When Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) visits Lolita (who fell ill and was hospitalized in Elphinstone, a small town in the Rocky Mountains) at the hospital, she thanks him for the flowers he brought her and asks him to cut out the French:
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning’s Dramatic Works, The history of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of the Rockies, The Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis - by Helen Wills, who had won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was staggering up to the door of my daughter’s thirteen-dollar-a day private room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot back into the room - probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly slept at all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on itnothing at all, save a phony armorial design with “Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a chassé-croisé with Mary, who was in the act of bustling out again - wonderful how fast they move and how little they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put back, uncrumpled.
“You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally. “Could burn your fingers.”
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
“Je croyais que c’était un bill - not a billet doux .” Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: “Bonjour, mon petit. ”
“Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters from my boy friend. It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small glit cross she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours.”
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverleat, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
“What gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the same. But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody.”
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic, with the Desert News , which her fair patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
“My sister Ann,” said Mary (topping information with afterthought), “works at the Ponderosa place.”
Poor Bluebeard. Those brutal brothers. Est-ce que tu ne m’aimes plus, ma Carmen? She never had. At the moment I knew my love was as hopeless as ever - and I also knew the two girls were conspirators, plotting in Basque, or Zemfirian, against my hopeless love. I shall go further and say that Lo was playing a double game since she was also fooling sentimental Mary whom she had told, I suppose, that she wanted to dwell with her fun-loving young uncle and not with cruel melancholy me. And another nurse whom I never identified, and the village idiot who carted cots and coffins into the elevator, and the idiotic green love birds in a cage in the waiting roomall were in the plot, the sordid plot. I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo (for you were rather lardy, you know, Rom, despite all that “snow” and “joy juice”).
My throat hurt. I stood, swallowing, at the window and stared at the mountains, at the romantic rock high up in the smiling plotting sky.
“My Carmen,” I said (I used to call her that sometimes), “we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed.”
“Incidentally, I want all my clothes,” said the gitanilla, humping up her knees and turning to another page.
“…Because, really,” I continued, “there is no point in staying here.”
“There is no point in staying anywhere,” said Lolita.
I lowered myself into a cretonne chair and, opening the attractive botanical work, attempted, in the fever-humming hush of the room, to identify my flowers. This proved impossible. Presently a musical bell softly sounded somewhere in the passage. (2.22)
In his Essais (Book One, Chapter XVIII) Michel de Montaigne (a French philosopher, 1533-1592) says: à se dernier rôle de la mort et de nous il n’y a plus que feindre, il faut parler français (in this last role of death one should not pretend anymore, one should speak French). In Book Three, Chapter XII ("Of Physiognomy") of Essais Montaigne says: "I have here only made a Nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them." Montaigne's words are quoted by the editors of The Album, and Ladies' Weekly Gazette (Philadelphia, Wednesday, June 7, 1826):
"I have here only made a Nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them." -
ADDRESS TO THE STARS.
Ye are fair—ye are fair—and your pensive rays
Steal down like the light of departed days;
But have sin and sorrow ne'er wandered o'er
The green abodes of each sunny shore?
Hath no frost been there, and no withering blast,
Cold—cold o'er the flower and the forest past?
Does the playful leaf never fall or fade,
The rose ne'er droop in the silent shade?
Say, comes there no cloud on your morning beam,
On your night of beauty no troubled dream?
Have ye no tear the eye to annoy,
No grief to shadow its light of joy?
No bleeding breasts that are doomed to part,
No blighted bower, and no broken heart?
Hath death ne'er saddened your scenes of bloom,
Your suns ne'er shone on the silent tomb?
Did their sportive radiance never fall
On the cypress tree or the ruined wall?—
'Twere vain to guess, for no eye hath seen
O'er the gulf eternally fixed between.
We hear not the song of your early hours;
We hear not the hymn of your evening bowers.
The strains that gladden each radiant sphere
Ne'er poured their sweets on a mortal ear,
Though such I could deem on the evening's sigh,
The air-harps' earthly melody!
[.N.M. Mag.]
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert (who had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start) by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.).
On the other hand, “what gruesome funeral flowers” (as Lolita calls Humbert's bouquet) brings to mind krasnye tsvety (red flowers) mentioned by VN in his poem Finis (1923):
Не надо плакать. Видишь, там - звезда,
там - над листвою, справа. Ах, не надо,
прошу тебя! О чем я начал? Да,
- о той звезде над чернотою сада;
на ней живут, быть может... что же ты,
опять! Смотри же, я совсем спокоен,
совсем... Ты слушай дальше: день был зноен,
мы шли на холм, где красные цветы...
Не то. О чем я говорил? Есть слово:
любовь, - глухой глагол: любить... Цветы
какие-то мне помешали. Ты
должна простить. Ну вот - ты плачешь снова.
Не надо слез! Ах, кто так мучит нас?
Не надо помнить, ничего не надо...
Вон там - звезда над чернотою сада...
Скажи - а вдруг проснемся мы сейчас?
9. 1. 23.
Krasnyi tsvetok ("The Red Flower," 1883) is a story by Vsevolod Garshin (a writer who in March 1888 committed suicide by falling down a stairwell). For his painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 made in 1883-1885 Ilya Repin used Grigoriy Myasoyedov, his friend and fellow artist, as the model for Ivan the Terrible, and writer Vsevolod Garshin for the Tsarevich. A Russian realist painter, Ilya Repin was born on August 5, 1844. In the Russian Lolita (1967) John Ray's Foreword to Humbert's manuscript is dated "5 August 1955:"
Джон Рэй, д-р философии
Видворт, Массачусетс
5 августа 1955 года.
English "gruesome" corresponds to German grausam. In Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans ("The Maid of Orleans," 1801) Raymond (a young shepherd who deeply loves Joan of Arc and seeks to protect her) says: "Ihr seht, es sind nicht alle Menschen grausam. Auch in der Wildnis wohnen sanfte Herzen" (You see, not all people are terrible. Also in the backwoods live mild hearts. 5.2). There is in grausam grau (gray in German).
The author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Gilles de Rais (c. 1405 - 1440), Joan of Arc's comrade-in-arms, Marshal of France and confessed child murderer, whom folklore transfigured into Bluebeard.