemish architect David van Veen in memory of his grandson Eric, the young author of the essay Villa Venus: An Organized Dream. As I pointed out before, many a beautiful building in St. Petersburg, VN's home city, was designed by the Venice-born architect Carlo Rossi (1775-1849). Venezia Rossa is mentioned in Ada, in connection with Baron Klim Avidov (Marina's former lover who gave her children a Flavita set: 1.36). Flavita is an anagram of alfavit (alphabet) and Baron Klim Avidov, of Vladimir Nabokov (whose letters were colored).

Rossi comes from the Italian word for "red". There is Rossi in both Rossiya (Russia, VN's home country) and Rossini (it rhymes with siniy, blue), the composer mentioned in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Fragments of Onegin's Journey, [XXVII], 3-4, 13-14):

At the beginning of Pushkin's novel Onegin ("by the most lofty will of Zeus the heir of all his relatives") drives headlong to his dying uncle thinking: "My uncle has most honest principles: when taken ill in earnest... etc."

David van Veen died from a stroke when building his hundredth floramor. His nephew and heir ['Velvet' Veen], an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen... was not cheated out of the millions of guldens... (2.3)