Back in 2008 I noted VN’s refiguring, in PF,  of a passage from Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy: The Age of Despots:

 

https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=nabokv-l;1cfd3e5f.0811

 

1. PF: (End of note 171): "When the fallen tyrant is tied, naked and

howling, to a plank in the public square and killed piecemeal by the people

who cut slices out, and eat them, and distribute his living body among

themselves (as I read when young in a story about an Italian despot, which

made of me a vegetarian for life)."

 

2. From a footnote in "Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots," by

John Addington Symonds (1898): "Dattiri was bound naked to a plank and

killed piecemeal by the people, who bit his flesh, cut slices out, and sold

and ate it--distributing his living body as a sort of infernal sacrament

among themselves."

 

I have now done some more reading in that very entertaining book, and I feel fairly certain that the following passages are connected also.

 

PF: (n. 62): “Everybody knows how given to regicide Zemblans are: two Queens, three Kings, and fourteen Pretenders died violent deaths, strangled, stabbed, poisoned, and drowned, in the course of only one century (1700-1800)” (95).

 

Symonds:  “No one believed in the natural death of a prince: princes must be poisoned or poignarded. Out of thirteen of the Carrara family, in little more than a century (1318-1435) three were deposed or murdered by near relatives, one was expelled by a rival from his state, four were executed the Venetians. Out of five of the La Scala family, three were killed by their brothers, and a fourth was poisoned in exile (120).”

 

It should be noted that this passage occurs one page previous to the passage above concerning Dattiri. 

 

Matt Roth