Do not write, do not phone, do not mention this letter, if and when you come Friday afternoon; but, please, if you do, wear, in propitious sign, the Florentine hat that looks like a cluster of wild flowers. I want you to celebrate your resemblance to the fifth girl from left to right, the flower-decked blonde with the straight nose and serious gray eyes, in Botticelli's Primavera, an allegory of Spring, my love, my allegory. (2. 7)

Annette's Florentine hat brings to mind Vadim's first wife Iris Black. In one of his Italian Verses (1909) Blok compares Florence (It., Firenze; and fiore means "flower;" Santa Maria del Fiore is the cathedral in Florence) to a smoky iris.

It was a holiday--the Festival of Flora--I said, indicating, with a not wholly normal smile, the carnations, camomiles, anemones, asphodels, and blue cockles in blond corn, which decorated my room in our honor. Her gaze swept over the flowers, champagne, and caviar canapés; she snorted and turned to flee; I plucked her back into the room, locked the door and pocketed its key. (2.8)

The mad scholar in Esmeralda and Her Parandrus wreathes Botticelli and Shakespeare together by having Primavera end as Ophelia with all her flowers. The loquacious lady in Dr. Olga Repnin remarks that tornadoes and floods are really sensational only in North America. On May 17, 1953, several papers printed a photograph of a family, complete with birdcage, phonograph, and other valuable possessions, riding it out on the roof of their shack in the middle of Rosedale Lake. Other papers carried the picture of a small Ford caught in the upper branches of an intrepid tree with a man, a Mr. Byrd, whom Horace Peppermill said he knew, still in the driver's seat,
stunned, bruised, but alive. A prominent personality in the Weather Bureau was accused of criminally delayed forecasts. A group of fifteen schoolchildren who had been taken to see a collection of stuffed animals donated by Mrs. Rosenthal, the benefactor's widow, to the Rosedale Museum, were safe in the sudden darkness of that sturdy building when the twister struck. But the prettiest lakeside cottage got swept away, and the drowned bodies of its two occupants were never retrieved.
(5.2)