Note that immediately after Lucette’s “storm of sobs” Ada calls her “an utterly mad and depraved gipsy nymphet,” Nabokov thereby confirming the deliberateness of the echo of Lolita in Ada’s“storm of sobs.”

Lucette’s “storm of sobs” here at Ardis is occasioned by Van’s stroking her and kissing her behind the ear, when this means too thrillingly much and yet too little to the twelve-year-old already dangerously besotted with her cousin. At Kingston, where Van welcomes sixteen-year-old Lucette with a light kiss to her cheek and stroking her hair (368), she will implore but not receive a farewell kiss that for a moment Van seems ready to give (387). In Paris, after she identifies with “Dolores—when she says she’s ‘only a picture painted on air’” (464), Van does kiss her on the mouth once they reach the privacy of her suite. That offers a foretaste and promise of his eventually responding to Lucette’s eager desire aboard the Tobakoff—until Ada as gitanilla steps onto the screen.

Aboard the Tobakoff

Pt. 3 Ch. 3, Lucette’s surprise meeting with Van in Paris, anticipates Pt. 3 Ch.5, Van’s surprise meeting with Lucette on the Atlantic, in numerous ways, from the narrative preparation—Lucette’s continued devotion to and eagerness for Van, the “important, important telephone call” (466) she has to make to Cordula—to seemingly incidental details.

The chapter begins with the concierge searching for Lucette in the room “where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show” (459), anticipating the Titianesque Titaness by the Tobakoff’s pool who claims friendship with  Vale and sports one of the designer’s skimpy golden swimwear creations; the insistent rotating presence of The Gitanilla, anticipating Ada as the gitanilla in Don Juan’s Last Fling, fateful both within the movie and in Lucette’s real life, so near its end;Lucette’s stepping unexpectedly into the picture, anticipating Ada’s stepping forward into the moving picture screening on shipboard; the black and yellow motif in the Divan Japonais poster, the advertising photograph, and the barroom scene, anticipating the colors Lucette will wear as she drowns; Lucette’s comparison of herself in Pt. 3 Ch. 3 with Dolores, the name of the gitanilla “lifted from Osberg’s novella” (488) and grafted onto the Don Juan story of the film in Pt. 3 Ch. 5.

Most ironic and resonant of all is that Van, after kissing Lucette in the privacy of her suite, refuses to go further, despite his generally irrepressible sex drive and his physical and emotional attraction to Lucette, partly because he has just made love twice with Cordula: “Had he not sported so well and so recently, he might not have withstood the temptation, the impardonable thrill” 467). This closely foreshadows his masturbating twice after Ada’s appearance on the Tobakoff screen sends him from the cinema to his suite:

I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door . . . and using a temporary expedient . . . ,
vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years
ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his
paroxysm . . . was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision
of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush. (490)

In the four days between seeing Lucette in Paris and being surprised by her aboard the Tobakoff Van has visited a Villa Venus in England after his research plans there come to naught.  Arriving on a gala night in honor of King Victor and Gamaliel’s successor, he recoils, shuddering “squeamishly at the thought of sharing the frolics of historical personages or contenting himself with the brave-faced girlies they had started to use and rejected” (473). Two days later, as “the stout snake of desire” weightily unwinds in him beside Lucette by the pool, he “grimly . . . regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus” (478).

Later that day, seated now in the cinema beside Lucette, his desire has been sufficiently aroused by her eager attentions for him to jettison his resolve not to complicate his life with her:

She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his
knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight.
         He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin
whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation:
         “If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room at midnight.” (488)

But when Ada steps into the main picture as the gitanilla Dolores, Van, his mood shattered, offers a lame excuse to leave. He retreats to his rooms to brace himself against temptation by masturbating twice, as he had ejaculated twice in Paris with Cordula before resisting Lucette’s invitation for more in her hotel suite.
                 
