On their way from Camp Q to The Enchanted Hunters (a hotel in Briceland where they spend their first night together) Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) tells Lolita that her sick mother is at the hospital near Lepingville:
“How’s Mother?” she asked dutifully.
I said the doctors did not quite know yet what the trouble was. Anyway, something abdominal. Abominable? No, abdominal. We would have to hang around for a while. The hospital was in the country, near the gay town of Lepingville, where a great poet had resided in the early nineteenth century and where we would take in all the shows. She thought it a peachy idea and wondered if we could make Lepingville before nine p. m.
“We should be at Briceland by dinner time,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll visit Lepingville. How was the hike? Did you have a marvelous time at the camp?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry to leave?”
“Un-un.” (1.27)
Humbert tells Lolita that her mother is dead only after they have left Briceland:
“Oh, a squashed squirrel,” she said. “What a shame.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” (eager, hopeful Hum).
“Let us stop at the next gas station,” Lo continued. “I want to go to the washroom.”
“We shall stop wherever you want,” I said. And then as a lovely, lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggested we might perhaps -
“Drive on,” my Lo cried shrilly.
“Righto. Take it easy.” (Down, poor beast, down.)
I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling.
“You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.”
Was she just joking? An ominous hysterical note rang through her silly words. Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her. The sweat rolled down my neck, and we almost ran over some little animal or other that was crossing the road with tail erect, and again my vile-tempered companion called me an ugly name. When we stopped at the filling station, she scrambled out without a word and was a long time away. Slowly, lovingly, an elderly friend with a broken nose wiped my windshieldthey do it differently at every place, from chamois cloth to soapy brush, this fellow used a pink sponge.
She appeared at last. “Look,” she said in that neutral voice that hurt me so, “give me some dimes and nickels. I want to call mother in that hospital. What’s the number?”
“Get in,” I said. “You can’t call that number.”
“Why?”
“Get in and slam the door.”
She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I swung onto the highway.
“Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”
“Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.” (1.32)
After leaving Briceland, Humbert and Lolita make a stop in Lepingville:
In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garments - swooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go. (1.33)
As pointed out by Matt Roth, Lepingville seems to hint at a poem by Sir John Suckling: "To his much honoured the Lord Lepington, upon his translation of Malvezzi, his Romulus and Tarquin." The next poem in John Suckling's "Poems" is Against Fruition:
STAY here, fond youth, and ask no more ; be wise :
Knowing too much long since lost paradise.
The virtuous joys thou hast, thou wouldst should still
Last in their pride ; and wouldst not take it ill,
If rudely from sweet dreams (and for a toy)
Thou wert wak't ? he wakes himself, that does enjoy.
Fruition adds no new wealth, but destroys,
And while it pleaseth much the palate, cloys ;
Who thinks he shall be happier for that,
As reasonably might hope he might grow fat
By eating to a surfeit ; this once past,
What relishes ? even kisses lose their taste.
Urge not 'tis necessary : alas ! we know
The homeliest thing which mankind does is so ;
The world is of a vast extent, we see,
And must be peopled ; children there must be ;
So must bread too ; but since they are enough
Born to the drudgery, what need we plough ?
Women enjoy'd (whate'er before th' have been)
Are like romances read, or sights once seen :
Fruition's dull, and spoils the play much more
Than if one read or knew the plot before.
'Tis expectation makes a blessing dear ;
Heaven were not heaven, if we knew what it were.
And as in prospects we are there pleas'd most,
Where something keeps the eye from being lost,
And leaves us room to guess ; so here restraint
Holds up delight, that with excess would faint.
They who know all the wealth they have, are poor,
He's only rich that cannot tell his store.
Describing his first night with Lolita in The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert says that his only regret today is that he did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night:
Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties - she had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in - after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes - say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say - I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe - that very same night. (1.28)
A cavalier poet, Sir John Suckling (1609-41) brings to mind Rita's seventh cavalier servant:
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did - and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband - and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant - the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was - and no doubt still is - a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
In his narrative poem Beppo (1818) Byron mentions a "cavalier servente" (in Italy, a man who attends a lady, especially one who is married, with fantastical devotion; a cicisbeo):
Shakespeare described the sex in Desdemona
As very fair, but yet suspect in fame,
And to this day from Venice to Verona
Such matters may be probably the same,
Except that since those times was never known a
Husband whom mere suspicion could inflame
To suffocate a wife no more than twenty,
Because she had a "cavalier servente."
