Describing Gradus' visit to Oswin Bretwit (the former Zemblan consul in Paris), 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) quotes the Latin saying Et in Arcadia ego (Even in Arcady am I):
I, too, was wont to draw my poet’s attention to the idyllic beauty of airplanes in the evening sky. Who could have guessed that on the very day (July 7) Shade penned this lambent line (the last one on his twenty-third card) Gradus, alias Degré, had flown from Copenhagen to Paris, thus completing the second lap of his sinister journey! Even in Arcady am I, says Death in the tombal scripture.
The activities of Gradus in Paris had been rather neatly planned by the Shadows. They were perfectly right in assuming that not only Odon but our former consul in Paris, the late Oswin Bretwit, would know where to find the King. They decided to have Gradus try Bretwit first. That gentleman had a flat in Meudon where he dwelt alone, seldom going anywhere except the National Library (where he read theosophic works and solved chess problems in old newspapers), and did not receive visitors. The Shadows’ neat plan sprung from a piece of luck. Suspecting that Gradus lacked the mental equipment and mimic gifts necessary for the impersonation of an enthusiastic Royalist, they suggested he had better pose as a completely apolitical commissioner, a neutral little man interested only in getting a good price for various papers that private parties had asked him to take out of Zembla and deliver to their rightful owners. Chance, in one of its anti-Karlist moods, helped. One of the lesser Shadows whom we shall call Baron A. had a father-in-law called Baron B., a harmless old codger long retired from the civil service and quite incapable of understanding certain Renaissance aspects of the new regime. He had been, or thought he had been (retrospective distance magnifies things), a close friend of the late Minister of Foreign Affairs, Oswin Bretwit’s father, and therefore was looking forward to the day when he would be able to transmit to “young” Oswin (who, he understood, was not exactly persona grata with the new regime) a bundle of precious family papers that the dusty baron had come across by chance in the files of a governmental office. All at once he was informed that now the day had come: the documents would be immediately forwarded to Paris. He was also allowed to prefix a brief note to them which read:
Here are some precious papers belonging to your family. I cannot do better than place them in the hands of the son of the great man who was my fellow student in Heidelberg and my teacher in the diplomatic service. Verba volant, scripta manent.
The scripta in question were two hundred and thirteen long letters which had passed some seventy years ago between Zule Bretwit, Oswin's grand-uncle, Mayor of Odevalla, and a cousin of his, Ferz Bretwit, Mayor of Aros. This correspondence, a dismal exchange of bureaucratic platitudes and fustian jokes, was devoid of even such parochial interest as letters of this sort may possess in the eyes of a local historian - but of course there is no way of telling what will repel or attract a sentimental ancestralist - and this was what Oswin Bretwit had always been known to be by his former staff. I would like to take time out here to interrupt this dry commentary and pay a brief tribute to Oswin Bretwit.
Physically, he was a sickly bald-headed man resembling a pallid gland. His face was singularly featureless. He had café-au-lait eyes. One remembers him always as wearing a mourning band. But this insipid exterior belied the quality of the man. From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit! Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water over the golden wake of an emblematic sun. Let no insurance firm or airline use this insigne on the glossy page of a magazine as an ad badge under the picture of a retired businessman stupefied and honored by the sight of the technicolored snack that the air hostess offers him with everything else she can give; rather, let this lofty handshake be regarded in our cynical age of frenzied heterosexualism as a last, but lasting, symbol of valor and self-abnegation. How fervently one had dreamed that a similar symbol but in verbal form might have imbued the poem of another dead friend; but this was not to be... Vainly does one look in Pale Fire (oh, pale, indeed!) for the warmth of my hand gripping yours, poor Shade! (note to Line 286)
In Kinbote's version, Death says "even in Arkady am I" in the tombal scripture. On the black granite slab of Count Sergey Yulievich Witte's grave, in addition to the usual dates of birth and death, another date was carved: 17 October 1905 (the date Witte presented the Manifesto “On the state order perfection”). Sergey Witte's father, Julius Witte (a Baltic German, 1814-1868) was a namesake of Julius Caesar (a Roman ruler and reformer of the calendary after whom the month of July is called). Shade writes his last poem in the twenty days of July and is killed by Gradus on the evening of July 21, 1959, when his poem is almost finished.
Witte served as the first prime minister of the Russian Empire, replacing the emperor as head of government on October 18, 1905. The third prime minister and the interior minister of the Russian Empire from 1906 until his assassination in Kiev's opera house in September 1911 was Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin. Stolypin's patronymic brings to mind "even in Arkady am I," Death's words in the tombal scripture. Pyotr Stolypin's wife, née Olga Neidhart, initially had been engaged to Stolypin's brother, Mikhail, who died in a duel. Alexey Arkadievich Stolypin (Lermontov's uncle and close friend, 1816-1858), known under the nickname Mongo, was Lermontov's second in his sword and pistol duel with Ernest de Barante (the son of the French ambassador in St. Petersburg) on February 18, 1840, on the Black River. Lermontov's adversary, de Barante was a great-grandson of Sophie d’Houdetot, a famous beauty who served as a model of Julie Wolmar in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). After dying in 1778, Rousseau was buried on a small island (Île des Peupliers, Poplar Island) in a pond at Ermenonville, France. The phrase Et in Arcadia ego was famously used on a replica of his tomb in Arcadia, Poland. Oswin Bretwit's first name seems to hint at Oświęcim (Russ., Osventsim, Germ., Auschwitz), a particulatly cruel German concentration camp in southern Poland during World War II.
Pushkin's adversary in his fatal duel, George d'Anthès was the adopted son of of Baron Jacob van Heeckeren, the Dutch plenipotentiary (ambassador) to the Russian Imperial Court in St. Petersburg.