When Lucette calls Van in his room after Don Juan’s Last Fling finishes, she asks:

“Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?” . . .
    “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),” answered Van.
      A small pause followed; then she hung up. (491)

Lucette can only assume he is now with the woman by the pool who flirted so obviously with him earlier in the day:

a tall splendid creature with trim ankles and repulsively fleshy thighs stalked past the Veens. . .
Except for a golden ribbon and a bleached mane, her long, ripply, beige back was bare all the
way down to the tops of her slowly and lusciously rolling buttocks, which divulged, in alternate
motion, their nether bulges from under the lamé loincloth. Just before disappearing behind a r
ounded white corner, the Titianesque Titaness half-turned her brown face and greeted Van with
a loud “hullo!”
      Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who’s that stately dame?)
     “I thought she addressed you,” answered Van. “I did not distinguish her face and do not
remember that bottom.” (479)

The possibility that her golden lamé loincloth comes from the collection of “Vivian Vale’s golden veils” (459) shown at the Alphonse Four four days earlier is confirmed when “the pava (peahen) reappeared” (482) after seeing Lucette has left Van briefly alone:

Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn
(for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her
face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin,
that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her
pale pout.
      “I was told,” she explained, “that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay—voozavay
entendue?—had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?”
      “Logically, no, ma’am,” replied Van.
       She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude
or ready—and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
     “See you aprey,” said Miss Condor.
      Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and
folds.
     “You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!”
     “I swear,” said Van, “that she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.”
     “You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que
j’en vais mourir.” (482-83)

 
Apart from the yellow-and-black motif and the woman-in-picture motif linking both chapters, then, there are other strong narrative links. First, between the extended Paris scene, Van’s two copulations with Cordula draining his desire so that he can hold off from Lucette even after a first kiss on the mouth tasting of Ada, and Van on the Tobakoff masturbating twice precisely in order to drain his desire, despite his earlier responsiveness and that invitation to Lucette to join him in his room.

And right at the start of Pt. 3 Ch 3, the fashion show with “Vivian Vale’s golden veils” features just before Van looks at the revolving bookstand with The Gitanilla. This sequence anticipates, first, Lucette’s extreme jealous discomfiture at the “Miss Condor” wearing the skimpiest of attire, the Vivian Vale gold lamé loincloth, and seeming to threaten what she had hoped would be her time with Van, and, second, the disruption in Van’s new readiness to respond to Lucette when Ada appears on screen as the gitanilla, precipitating his exit from the cinema to his room and there, his masturbation and its resolute repetition. The Sapsucker imprint of The Gitanilla on the bookstand perhaps has another resonance here.

When Lucette rings Van to ask if she can come now, he says he is not alone, and she can only assume that he has been lying to her all day and that he is now with the “gruesome girl” who has been soliciting him. But in fact he has been unmanned for Lucette not by the woman barely concealed by her golden veil but by Ada as gitanilla and as memory. Lucette loses one last fatal time not to the stranger she has been jealous of all day but to the sister she has been too generous to be jealous of the whole time they have both vied for Van.

Beyond: Pt. 3 Ch. 3 and Pt. 3 Ch. 8: Company and Kiss
               
Pt. 3 Ch. 3 points forward strongly not only to Pt. 3 Ch. 5, and Van’s next, last, and fatal, meeting with Lucette, but also to Pt. 3 Ch. 8, and Van’s next meeting and penultimate reunion with Ada.
                 
One of the odd features of Pt. 3 Ch. 3 is that despite its intense concentration on Van and Lucette’s meeting for the first time in many years, the chapter swarms with others around them in the bar and the hotel, including those whom they know and who know them—Demon’s business connections, the banker and poet Kithar Sween and the real-estate magnate Milton Eliot; Alphonse, heir to the Portuguese throne, and Lenore Colline—and who from Van’s point of view risk overhearing incestuous Veen secrets. The bartender Ed, whom Van knows, listens “with the limp smile of utter enchantment” to Lucette’s denunciation of Dorothy Vinelander’s false taste in “progressive philistine Art” (462). Just before Lucette, still venting her outrage about the Vinelanders at Agavia, mentions her being spied on by Dorothy while “reshaking old times” with Ada (463), Van warns “‘Po-russki’ . . . noticing that an English couple had ordered drinks and settled down to some quiet auditing” (463). As Lucette invites Van to “Come and travel with me to some distant place, where there are frescoes and fountains, why can’t we travel to some distant place with ancient fountains? By ship? By sleeping car?” Van replies “It’s safer and faster by plane. . . And for Log’s sake, speak Russian” (464-65) as Mr. Sween acknowledges them from his table. Only when they get to her suite and privacy does he discard his wariness: “There, firmly resolved to leave in a moment, he removed his glasses and pressed his mouth to her mouth, and she tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis, in the early afternoon” (466-67).
                 
