Vladimir Nabokov

Floeberg's Ursula & Lucette's Degrasse in Ada

By Alexey Sklyarenko, 20 March, 2022

On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which VN’s novel Ada, 1969, is set) Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:

 

Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula). (1.20)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): Floeberg: Flaubert’s style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.

 

Mademoiselle Rouault (Emma's maiden name in Flaubert's novel) was brought up at the Ursuline Convent:

 

Dans les premiers temps que Charles fréquentait les Bertaux, madame Bovary jeune ne manquait pas de s’informer du malade, et même sur le livre qu’elle tenait en partie double, elle avait choisi pour M. Rouault une belle page blanche. Mais quand elle sut qu’il avait une fille, elle alla aux informations; et elle apprit que mademoiselle Rouault, élevée au couvent, chez les Ursulines, avait reçu, comme on dit, une belle éducation, qu’elle savait, en conséquence, la danse, la géographie, le dessin, faire de la tapisserie et toucher du piano. Ce fut le comble!

 

During the first period of Charles’s visits to the Bertaux, Madame Bovary junior never failed to inquire after the invalid, and she had even chosen in the book that she kept on a system of double entry a clean blank page for Monsieur Rouault. But when she heard he had a daughter, she began to make inquiries, and she learnt that Mademoiselle Rouault, brought up at the Ursuline Convent, had received what is called “a good education”; and so knew dancing, geography, drawing, how to embroider and play the piano. That was the last straw. (Part One, chapter 2)

 

Saint Ursula was a legendary Romano-British Christian saint who was killed (in 383 AD), with a group of holy virginal handmaids who accompanied her, at Cologne. Describing Lucette’s visit to Kingston (Van’s American University), Van Veen (the narrator and main character in Ada) mentions Degrasse, Lucette’s smart, though decidedly ‘paphish,’ perfume that hints at eau de Grasse (a perfume that brings to mind eau de Cologne):

 

‘My joy (moya radost’),’ said Lucette — just like that; he had expected more formality: all in all he had hardly known her before — except as an embered embryo.

Eyes swimming, coral nostrils distended, red mouth perilously disclosing her tongue and teeth in a preparatory half-open skew (tame animal signaling by that slant the semblance of a soft bite), she advanced in the daze of a commencing trance, of an unfolding caress — the aurora, who knows (she knew), of a new life for both.

‘Cheekbone,’ Van warned the young lady.

‘You prefer skeletiki (little skeletons),’ she murmured, as Van applied light lips (which had suddenly become even drier than usual) to his half-sister’s hot hard pommette. He could not help inhaling briefly her Degrasse, smart, though decidedly ‘paphish,’ perfume and, through it, the flame of her Little Larousse as he and the other said when they chose to emprison her in bath water. Yes, very nervous and fragrant. Indian summer too sultry for furs, The cross (krest) of the best-groomed redhead (rousse). Its four burning ends. Because one can’t stroke (as he did now) the upper copper without imagining at once the lower fox cub and the paired embers. (2.5)

 

In Madame Bovary Emma smells the perfume of the pomade that makes Rodolphe’s hair glossy:

 

Rodolphe s'était rapproché d'Emma, et il disait d'une voix basse, en parlant vite:

-- Est-ce que cette conjuration du monde ne vous révolte pas? Est- il un seul sentiment qu'il ne condamne? Les instincts les plus nobles, les sympathies les plus pures sont persécutés, calomniés, et, s'il se rencontre enfin deux pauvres âmes, tout est organisé pour qu'elles ne puissent se joindre. Elles essayeront cependant, elles battront des ailes, elles s'appelleront. Oh! n'importe, tôt ou tard, dans six mois, dix ans, elles se réuniront, s'aimeront, parce que la fatalité l'exige et qu'elles sont nées l'une pour l'autre.

