Describing his first visit to Villa Venus (Eric Veen's floramors), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentions la gosse, trembling Adada:
I have frequented bordels since my sixteenth year, but although some of the better ones, especially in France and Ireland, rated a triple red symbol in Nugg’s guidebook, nothing about them pre-announced the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus. It was the difference between a den and an Eden.
Three Egyptian squaws, dutifully keeping in profile (long ebony eye, lovely snub, braided black mane, honey-hued faro frock, thin amber arms, Negro bangles, doughnut earring of gold bisected by a pleat of the mane, Red Indian hairband, ornamental bib), lovingly borrowed by Eric Veen from a reproduction of a Theban fresco (no doubt pretty banal in 1420 B.C.), printed in Germany (Künstlerpostkarte Nr. 6034, says cynical Dr Lagosse), prepared me by means of what parched Eric called ‘exquisite manipulations of certain nerves whose position and power are known only to a few ancient sexologists,’ accompanied by the no less exquisite application of certain ointments, not too specifically mentioned in the pornolore of Eric’s Orientalia, for receiving a scared little virgin, the descendant of an Irish king, as Eric was told in his last dream in Ex, Switzerland, by a master of funerary rather than fornicatory ceremonies.
Those preparations proceeded in such sustained, unendurably delicious rhythms that Eric dying in his sleep and Van throbbing with foul life on a rococo couch (three miles south of Bedford) could not imagine how those three young ladies, now suddenly divested of their clothes (a well-known oneirotic device), could manage to draw out a prelude that kept one so long on the very lip of its resolution. I lay supine and felt twice the size I had ever been (senescent nonsense, says science!) when finally six gentle hands attempted to ease la gosse, trembling Adada, upon the terrible tool. Silly pity — a sentiment I rarely experience — caused my desire to droop, and I had her carried away to a feast of peach tarts and cream. The Egypsies looked disconcerted, but very soon perked up. I summoned all the twenty hirens of the house (including the sweet-lipped, glossy chinned darling) into my resurrected presence. After considerable examination, after much flattering of haunches and necks, I chose a golden Gretchen, a pale Andalusian, and a black belle from New Orleans. The handmaids pounced upon them like pards and, having empasmed them with not unlesbian zest, turned the three rather melancholy graces over to me. The towel given me to wipe off the sweat that filmed my face and stung my eyes could have been cleaner. I raised my voice, I had the reluctant accursed casement wrenched wide open. A lorry had got stuck in the mud of a forbidden and unfinished road, and its groans and exertions dissipated the bizarre gloom. Only one of the girls stung me right in the soul, but I went through all three of them grimly and leisurely, ‘changing mounts in midstream’ (Eric’s advice) before ending every time in the grip of the ardent Ardillusian, who said as we parted, after one last spasm (although non-erotic chitchat was against the rules), that her father had constructed the swimming pool on the estate of Demon Veen’s cousin.
It was now all over. The lorry had gone or had drowned, and Eric was a skeleton in the most expensive corner of the Ex cemetery (‘But then, all cemeteries are ex,’ remarked a jovial ‘protestant’ priest), between an anonymous alpinist and my stillborn double. (2.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Künstlerpostkarte: Germ., art picture postcards.
la gosse: the little girl.
The Trembling of the Veil (1922) is the second of W. B. Yeats's seven autobiographical works. In her Theosophical Glossary Helena Blavatsky, the author of Isis Unveiled (1877), says that in Aramean ad means one, and ad-ad “the only one:”
Ad (Assyr.). Ad, “the Father”. In Aramean ad means one, and ad-ad “the only one”.
In Lagosse (the name of old Van's doctor) there is lagos (λαγός), the Greek word for "hare" (the names of most physicians in Ada are connectes with rabbits). In Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary there is an entry "Hare-Worship:"
Hare-Worship. The hare was sacred in many lands and especially among the Egyptians and Jews. Though the latter consider it an unclean, hoofed animal, unfit to eat, yet it was held sacred by some tribes. The reason for this was that in a certain species of hare the male suckled the little ones. It was thus considered to be androgynous or hermaphrodite, and so typified an attribute of the Demiurge, or creative Logos. The hare was a symbol of the moon, wherein the face of the prophet Moses is to be seen to this day, say the Jews. Moreover the moon is connected with the worship of Jehovah, a deity pre-eminently the god of generation, perhaps also for the same reason that Eros, the god of sexual love, is represented as carrying a hare. The hare was also sacred to Osiris. Lenormand writes that the hare “has to be considered as the symbol of the Logos . . . the Logos ought to be hermaphrodite and we know that the hare is an androgynous type”.
A major Egyptian goddess of magic and motherhood, Isis was both the sister and wife of Osiris (the ancient Egyptian god of the afterlife, death, resurrection, and agriculture, "Lord of the Underworld").