In Pt. 3 Ch. 8 Van meets Ada at a hotel in Mont Roux in 1905, twelve years since they were parted by Demon, who has died just a few months previously. But in this hotel too, at this reunion, others are at first present—especially Yuzlik, the director of Don Juan’s Last Fling, two other movieland extras, and Dorothy and Andrey Vinelander—and keep Van and Ada’s conversation and conduct decidedly guarded, until they too at the end of the evening can snatch a moment alone and a kiss.
                 
In both scenes a good deal of the dialogue dips into Russian and a good stretch of the talk is taken up with the dreary manners of Andrey Vinelander and the philistine modernism and the paraded Orthodoxy of his sister, Dorothy (in the earlier chapter, Lucette reports she tries to make “a practicing Orthodox not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our sufficiently pravoslavnaya mother,” 463; in the later, prim Dorothy warns Van, his eyes fixed “insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest,” “that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one,” 514). In Paris, Lucette refers to Dorothy Vinelander with barbedly ironic affectionate diminutives, as Dorochka and Daryushka (“dear watchful Dorochka,” 463, “Daryushka, a born blackmailer,” 466); in Mont Roux, Van responds to Dorothy’s appropriative “Adochkas” and “Andryushas” with his frostily formal “Daria Andreevna” (519). Lucette tells Van that had she seen him when their paths crossed at Villa Armina “I would have stopped to tell you what I had just learned. Imagine, mother knew everything—your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!” (461-62). Dorothy, collaring Van as psychologist, tells him: “Incidentally, in her deathbed delirium . . . our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other—that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish. How does your school of psychiatry explain that kind of conflict?” (519).
                 
The scenes in the hotel lounge and dining floors in Paris in 1901 and in Mont Roux in 1905 do not feel similar, because of the different interpersonal relations, the different distances between Van and Lucette and Van and Ada, the differences between Lucette’s isolation and Ada’s embeddedness in company she does not care for, and especially between Van’s responsiveness to Lucette’s fascinating conversational flow and his resistance to Dorothy’s droning insensitivity and intrusiveness. But Nabokov has gone to a great deal of imaginative trouble to tie the two scenes together. Why?
                 
The most emphatic reason lies in the kiss on the mouth that follows the conversation in public. In Paris Van kisses Lucette, impulsively, once, in the privacy of her suite. In Mont Roux he has been dying to kiss Ada properly since being constrained—after she rushes from her companions to meet him, causing heads to turn and eyes to peer—to merely raising “to his unbending lips and kiss[ing] her cygneous hand” (511). But after Yuzlik, the movie agents, and Andrey have all retired, after the lights have been lowered in the lounge, Dasha talks on for another hour, determined not to give Ada and Van time alone together. At last she and Ada make to leave:

Before the two ladies proceeded toward the lift, Ada glanced at Van—and he—no fool in amorous
strategy—refrained to comment on her “forgetting” her tiny black silk handbag on the seat of her chair.
He did not accompany them beyond the passage leading liftward and, clutching the token, awaited her
planned return behind a pillar of hotel-hall mongrel design, knowing that in a moment she would say to
her accursed companion (by now revising, no doubt, her views on the “beau ténébreux”) as the lift’s eye
turned red under a quick thumb: “Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!”—and instantly flitting back,
like Vere’s Ninon, she would be in his arms.
       Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese
neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening.
      “We’ll vroom straight to my place as soon as you wake up, don’t bother to bathe, jump into your
lenclose—” and, with the burning sap brimming, he again devoured her, until (Dorothy must have reached
the sky!) she danced three fingers on his wet lips—and escaped.
      “Wipe your neck!” he called after her in a rapid whisper (who, and where in this tale, in this life, had
also attempted a whispered cry?) (520)

Readers of Pt. 3 Ch. 3 may well detect in “the new, young, divine, Japanese neck” a strong echo of the Divan Japonais (or Lucette’s “fabulous Japanese divan,” 463) and perhaps “the pure proud line of that throat, that tilted chin” (460) in the description of Lucette at the bar, but will probably suppose them mere Nabokovian grace notes. Far from it. On his first glimpse of Ada in twelve years, Van sees “Her still blacker hair . . . drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise” (511)—the line of Lucette in the pose of the photograph imitating but improving on the Divan Japonais poster. But this echo of the Japanese divan comes at the very moment of the long-withheld kiss, the kiss impossible while others watch, as if in pointed but concealed echo of Van’s long-delayed kiss with Lucette, when they too are out of the public eye, in the hall of her suite with the Japanese divan.

