From Eric Naiman: In light of the earlier discussion of the mulberry soap, it is worth noticing its last usage in the novel: Charcoal A boxwood-lined path, presided over by a nostalgic-looking sempervirent sequoia (which American visitors mistook for a "Lebanese cedar"-if they remarked it at all) took them to the absurdly misnamed rue du Mūrier, where a princely paulownia ("mulberry tree!" snorted Ada), standing in state on its incongruous terrace above a public W.C., was shedding generously its heart-shaped dark green leaves, but retained enough foliage to cast arabesques of shadow onto the south side of its trunk. We should definitely read this passage in keeping with Brian Boyd's reading of III.8 -- to note the presence of Lucette that seems to be ignored by the adulterous lovers. He points to the grebes with crests seen a few pages later as evidence of Lucette's continued existence in the text. This passage, with its reference to the mulberry and the W.C. seems to refer to that earlier bathing passage, and we should note the generous leaf-dropping that Boyd sees as a Lucette marker elsewhere in the book. Note, too, that Lucette -- or Van? -- gives this passage a shimmer of indecency evident once we see the reference to the earlier passage. (boxwood-lined path, l-eban-ese cedar, the mulberry "standing in state" (as was the soap -- see also the bawdy Malrow passage on 377 where Van is cursing "the condition in which the image of the four embers of a vixen's cross had not solidly put him": "One of the synonyms of "condition" is "state," and the adjective "human" may be construed as "manly" etc. I wonder about passages like this whether they might not show that Lucette has been unable to overcome her Ophelian frenzy in death. If she is responsible for that phallic walrus -- as Boyd suggested in his recent post -- and she is still obsessed with mulberries standing in state, is her generous "blessing" of Van and Ada's reunin at Mon Trou as comforting an ending as it might once have seemed. Or might her "blessing" of Van and Ada's reunion be even more disturbing -- is she not ever-present, a kind of necessary third, observing the lovers just as she did earlier as a child. If we accept the notion that Lucette's ghost -- or else -- going back to what Van tells the dying Phillip -- pieces of Lucette -- bless or haunt the period after her death (including the writing of the entire manuscript) don't we have to see the novel as stating emphatically that yes, there is lust after death, a kind of disembodied existence where we will only have words to play with and will suffer the hell(?) of being continually aroused?