The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

It is known from a cousin of hers, H. F. Stainton, that during the last months of her life she roamed all over the South of France, staying for a day or two at small hot provincial towns, rarely visited by tourists – feverish, alone (she had abandoned her lover) and probably very unhappy. One might think she was fleeing from someone or something, as she doubled and re-crossed her tracks; on the other hand, to anyone who knew her moods, that hectic dashing might seem but a final exaggeration of her usual restlessness. She died of heart-failure (Lehmann's disease) at the little town of Roquebrune, in the summer of 1909. There was some difficulty in getting the body dispatched to England; her people had died some time before; Mr Stain ton alone attended her burial in London.

My parents lived happily. It was a quiet and tender union, unmarred by the ugly gossip of certain relatives of ours who whispered that my father, although a loving husband, was attracted now and then by other women. One day, about Christmas, 1912, an acquaintance of his, a very charming and thoughtless girl, happened to mention as they walked down the Nevsky, that her sister's fiancй, a certain Palchin, had known his first wife. My father said he remembered the man – they had met at Biarritz about ten years ago, or was it nine….

'Oh, but he knew her later too,' said the girl, 'you see he confessed to my sister that he had lived with Virginia after you paned…. Then she dropped him somewhere in Switzerland…. Funny, nobody knew.'

'Well,' said my father quietly, 'if it has not leaked out before, there is no reason for people to start prattling ten years later.'

By a very grim coincidence, on the very next day, a good friend of our family, Captain Belov, casually asked my father whether it was true that his first wife came from Australia – he, the Captain, had always thought she was English. My father replied that, as far as he knew, her parents had lived for some time in Melbourne, but that she had been born in Kent.

'…What makes you ask me that?' he added.

The Captain answered evasively that his wife had been at a party or something where somebody had said something

'Some things will have to stop, I'm afraid,' said my father.

Next morning he called upon Palchin, who received him with a greater show of geniality than was necessary. He had spent many years abroad, he said, and was glad to meet old friends.

'There is a certain dirty lie being spread,' said my father without sitting down, 'and I think you know what it is.