After the kiss with Lucette in Paris, Van restrains himself, walks away, explaining to her that he loves Ada, and simply refuses “to complicate matters by entering into yet another incestuous relationship” (467). Lucette challenges him, and he uses her challenge as “a pretext for marching away. ‘I apollo, I love you,’ she whispered frantically, trying to cry after him in a whisper because the corridor was all door and ears” (467). This answers the pointed riddle above, the italicized “cry . . . whisper” in Paris in 1901 providing the answer to the little memory test for the reader in the moment of Van and Ada’s 1905 Mont Roux kiss: “who, and where in this tale, in this life, had also attempted a whispered cry?” (520)
Why not only the kiss after escaping from watchful eyes, but also the echo in the “new, young, divine Japanese neck,” and the “whispered cry”?

By focusing on the “whispered cry,” Paul Grant and Stephen Blackwell have proposed an answer (Grant, Blackwell 2024), which I was delighted to see, agreed with at once, and will eventually discuss in the Afternote to Pt. 3 Ch. 8. But from the viewpoint of Pt. 3 Ch. 3, there are other facets to revolve.

I long ago (in Boyd 1979, published in Boyd 1985/2001) proposed that dead Lucette’s spirit somehow intervenes in Van and Ada’s lives to bring them together for their final, enduring reunion, in Mont Roux in 1922. Only more than forty years later (Boyd 2021) did I see that Lucette also plays a part in Van and Ada’s briefer earlier reunion in Mont Roux in 1905.

Like other Nabokovians, Grant and Blackwell, who have long taken for granted my earlier account of dead Lucette’s role in Van and Ada’s life in the Mont Roux reunion of 1922, now also agree in their 2024 paper with my own conclusion in Boyd 2021 (which they had arrived at independently) that in Mont Roux in 1905 Lucette’s spirit somehow watches over and even facilitates Van and Ada’s reunion there. I will not repeat the evidence here, but it comes forward most strongly in the paragraph that immediately follows the riddle posed by the italicized “whispered cry” (520) and describes Van’s dream that night and Ada’s visit to Van next morning: again, see Boyd 2021 and the eventual Afternote to Pt. 3 Ch.8. 

But just before that, the echoes in the kiss delayed until a moment of privacy, the “new, young, divine, Japanese neck,” and the “whispered cry” seem to point strongly back to Pt. 3 Ch. 3 and to signal Lucette’s presence and even encouragement right here at the moment of the kiss.

All the more so if we note  that Ada’s ploy for rushing back to Van after she has pressed the lift button, once inside the lift with Dorothy, is her handbag: “‘Akh, sumochku zabïla (forgot my bag)!”’—and instantly flitting back, like Vere’s Ninon, she would be in his arms.” That bag is “her tiny silk black handbag” (520). But (as Grant and Blackwell 2024 notice) Lucette has a “little black handbag” (466) where she searches for the key to unlock her suite in the Alphonse Four, just a moment before Van kisses her:

“I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen,” said
Lucette searching for the key in her little black handbag.

They entered the hall of her suite. There, firmly resolved to leave in a moment, he removed
his glasses and pressed his mouth to her mouth, and she tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis. . . . (466-67)

In Mont Roux Ada rushes back to Van, who is “clutching the token” of her tiny black handbag, and their open mouths meet in that long-delayed kiss. It may seem that once again Lucette has provided the key—in this case given Ada the idea of using that little black handbag as her ploy—and released this new kiss.
                 
