amid an ovation of crickets and that vortex of yellow and maroon butterflies that so pleased Chateaubriand on his arrival in America] Chateaubriand describes the trees and the birds, but no butterflies, on his landing in Chesapeake Bay on 2 July 1791 (Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier [Paris: Gallimard, 1951, 1957] I,217); six weeks later, he notes simply, "We camped in meadows bedaubed with butterflies and flowers" (I, 241); describing botanizing by the Ohio, perhaps another six weeks later, he reports "mayflies and butterflies which, in their brilliant array, vied with the speckled flora" (I, 259). This last passage is in fact mostly lifted from William Bartram's 1791 account of his travels through the Carolinas. In his American tales, especially the beginning of Atala, Chateaubriand borrowed even more heavily from earlier travelers, to produce a still more exotic effect, and this is perhaps Nabokov's point.