Their jealousy (if they are ever jealous)
Is of a fair complexion altogether,
Not like that sooty devil of Othello's,
Which smothers women in a bed of feather,
But worthier of these much more jolly fellows,
When weary of the matrimonial tether
His head for such a wife no mortal bothers,
But takes at once another, or another's. (XVII-XVIII)
In The Enchanted Hunters Humbert drugs Lolita with the sleeping pills that were given to him by Dr. Byron (the Haze family physician):
The dining room met us with a smell of fried fat and a faded smile. It was a spacious and pretentious place with maudlin murals depicting enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of pallid animals, dryads and trees. A few scattered old ladies, two clergymen, and a man in a sports coat were finishing their meals in silence. The dining room closed at nine, and the green-clad, poker-faced serving girls were, happily, in a desperate hurry to get rid of us.
“Does not he look exactly, but exactly, like Quilty?” said Lo in a soft voice, her sharp brown elbow not pointing, but visibly burning to point, at the lone diner in the loud checks, in the far corner of the room.
“Like our fat Ramsdale dentist?”
Lo arrested the mouthful of water she had just taken, and put down her dancing glass.
“Course not,” she said with a splutter of mirth. “I meant the writer fellow in the Dromes ad.”
Oh, Fame! Oh, Femina!
When the dessert was plunked down - a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie - I produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills. As I look back at those seasick murals, at that strange and monstrous moment, I can only explain my behavior then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind; but at the time, it all seemed quite simple and inevitable to me. I glanced around, satisfied myself that the last diner had left, removed the stopped, and with the utmost deliberation tipped the philter into my palm. I had carefully rehearsed before a mirror the gesture of clapping my empty hand to my open mouth and swallowing a (fictitious) pill. As I expected, she pounced upon the vial with its plump, beautifully colored capsules loaded with Beauty’s Sleep.
“Blue!” she exclaimed. “Violet blue. What are they made of?”
“Summer skies,” I said, “and plums and figs, and the grapeblood of emperors.”
“No, seriously - please.”
“Oh, just purpills. Vitamin X. Makes one strong as an ox or an ax. Want to try one?”
Lolita stretched out her hand, nodding vigorously.
I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volumeoh, how fast the magic potion worked! - and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smilingwouldn’t you like me to tell youhalf closing her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones. (1.27)
Btw., Lord Lepington brings to mind not only Lepingville, but also Parkington, a town in the vicinity of Briceland where Clare Quilty (a stranger on the porch of The Enchanted Hunters) lives. In A Ballad upon a Wedding Sir John Suckling uses the phrase "at course-a-park:"
At course-a-park, without all doubt,
He should have first been taken out
By all the maids i' th' town:
Though lusty Roger there had been,
Or little George upon the Green,
Or Vincent of the Crown.
John Suckling's Ballad is adressed to Dick:
I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen,
O, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake or fair.
In Coalmont Lolita marries Dick Schiller. A German poet and playwright, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) is the author of Maria Stuart (1800), a verse play in five acts. Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart was beheaded in 1587. Sir John Suckling was a cavalier poet of King Charles I, King of England who was beheaded in 1649. Humbert finds out Clare Quilty's address from his uncle Ivor (the Ramsdale dentist). Describing his visit to Ramsdale in September 1952, Humbert links Quilty (with indecent connotations) to King of France Louis XVI:
Now that everything had been put out of the way, I could dedicate myself freely to the main object of my visit to Ramsdale. In the methodical manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon, where he was waiting for me to come with barber and priest: “Réveillez-vous, Laqueue, il est temps de mourir! ” I have no time right now to discuss the mnemonics of physiognomization - I am on my way to his uncle and walking fast - but let me jot down this: I had preserved in the alcohol of a clouded memory the toad of a face. In the course of a few glimpses, I had noticed its slight resemblance to a cheery and rather repulsive wine dealer, a relative of mine in Switzerland. With his dumbbells and stinking tricot, and fat hairy arms, and bald patch, and pig-faced servant-concubine, he was on the whole a harmless old rascal. Too harmless, in fact, to be confused with my prey. In the state of mind I now found myself, I had lost contact with Trapp’s image. It had become completely engulfed by the face of Clare Quilty - as represented, with artistic precision, by an easeled photograph of him that stood on his uncle’s desk. (2.33)