That suggestion becomes still stronger if we note what Van writes between Ada’s “forgot my bag” and “Their open mouths met in tender fury”: “and instantly flitting back, like Vere’s Ninon, she would be in his arms” (520). As experienced readers of Ada will know, one of the strongest clues to Van’s retrospective awareness, as he writes his memoir, of Lucette’s tender intervention in his and Ada’s lives at its most crucial turning point, occurs at the end of his The Texture of Time. When his 1922 reunion with Ada seems to have fallen through, Van takes a sleeping pill and, while he waits for it to act, he sits down to work on his sheaf of notes. His essay’s argument, composed en route to Mont Roux, has seemed a tangle, but as he writes it all suddenly comes together as a lucid summary and a tight conclusion, just as Ada, on her way away from him, seems to feel a pull to return to him in Mont Roux. Van begins to think himself back into his argument thus:

Does the ravage and outrage of age deplored by poets tell the naturalist of Time anything about
Time’s essence? Very little. Only a novelist’s fancy could be caught by this small oval box, once
containing Duvet de Ninon (a face powder, with a bird of paradise on the lid), which has been
forgotten in a not-quite-closed drawer of the bureau’s arc of triumph—not, however, triumph over
Time. The blue-green-orange thing looked as if he were meant to be deceived into thinking it had
been waiting there seventeen years for the bemused, smiling finder’s dream-slow hand: a shabby
trick of feigned restitution, a planted coincidence—and a bad blunder, since it had been Lucette,
now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis (and not Ada, now a stranger somewhere near Morges
in a black limousine) who had favored that powder. Throw it away lest it mislead a weaker
philosopher; what I am concerned with is the delicate texture of Time, void of all embroidered
events. (559)

There are many hints of Lucette’s posthumous presence in and around this passage (including “bird of paradise”; “Lucette, now a mermaid in the groves of Atlantis”; “Morges,” which three pages later yields “‘Morges’—maybe a mermaid’s message” (562), see 466.16-19n above and Boyd 1985/2001: 202-06, 275-77, Boyd 2021: 122-27), but notice especially the Duvet de Ninon, which gives Van a memory jolt: a face powder that Lucette had favored. This pointedly links with “like Vere’s Ninon” in 1905, in the chink between the handbag and the kisses on Ada’s mouth and “her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening” (520).
 
Nabokov characteristically allows readers multiple paths to his most secret destinations. There is another path here that brings us back from the scene of Lucette’s death to Jupiter Olorinus. Two more women in pictures form the key pattern.

Aboard the Tobakoff Lucette, so completely without jealousy toward Ada, feels intense jealousy toward the woman in skimpy gold making eyes and parading curves at Van, the woman she delightfully calls “Miss Condor (nasalizing the first syllable)” (481) and Van himself dubs the Titianesque Titaness. One of Titian’s most famous paintings, of which he made at least six versions “between 1544 and the 1560s” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana%C3%AB_(Titian_paintings), accessed October 19, 2024), is Danaë and the Shower of Gold, depicting the story of Jupiter who falls in lust with Danaë, imprisoned in a tower, and possesses her by metamorphosing himself into a shower of gold cascading on her lap and thereby impregnating her. Near-naked in one of “Vivian Vale’s golden veils,” in nothing but her “lamé loincloth,” Miss Condor in multiple ways reenacts Titian’s naked titaness stretched out with gold raining down on her lap.

Another famous subject of Renaissance painting depicts another story of Jupiter metamorphosing himself to possess another mortal woman, when he takes the form of a swan to couple with Leda: a subject treated by artists from Greek vase-painters and Pompeian fresco makers to Leonardo, Michelangelo, Correggio, Rubens, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens and even Boucher and well beyond. Once again, that paragraph of the delayed kiss at Mont Roux:

Their open mouths met in tender fury, and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine,
Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout
the evening (520).

Olorinus means “swan-like, of a swan”; this takes place in the hotel Les Trois Cygnes, “The Three Swans”; Van, seeing Ada rush over to him early in the evening, conscious of all the eyes on them, has “raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand” before he notices her new hairdo, “drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise” (511) (cf. Johnson 2006: 112-13).
                 
Aboard the Tobakoff Lucette wants to keep at bay the cocotte she jealously (and mistakenly) sees as her rival, the Titianesque Titaness, aka Miss Condor, and she goes to her death thinking that woman must indeed be Van’s companion when he tells her “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone).” But she has never felt jealous of Ada, or seen her as a rival, even though she has always wished Van for herself too. The imagery and the excitement and the echoes of Lucette surrounding Van and Ada’s twelve-years -delayed kiss in Mont Roux seem to signal that Lucette is somehow present and even instrumental in their being at last alone with each other, and that she shows here the generosity towards Ada she showed so pointedly in Pt. 3 Ch. 3, in her plans for a future with Van between the Divan Japonais-like scene and her own Japanese divan.

