The characters in VN's novel Lolita (1955) include Mary Lore, a Basque nurse at the Elphinstone hospital:
Mrs. Hays, the brisk, briskly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a tinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperatureeven exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebraeand I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary. To an unsmiling blond bitch of a secretary I gave my daughter’s age as “practically sixteen.” While I was not looking, my child was taken away from me! In vain I insisted I be allowed to spend the night on a “welcome” mat in a corner of their damned hospital. I ran up constructivistic flights of stairs, I tried to trace my darling so as to tell her she had better not babble, especially if she felt as lightheaded as we all did. At one point, I was rather dreadfully rude to a very young and very cheeky nurse with overdeveloped gluteal parts and blazing black eyesof Basque descent, as I learned. Her father was an imported shepherd, a trainer of sheep dogs. Finally, I returned to the car and remained in it for I do not know how many hours, hunched up in the dark, stunned by my new solitude, looking out open-mouthed now at the dimly illumined, very square and low hospital building squatting in the middle of its lawny block, now up at the wash of stars and the jagged silvery ramparts of the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas - que sais-je! - or seducing a ewe. Such-like fragrant vagabond thoughts have been always a solace to me in times of unusual stress, and only when, despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night, did I think of driving back to the motel. The old woman had disappeared, and I was not quite sure of my way. Wide gravel roads criss-crossed drowsy rectangual shadows. I made out what looked like the silhouette of gallows on what was probably a school playground; and in another wastelike black there rose in domed silence the pale temple of some local sect. I found the highway at last, and then the motel, where millions of so-called “millers,” a kind of insect, were swarming around the neon contours of “No Vacancy”; and, when, at 3 a. m., after one of those untimely hot showers which like some mordant only help to fix a man’s despair and weariness, I lay on her bed that smelled of chestnuts and roses, and peppermint, and the very delicate, very special French perfume I latterly allowed her to use, I found myself unable to assimilate the simple fact that for the first time in two years I was separated from my Lolita. All at once it occurred to me that her illness was somehow the development of a themethat it had the same taste and tone as the series of linked impressions which had puzzled and tormented me during our journey; I imagined that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was, prowling around the hospital - and Aurora had hardly “warmed her hands,” as the pickers of lavender say in the country of my birth, when I found myself trying to get into that dungeon again, knocking upon its green doors, breakfastless, stool-less, in despair.
This was Tuesday, and Wednesday or Thursday, splendidly reacting like the darling she was to some “serum” (sparrow’s sperm or dugong’s dung), she was much better, and the doctor said that in a couple of days she would be “skipping” again.
Of the eight times I visited her, the last one alone remains sharply engraved on my mind. It had been a great feat to come for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too. None will know the strain it was to carry that bouquet, that load of love, those books that I had traveled sixty miles to buy: Browning’s Dramatic Works, The History of Dancing, Clowns and Columbines, The Russian Ballet, Flowers of the Rockies, the Theatre Guild Anthology, Tennis by Helen Wills, who had won the National Junior Girl Singles at the age of fifteen. As I was staggering up to the door of my daughter’s thirteen-dollar-a day private room, Mary Lore, the beastly young part-time nurse who had taken an unconcealed dislike to me, emerged with a finished breakfast tray, placed it with a quick crash on a chair in the corridor, and, fundament jigging, shot back into the room - probably to warn her poor little Dolores that the tyrannical old father was creeping up on crepe soles, with books and bouquet: the latter I had composed of wild flowers and beautiful leaves gathered with my own gloved hands on a mountain pass at sunrise (I hardly slept at all that fateful week).
Feeding my Carmencita well? Idly I glanced at the tray. On a yolk-stained plate there was a crumpled envelope. It had contained something, since one edge was torn, but there was no address on it - nothing at all, save a phony armorial design with “Ponderosa Lodge” in green letters; thereupon I performed a chassé-croisé with Mary, who was in the act of bustling out again - wonderful how fast they move and how little they do, those rumpy young nurses. She glowered at the envelope I had put back, uncrumpled.
“You better not touch,” she said, nodding directionally. “Could burn your fingers.”
