In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) cites a discarded variant and wonders if some obscure intuition, some prophetic scruple prevented Shade from spelling out the name of an eminent man who happened to be an intimate friend of his:
A beautiful variant, with one curious gap, branches off at this point in the draft (dated July 6):