Beyond and Here-and-Now: Half-sister and sister-in-law
                 
The night they meet in 1905, Van and Ada at last escape the close vigilance of Dorothy Vinelander and rush together for a kiss that echoes Van’s kiss with Lucette in 1901 but that, unlike that earlier long-delayed kiss, seems to open a future rather than close one off.

Van and Ada have had to wait in suppressed exasperation to outlast Dorothy’s watchfulness before they can meet in the “tender fury” of that kiss. But Lucette seems to have been waiting excitedly to help this moment along and (see Boyd 2021) seems to plan as an extra gift the manner of the next morning’s full rendezvous.

In fact there seems to be a tussle throughout the chapter between Dorothy’s suspicious surveillance at Mont Roux and dead Lucette’s subliminal support for Van and Ada. All through Pt. 3 Ch. 3 and Pt. 3 Ch. 8, indeed, there runs a consistent and pointed opposition between Lucette Veen and Dorothy Vinelander, between Ada’s and Van’s half-sister and Ada’s sister-in-law. And as so often, metaphysics in Nabokov intersects with ethics and even aesthetics.

Art          
By the time Van meets Lucette in Paris she has long—ever since Kingston in 1892—been established as an art history scholar with a minute and sensitive appreciation of fine art, from furniture to frescoes. Her affinity with art seems almost to manifest itself bodily when Van sees her in Paris in terms that evoke the Divan Japonais poster and the Barton & Guestier advertisement, and as narrator he depicts her in words in  “a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarly postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist” (461).

Visual art, indeed, will be the surprising first arena for the opposition and even the hostility between Lucette and Dorothy in Pt. 3 Ch. 3 and Pt. 3 Ch. 8. The tone of the Van’s dismissal of Toulouse-Lautrec continues in the first sustained topic of his conversation with Lucette. He reports her diatribe:

Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even for that, collected progressive philistine
Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile’s doodles, primitive
idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich
Heideland. His bride found the ranch yard adorned with a sculpture, if that’s the right word, by old Heinrich
himself and his four hefty assistants, a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany ten feet high, entitled
“Maternity,” the mother (in reverse) of all the plaster gnomes and pig-iron toadstools planted by former
Vinelanders in front of their dachas in Lyaska.
        The barman stood wiping a glass in endless slow motion as he listened to Lucette’s denunciation with
the limp smile of utter enchantment. (462)

In visual art as in the other terms of opposition between the two women, Lucette’s colorful complaints in Paris are confirmed and demonstrated in action in Dorothy’s comically dreary pronouncements or insufferable behavior in Mont Roux. There for instance Dorothy rejects Ada’s claim that Van would have no interest in the details of Andrey’s daily life: “Don’t listen to her. Massa interesnago (heaps of interesting stuff). Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men’she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). Nashi sel’skohozyaystvennïya mashinï i ih teni (our agricultural machines and their shadows)—eto tselaya kollektsiya predmetov modernoy skul’pturï i zhivopisi (is a veritable collection of modern art) which I suspect you adore as I do” (517).

Virgins
Even more surprisingly Lucette and Dorothy are paired and contrasted in terms of virginity. Already in this Afternote, and long before, I have variously emphasized the ironies of Lucette’s virginity, her being seen in the position of a whore in Ovenman’s bar and yet remaining a virgin, even if a kokotische virgin, and indeed being a martyr to her virginity precisely because she cannot lose it, as she wishes, to Van. Dasha too is decidedly a virgin, but in an opposite way: an uncomely spinster, “a short plumpish lady in governess gray, . . . with smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril” (511), a near-nun (“prissy and pious,” 463.02), a prudish watchdog, who displays her cross on her chess and proselytises for her Orthodox faith. Only much later, after Andrey is confined to a clinic, does she retire to a “subarctic monastery town” where she eventually marries a man “who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii” (532). The opposition of virgin and virgin in the background of the hotel settings in these two chapters cannot be unseen once seen.
                 
