Chapter 6

A propos: I have often wondered what became of those lovers later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the rapturous evenings I stole from them did not affect their future? Is it vanity to assume I had possessed them, that they never forgot? All right, all right, I know. Your answer is yes. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with their fate? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

I remember walking along an animated street on a gray spring afternoon somewhere near the Madeleine. A short slim young woman passed me at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step, we glanced back at the same moment, she stopped and I accosted her. She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round face French women so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her body. I saw her each night for a week, and on the seventh, Monique asked me up to her room.

When I examined her small hands and drew her attention to their grubby fingernails, she said with a naive frown "That isn’t nice, is it," and went to the wash-basin, but I said it did not matter, did not matter at all. With her brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Her hips were bigger than many; in fact, I do not hesitate to say that among the twenty or so women I bedded in those days, she was the only one that gave me a pang of genuine pleasure. I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any lady before, and my last vision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety that I find seldom associated with any event in my humiliating, sordid, taciturn love life. She looked tremendously pleased with my skills as a lover and she trotted out into the April night drizzle with Humbert Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake.

As I left Monique’s apartment, I was robbed for the first time in my life. (It was, however, not to be the last time. That privilege went to Quilty alone, and I don’t mind telling you, he paid dearly for it.) As I passed a dimly lit street, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provenãal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, stood in her doorway and urgently ushered me inside. I considered walking on, but feared she might need my help. The woman took me to what was apparently her own home, and there, after explosively and inexplicably kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept. It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at most fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll. It began to dawn on me that I had been tricked into a den of the worst kind of debauchery, and the realization nearly made me vomit.

When I shook my head and tried to shuffle out of the trap, the woman, talking fast, began removing the dingy woolen jersey from the young giantess' torso; then, seeing my determination to leave, she demanded money. A door at the end of the room was opened, and two men who had been dining in the kitchen joined in the squabble. They were misshapen, bare-necked, very swarthy and one of them wore dark glasses. A small boy and a begrimed, bowlegged toddler lurked behind them. With the insolent logic of a nightmare, the enraged procuress, indicating the man in glasses, said he had served in the police, so that I had better do as I was told. I went up to the girl--for that was her stellar name--who by then had quietly transferred her heavy haunches to a stool at the kitchen table and resumed her interrupted soup while the toddler picked up the doll. With a surge of pity dramatizing my idiotic gesture, I thrust a banknote into her indifferent hand. She surrendered my gift to the ex-detective, whereupon I was suffered to leave.

I was so thoroughly horrified by the ordeal that I never again ventured to Monique’s apartment or anywhere near it. And so another woman was scorned by Humbert—not by his own devising, of course, but intentional scorn is rarely the charge against womanizers. We wish no harm. We wish nothing at all.