Il se tenait les bras croisés sur ses genoux, et, ainsi levant la figure vers Emma, il la regardait de près, fixement. Elle distinguait dans ses yeux des petits rayons d'or s'irradiant tout autour de ses pupilles noires, et même elle sentait le parfum de la pommade qui lustrait sa chevelure. Alors une mollesse la saisit, elle se rappela ce vicomte qui l'avait fait valser à la Vaubyessard, et dont la barbe exhalait, comme ces cheveux-là, cette odeur de vanille et de citron; et, machinalement, elle entreferma les paupières pour la mieux respirer: Mais, dans ce geste qu'elle fit en se cambrant sur sa chaise, elle aperçut au loin, tout au fond de l'horizon, la vieille diligence l'Hirondelle, qui descendait lentement la côte des Leux, en traînant après soi un long panache de poussière. C'était dans cette voiture jaune que Léon, si souvent, était revenu vers elle; et par cette route là-bas qu'il était parti pour toujours! Elle crut le voir en face, à sa fenêtre; puis tout se confondit, des nuages passèrent; il lui sembla qu'elle tournait encore dans la valse, sous le feu des lustres, au bras du vicomte, et que Léon n'était pas loin, qui allait venir ... et cependant elle sentait toujours la tête de Rodolphe à côté d'elle. La douceur de cette sensation pénétrait ainsi ses désirs d'autrefois, et comme des grains de sable sous un coup de vent, ils tourbillonnaient dans la bouffée subtile du parfum qui se répandait sur son âme. Elle ouvrit les narines à plusieurs reprises, fortement, pour aspirer la fraîcheur des lierres autour des chapiteaux. Elle retira ses gants, elle s'essuya les mains; puis, avec son mouchoir, elle s'éventait la figure, tandis qu'à travers le battement de ses tempes elle entendait la rumeur de la foule et la voix du Conseiller qui psalmodiait ses phrases."

 

"Rodolphe had drawn nearer to Emma, and said to her in a low voice, speaking rapidly--

"Does not this conspiracy of the world revolt you? Is there a single sentiment it does not condemn? The noblest instincts, the purest sympathies are persecuted, slandered; and if at length two poor souls do meet, all is so organised that they cannot blend together. Yet they will make the attempt; they will flutter their wings; they will call upon each other. Oh! no matter. Sooner or later, in six months, ten years, they will come together, will love; for fate has decreed it, and they are born one for the other."...

His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.

Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. But in making this movement, as she leant back in her chair, she saw in the distance, right on the line of the horizon, the old diligence, the "Hirondelle," that was slowly descending the hill of Leux, dragging after it a long trail of dust. It was in this yellow carriage that Leon had so often come back to her, and by this route down there that he had gone for ever. She fancied she saw him opposite at his windows; then all grew confused; clouds gathered; it seemed to her that she was again turning in the waltz under the light of the lustres on the arm of the Viscount, and that Leon was not far away, that he was coming; and yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe's head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals. She took off her gloves, she wiped her hands, then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the councillor intoning his phrases. (Part Two, chapter VIII)

(translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling)

 

The first English translator of Flaubert’s novel, Eleanor Aveling was Karl Marx’s daughter. Describing Lucette’s visit to Kingston, Van mentions Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays:

 

Van spent the fall term of 1892 at Kingston University, Mayne, where there was a first-rate madhouse, as well as a famous Department of Terrapy, and where he now went back to one of his old projects, which turned on the Idea of Dimension & Dementia (‘You will "sturb," Van, with an alliteration on your lips,’ jested old Rattner, resident pessimist of genius, for whom life was only a ‘disturbance’ in the rattnerterological order of things — from ‘nertoros,’ not ‘terra’).

Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada] liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit dealing with the divorce between time and the contents of time (such as action on matter, in space, and the nature of space itself) and was contemplating moving to Manhattan (that kind of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication rather than a concession to some farcical ‘influence of environment’ endorsed by Marx père, the popular author of ‘historical’ plays), when he received an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment affected violently his entire pulmonary and systemic circulation. (2.5)

 

After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franko-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) with Ada and Lucette (a week after Lucette’s visit to Kingston) Van inhales his right hand before gloving it:

 

Detachedly, merely tactually, as if he had met those two slow-moving, hip-swaying graces only that night, Van, while steering them through a doorway (to meet the sinchilla mantillas that were being rushed toward them by numerous, new, eager, unfairly, inexplicably impecunious, humans), place one palm, the left, on Ada’s long bare back and the other on Lucette’s spine, quite as naked and long (had she meant the lad or the ladder? Lapse of the lisping lips?). Detachedly, he sifted and tasted this sensation, then that. His girl’s ensellure was hot ivory; Lucette’s was downy and damp. He too had had just about his ‘last straw’ of champagne, namely four out of half a dozen bottles minus a rizzom (as we said at old Chose) and now, as he followed their bluish furs, he inhaled like a fool his right hand before gloving it.

‘I say, Veen,’ whinnied a voice near him (there were lots of lechers around), ‘you don’t rally need two, d’you?’

Van veered, ready to cuff the gross speaker — but it was only Flora, a frightful tease and admirable mimic. He tried to give her a banknote, but she fled, bracelets and breast stars flashing a fond farewell. (2.8)

 

At breakfast on the morning after the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) Uncle Dan, too, pronounces the word “really” as “rally:”

 

‘You could have taken us to see the fire, Uncle dear,’ remarked Van, pouring himself a cup of chocolate.

‘Ada will tell you all about it,’ replied Uncle Dan, lovingly buttering and marmalading another toast. ‘She greatly enjoyed the excursion.’

‘Oh, she went with you, did she?’

‘Yes — in a black charabanc, with all the butlers. Jolly good fun, rally’ (pseudo-British pronunciation).

‘But that must have been one of the scullery maids, not Ada,’ remarked Van. ‘I didn’t realize,’ he added, ‘we had several here — I mean, butlers.’

‘Oh, I imagine so,’ said Uncle Dan vaguely. He repeated the internal rinsing process, and with a slight cough put on his spectacles, but no morning paper had come — and he took them off again. (1.20)

 

According to Ada, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies:

 

‘Fine,’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.’

‘I remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.’

‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.’

‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’

‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.’

‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?’

All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’

‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): hument: inhale.

tout le reste: all the rest.

zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.

 

Describing his debauch á trois with Ada and Lucette after the dinner in ‘Ursus,’ Van says that sounds have colors, colors have smells:

 

Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams (actually all is shadowy up there, for the blinds are still drawn, shutting out the gray morning), we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane. The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half-shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. The recently repapered wall immediately west of the now louder-murmuring (et pour cause) dorocene lamp is ornamented in the central girl’s honor with Peruvian’ honeysuckle’ being visited (not only for its nectar, I’m afraid, but for the animalcules stuck in it) by marvelous Loddigesia Hummingbirds, while the bedtable on that side bears a lowly box of matches, a karavanchik of cigarettes, a Monaco ashtray, a copy of Voltemand’s poor thriller, and a Lurid Oncidium Orchid in an amethystine vaselet. The companion piece on Van’s side supports a similar superstrong but unlit lamp, a dorophone, a box of Wipex, a reading loupe, the returned Ardis album, and a separatum ‘Soft music as cause of brain tumors,’ by Dr Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name). Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and unframed. (2.8)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): et pour cause: and no wonder.

karavanchik: small caravan of camels (Russ.).