Brothers
A third element pairing and contrasting Lucette and Dorothy is their attachment, their over-attachment, even, to their brothers. Lucette has died for her love for Van, but after death still seems to be promoting him and Ada.
Of course, Lucette also loves Ada, and even enjoys making love with her sister. In Paris, just before she launches into her diatribe about Dorothy’s passion for “progressive philistine Art,” she mentions to Van that Demon has told Marina

                  “ . . . everything about Ada and you!”
                  “But not about you and her.”
                  Lucette asked him not to mention that sickening, maddening girl. She was furious with Ada
and jealous by proxy. Her Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even
for that, collected progressive philistine Art. . . .462)

Lucette is furious with her sister because Ada has let herself be directed by Dorothy’s urge to protect her brother and to patrol sexual shenanigans. She goes on to explain to Van:

“Dorothy is a prissy and pious monster who comes to stay for months, orders the meals, and has a
private collection of keys to the servants’ rooms—which our dumb brunette should have known—
and other little keys to open people’s hearts—she has tried, by the way, to make a practicing
Orthodox not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our sufficiently pravoslavnaya
mother. . . .
     “Kak-to noch’yu (one night), when Andrey was away having his tonsils removed or something,
dear watchful Dorochka went to investigate a suspicious noise in my maid’s room and found poor
Brigitte fallen asleep in the rocker and Ada and me tryahnuvshih starinoy (reshaking old times) on
the bed. That’s when I told Dora I would not stand her attitude, and immediately left for Monarch
Bay.” (463)

 Van asks a little later:

         “Did that woman tell her brother about your innocent frolics?”
         “Of course not! She drozhit (trembles) over his bliss. But I’m sure it was she who forced Ada
to write me that I ‘must never try again to wreck a successful marriage’—and this I forgive
Daryushka, a born blackmailer, but not Adochka.” (465-66)

More details emerge only in Pt. 3 Ch. 8, after Van and Ada have resumed their amour. As they walk by the lake a chance detail brings Lucette to Van’s mind:

“Why on earth,” asked Van, “didn’t you let her know, in one way or another, that you were not
angry with her? Your phoney letter made her most unhappy!”
         “Pah!” uttered Ada. “She put me in a most embarrassing situation. I can quite understand
her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing—stupid enough to warn me against
possible ‘infections’ such as ‘labial lesbianitis.’ Labial lesbianitis!) but that was no reason for
Lucette to look up Andrey in town and tell him she was great friends with the man I had loved
before my marriage. He didn’t dare annoy me with his revived curiosity, but he complained to
Dorothy of Lucette’s neopravdannaya zhestokost’ (unjustified cruelty).” (526)

To return to the first intimation of this subplot: Lucette in Paris declares herself “furious with Ada and jealous by proxy” (462). She is jealous not for herself but for Van, because Ada has married someone as drab and commonplace, except for his interest in plants and birds, as Andrey Vinelander. And she is “furious with Ada” because Ada has complied with Dorothy’s pressure and written that “phoney letter” telling Lucette she “must never try again to wreck a successful marriage” (465-66). Lucette feels as strongly as anyone, even Van, or Ada herself, that Ada’s marriage to Andrey is a lie, a trial, anything but successful, and her jealousy on Van’s behalf leads her to tell Andrey she knows the man Ada had loved.

Dorothy on the other hand has an inordinate attachment to unprepossessing Andrey and feels active and protective jealousy on her brother’s behalf. At Mont Roux, early on the morning after they meet, Andrey informs Ada

that her “Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel’no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably
sympathetic, in the sense of ‘fetching,’ impression).” The dear fellow’s verbal apparatus
consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian commonplaces of language,
but—not liking to speak of himself—he spoke little, especially since his sister’s sonorous
soliloquy (lapping at Van’s rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. (513-14)

The remainder of the paragraph reveals Dorothy in action, disclosing just how little she has to mesmerize and engross anyone. Years ago she had accosted Van after one of his public psychology lectures  “with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together”  (503), which Van understandably merely scowled at and refused to take. Now she has him at her side and her mercy, she launches in again, disclosing her intrusiveness, her anti-Semitism (“zhidovskaya”), her pseudo-intellectual pretentions, her domineering, and her failure to respect other people’s boundaries:

Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint
(“Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa”),
but her reluctant analyst’s attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so
insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable
chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream
volcano) to say: “I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with
Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I’d like to warn you that I object to
anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.” (514)

Andrey by contrast says little, and then of the dullest, and has little confidence in saying even that: “Adochka, dushka (darling), razskazhi zhe pro rancho, pro skot (tell about the ranch, the cattle), emu zhe lyubopïtno (it cannot fail to interest him)” (516). When Ada responds “what’s so interesting about it” Dorothy plunges in with her implausibly bombastic defense of the fascination of her brother’s work:  “Delo brata ogromnoe, volnuyushchee delo, trebuyushchee ne men’she truda, chem uchyonaya dissertatsiya (his business is a big thing, quite as demanding as a scholar’s). . . . ” (517).