Below my dignity to rejoin. All I said was:
“Je croyais que c’était un bill - not a billet doux.” Then, entering the sunny room, to Lolita: “Bonjour, mon petit.”
“Dolores,” said Mary Lore, entering with me, past me, though me, the plump whore, and blinking, and starting to fold very rapidly a white flannel blanket as she blinked: “Dolores, your pappy thinks you are getting letters from my boy friend. It’s me (smugly tapping herself on the small glit cross she wore) gets them. And my pappy can parlay-voo as well as yours.”
She left the room. Dolores, so rosy and russet, lips freshly painted, hair brilliantly brushed, bare arms straightened out on neat coverleat, lay innocently beaming at me or nothing. On the bed table, next to a paper napkin and a pencil, her topaz ring burned in the sun.
“What gruesome funeral flowers,” she said. “Thanks all the same. But do you mind very much cutting out the French? It annoys everybody.”
Back at the usual rush came the ripe young hussy, reeking of urine and garlic, with the Desert News, which her fair patient eagerly accepted, ignoring the sumptuously illustrated volumes I had brought.
“My sister Ann,” said Mary (topping information with afterthought), “works at the Ponderosa place.” (2.22)
Nurse 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 (1440-1492), an Italian statesman, the de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic and patron of arts. Ann Lore (Mary's sister who works at the Ponderosa place) is a namesake of Anna de' Medici (1616-1676), a daughter of Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and his wife Maria Maddalena of Austria. The House of Medici brings to mind Religio Medici (The Religion of a Doctor, 1643) by the English polymath Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), a spiritual testament and early psychological self-portrait. At the beginning of her essay Montaigne (included in “The Common Reader,” 1925) Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an English writer who, as a little girl and in her teens, was a victim of repeated sexual abuses, says that the Religio Medici is a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul:
Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, "Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?" Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty.
After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps. The Religio Medici is a coloured glass through which darkly one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other people's shoulders in the famous biography.
A Genevan philosopher, writer, composer, and amateur botanist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is the author of the Confessions (1782–89), an autobiographical book (or rather two books) published posthumously. Humbert's manuscript is subtitled "the Confession of a White Widowed Male." An English writer, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) is most remembered today for the diary he kept for almost a decade. In Lolita, Exhibit Number Two is Humbert's pocket diary that he kept in Ramsdale (Lolita's mother Charlotte dies under the wheels of a truck after reading Humbert's diary). Montaigne's motto was que sais-je? ("What do I know?"), a phrase used by Humbert ("the haute montagne where at the moment Mary’s father, lonely Joseph Lore was dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas - que sais-je! - or seducing a ewe"). In his Essais (Book One, Chapter XVIII) Michel de Montaigne (a French philosopher, 1533-1592) says: à se dernier rôle de la mort et de nous il n’y a plus que feindre, il faut parler français (in this last role of death one should not pretend anymore, one should speak French). It seems that Lolita (who asks Humbert cut out the French so as not to annoy people) dies not in childbed in Gray Star (a settlement in the remotest Northwest) on Christmas Day 1952, as John Ray, Jr. says in his Foreword to Humbert Humbert's manuscript, but of ague at the Elphinstone hospital on July 4, 1949. Everything what happens after her death (Lolita's escape from the hospital with Quilty, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Raymond Lully (a Mallorcan philosopher and poet who invented a philosophical system known as the Art, conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities, c. 1232-1316) and Raymond de Sabunde (a Catalan theologian and physician, c. 1385-1436). An Apology for Raymond Sabunde is an essay by Montaigne.
Humbert's constant companion (a girl whom he picked up at a roadside bar somewhere between Montreal and New York), Rita is a namesake of Margaret of Valois (1553-1615), popularly known as Queen Margot, the first wife of King Henry IV. The wedding of the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre (the future King Henry IV of France and Navarre) and Margarete Valois (the sister of King Charles IX) on 18 August 1572 preceded the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre that began in the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of the Feast of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle.
Montaigne's father and later Montaigne himself were the mayors of Bordeaux. Rita's brother is the mayor and boaster of Grainball:
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 Tiger-moth, 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)