Describing his quarrel with Lolita in Beardsley, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) mentions prude and prurient Miss East (Miss Finton Lebone) who had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of the quarrel:
With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East – or to explode her incognito, Miss Finton Lebone – had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.
“…This racket… lacks all sense of…” quacked the receiver, “we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically…”
I apologized for my daughter’s friends being so loud. Young people, you know - and cradled the next quack and a half.
Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?
Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark - hub of bicycle wheel - moved, shivered, and she was gone.
It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed - no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on. (2.14)
Miss Finton Lebone protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window brings to mind Le bon roi Henri (King Henry IV of France and Navarre, 1553-1610, the first Bourbon King of France who on 18 August 1572 married Margaret of Valois, popularly known as Queen Margot, the sister of King Charles IX) and Admiral Coligny's body hanging out of a window in a painting by François Dubois (c.1529-1584), a Huguenot painter of the Fontainebleau School who fled France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day (23-24 August 1572):
The dog in the picture makes one think of Miss Fabian's dropsical dackel. To the left rear, Catherine de' Medici (a Florentine noblewoman of the Medici family, 1519-1589, and Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 by marriage to King Henry II, the mother of French Kings Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III) is shown emerging from the Louvre Palace to inspect a heap of bodies. A Basque nurse at the Elphinstone hospital, Mary Lore seems to combine Maria de' Medici (1575-1642), Queen of France and Navarre as the second wife of King Henry IV, with Lorenzo de' Medici (known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, 1449-1492), an Italian statesman, the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic and patron of arts. Lolita's birthday, January 1 is also the birthday of Lorenzo de' Medici. A small town in the Rocky Mountains where Lolita falls ill and is hospitalized, Elphinstone brings to mind Counter Admiral John Elphinstone (1722-85), a British senior naval officer who in the battle of Chesma (July 5-7, 1770) commanded the Russian rear guard.