 

Lucette's 'paphish' perfume brings to mind Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon visited by Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) in Mont Roux:

 

On Wednesday, October 22, in the early afternoon, Dorothy, ‘frantically’ trying to ‘locate’ Ada (who after her usual visit to the Three Swans was spending a couple of profitable hours at Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon) left a message for Van, who got it only late at night when he returned from a trip to Sorcière, in the Valais, about one hundred miles east, where he bought a villa for himself et ma cousine, and had supper with the former owner, a banker’s widow, amiable Mme Scarlet and her blond, pimply but pretty, daughter Eveline, both of whom seemed erotically moved by the rapidity of the deal. (3.8)

 

According to Van, Andrey's breath carries the odor of a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base:

 

Finally Van reached Ada’s husband.

Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather ‘undersight’) Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. ‘Obnimemsya, dorogoy’ (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout’s bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis. As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier’s by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektnïy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau. (ibid.)

 

Describing the death of Ada's husband, Van mentions the smell of food (the origin, indeed, of our first beatitudes):

 

Steadily but very slowly Andrey’s condition kept deteriorating. During his last two or three years of idle existence on various articulated couches, whose every plane could be altered in hundreds of ways, he lost the power of speech, though still able to nod or shake his head, frown in concentration, or faintly smile when inhaling the smell of food (the origin, indeed, of our first beatitudes). He died one spring night, alone in a hospital room, and that same summer (1922) his widow donated her collections to a National Park museum and traveled by air to Switzerland for an ‘exploratory interview’ with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen. (ibid.)

 

The smell of food inhaled by sick Andrey Vinelander reminds one of the smell of Monaco’s coffee inhaled by Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) in the lift that brings him to Van's penthouse appartment:

 

Next day, February 5, around nine p.m., Manhattan (winter) time, on the way to Dan’s lawyer, Demon noted — just as he was about to cross Alexis A venue, an ancient but insignificant acquaintance, Mrs Arfour, advancing toward him, with her toy terrier, along his side of the street. Unhesitatingly, Demon stepped off the curb, and having no hat to raise (hats were not worn with raincloaks and besides he had just taken a very exotic and potent pill to face the day’s ordeal on top of a sleepless journey), contented himself — quite properly — with a wave of his slim umbrella; recalled with a paint dab of delight one of the gargle girls of her late husband; and smoothly passed in front of a slow-clopping horse-drawn vegetable cart, well out of the way of Mrs R4. But precisely in regard to such a contingency, Fate had prepared an alternate continuation. As Demon rushed (or, in terms of the pill, sauntered) by the Monaco, where he had often lunched, it occurred to him that his son (whom he had been unable to ‘contact’) might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey in the penthouse apartment of that fine building. He had never been up there — or had he? For a business consultation with Van? On a sun-hazed terrace? And a clouded drink? (He had, that’s right, but Cordula was not dull and had not been present.)

With the simple and, combinationally speaking, neat, thought that, after all, there was but one sky (white, with minute multicolored optical sparks), Demon hastened to enter the lobby and catch the lift which a ginger-haired waiter had just entered, with breakfast for two on a wiggle-wheel table and the Manhattan Times among the shining, ever so slightly scratched, silver cupolas. Was his son still living up there, automatically asked Demon, placing a piece of nobler metal among the domes. Si, conceded the grinning imbecile, he had lived there with his lady all winter.

‘Then we are fellow travelers,’ said Demon inhaling not without gourmand anticipation the smell of Monaco’s coffee, exaggerated by the shadows of tropical weeds waving in the breeze of his brain. (2.10)

 

Demon definitely smells of ether:

 

Was he perhaps under the influence of some bright Chilean drug? That torrent was simply unstoppable, a crazy spectrum, a talking palette —

‘— no really, I don’t think we should bother Ada in her Agavia. He is — I mean, Vinelander is — the scion, s,c,i,o,n, of one of those great Varangians who had conquered the Copper Tartars or Red Mongols — or whoever they were — who had conquered some earlier Bronze Riders — before we introduced our Russian roulette and Irish loo at a lucky moment in the history of Western casinos.’

‘I am extremely, I am hideously sorry,’ said Van, ‘what with Uncle Dan’s death and your state of excitement, sir, but my girl friend’s coffee is getting cold, and I can’t very well stumble into our bedroom with all that infernal paraphernalia.’

‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving. After all we haven’t seen each other — since when, August? At any rate, I hope she’s prettier than the Cordula you had here before, volatile boy!’

Volatina, perhaps? Or dragonara? He definitely smelled of ether. Please, please, please go. (ibid.)

 

In March, 1905, Demon Veen perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific (3.7). Van does not realize that his father died because Ada, who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up, managed to persuade the pilot to destory his machine in midair.

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.

 

Lucette's 'paphish' perfume and Paphia’s ‘Hair and Beauty’ Salon bring to mind Ne rozu pafosskuyu ("Not the Paphian rose"), the first line of Pushkin's Otryvok ("A Fragment," 1830):

 

Не розу Пафосскую,
Росой оживленную,
Я ныне пою;
Не розу Феосскую,
Вином окропленную,
Стихами хвалю;
Но розу счастливую,
На персях увядшую
[Элизы] моей....

 

Ada loathes roses. As a schoolboy at Riverlane (Van's prep-school), Van is in love with Mrs Tapirov's daughter who always puts a bunch of real roses among the fake ones:

 

He had just turned thirteen. He had never before left the comforts of the paternal roof. He had never before realized that such ‘comforts’ might not be taken for granted, only occurring in some introductory ready-made metaphor in a book about a boy and a school. A few blocks from the schoolgrounds, a widow, Mrs Tapirov, who was French but spoke English with a Russian accent, had a shop of objets d’art and more or less antique furniture. He visited it on a bright winter day. Crystal vases with crimson roses and golden-brown asters were set here and there in the fore part of the shop — on a gilt-wood console, on a lacquered chest, on the shelf of a cabinet, or simply along the carpeted steps leading to the next floor where great wardrobes and flashy dressers semi-encircled a singular company of harps. He satisfied himself that those flowers were artificial and thought it puzzling that such imitations always pander so exclusively to the eye instead of also copying the damp fat feel of live petal and leaf. When he called next day for the object (unremembered now, eighty years later) that he wanted repaired or duplicated, it was not ready or had not been obtained. In passing, he touched a half-opened rose and was cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. ‘My daughter,’ said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, ‘always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.’ As he was leaving she came in, a schoolgirl in a gray coat with brown shoulder-length ringlets and a pretty face. On another occasion (for a certain part of the thing — a frame, perhaps — took an infinite time to heal or else the entire article proved to be unobtainable after all) he saw her curled up with her schoolbooks in an armchair — a domestic item among those for sale. He never spoke to her. He loved her madly. It must have lasted at least one term. (1.4)

 

Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): pour attraper le client: to fool the customer.

 

In 1922, in Mont Roux, Van sends a bouquet of seventeen Baccara roses to Mademoiselle Addor: 

 

He showered and changed, and finished the flask of brandy in his dressing case, and called the Geneva airport and was told that the last plane from America had just arrived. He went for a stroll — and saw that the famous ‘mûrier,’ that spread its great limbs over a humble lavatory on a raised terrace at the top of a cobbled lane, was now in sumptuous purple-blue bloom. He had a beer at the café opposite the railway station, and then, automatically, entered the flower shop next door. He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that debauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway. He stared and was easily outstared by small Carols from Belgium, long-stemmed Pink Sensations, vermilion Superstars. There were also zinnias, and chrysanthemums, and potted aphelandras, and two graceful fringetails in an inset aquarium. Not wishing to disappoint the courteous old florist, he bought seventeen odorless Baccara roses, asked for the directory, opened it at Ad-Au, Mont Roux, lit upon ‘Addor, Yolande, Mlle secrét., rue des Délices, 6,’ and with American presence of mind had his bouquet sent there. (Part Four)

 

See also the updated version of my previous post, “MOYA RADOST', SKELETIKI & ROLY-POLY OLD POLE IN ADA.”