Overwatching, Watching over
Partly in order to protect Andrey, partly because of her intrinsic snoopiness, Dorothy not only monitors Van and Ada on the night they meet but tries to find out exactly what they are they up to throughout their time in Mont Roux. And here lies the greatest contrast of all between Dorothy and Lucette, a contrast that persists even beyond Lucette’s death.

Lucette as a child has seemed comically (initially at least) in the know from the first about Van and Ada’s romps, but as an innocent child, hardly comprehending what she is seeing, green eyes all agog. Dorothy by contrast knows comically little about Van and Ada yet strives to know everything so that she can police and control:

During the next days, Dorothy used her leisure to spy upon Ada. The woman was sure of three
things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging
for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The
delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided
Van with another source of amusement. (527)

Dorothy tries to monitor and force others’ souls. She has no respect for their independence. Lucette deftly sums up this worst aspect of her nature: although only  a guest at Agavia, Dorothy has secured “a private collection of keys to the servants’ rooms—which our dumb brunette should have known—and other little keys to open people’s hearts” (463). She relentlessly snoops, intrudes, oversteps, partly out of jealousy on Andrey’s behalf but largely because of her own prurient curiosity and desire to dominate.
                 
Lucette by contrast, although she feels a generous jealousy on Van’s behalf that Ada is married to Andrey rather than to the love of her life, and although she has seen so much of Van and Ada making love, as an innocently curious child, and although she loves Van with a firmly fixed focus, has no jealousy whatever of Ada as Van’s first love. In Paris she offers Van, now that Ada is married, a marriage with herself, and the opportunity to invite Ada to Ardis, and for Van and Ada to have as much time together as they wish, while she leaves them to themselves or rejoins them should they wish it.
                 
And in Mont Roux Lucette from beyond death seems to show a similar generosity. Despite her own mortal feelings for Van she does all she can to bring him and Ada together at Mont Roux, in 1905 and again in 1922. She does not direct them but allows them opportunities to flourish together; she does not surveil them minutely, although she appears to be able to see all she wants of them, but intervenes only at what could be crucial turning points in their life and love. Unlike Dorothy she does not want little keys to force open their hearts, but offers them, while alive and in death, opportunities to open to each other. And in Mont Roux she appears, beyond death, to enjoy,  as much as Van and Ada do during their adulterous week and a half together, their evading Dorothy’s persistent and intrusive vigilance, her unflagging attempts to force her way into their privacy and their independence.
                 
The theme of spying on Van and Ada has had multiple strands and multiple moods in Ardis, in Lucette, Blanche, blackmailer Kim and even purblind Mlle Larivière. It has after-echoes that emerge in Manhattan, comic (Lucette) and tragic (Kim, Blanche). It has later variations in Ada and Lucette’s being seen making love by Brigitte and by Dorothy in Arizona. And the theme of alert eyes and ears returns in Van’s wariness of acquaintances in Paris, and in Mont Roux in Dorothy and Lucette.
                 
In Paris Van, conscious that others can eavesdrop, repeatedly cautions voluble Lucette to speak in Russian. But once no witnesses surround them, he responds to her manifold invitations with that long-desired, long-delayed, kiss on the mouth.
                 
In Mont Roux, conscious of others around—and especially of Dorothy Vinelander, who scrutinizes them so closely, and talks so volubly, but unlike Lucette in Paris finds it hard to hold a listener, let alone to attract an eavesdropper—Van and Ada can show no sign of their affection until the lift doors close on Dorothy. But somehow dead Lucette seems not only to be still watching them, without intruding or snooping on their souls, but to be helping them on their way to their own long-desired and long-delayed kiss, and the promise of more.