Describing his second road trip with Lolita across the USA and their visit to Elphinstone (where Lolita falls ill, is hospitalized and is abducted from the hospital), Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Lolita, 1955) uses the phrase soyons logiques (let's be logical):
The two-room cabin we had ordered at Silver Spur Court, Elphinstone, turned out to belong to the glossily browned pine-log kind that Lolita used to be so fond of in the days of our carefree first journey; oh, how different things were now! I am not referring to Trapp or Trapps. After all - well, really… After all, gentlemen, it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives in prismatically changing cars were figments of my persecution mania, recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. Soyons logiques, crowed the cocky Gallic part of my brain - and proceeded to rout the notion of a Lolita-maddened salesman or comedy gangster, with stooges, persecuting me, and hoaxing me, and otherwise taking riotous advantage of my strange relations with the law. I remember humming my panic away. I remember evolving even an explanation of the “Birdsley” telephone call… But if I could dismiss Trapp, as I had dismissed my convulsions on the lawn at Champion, I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved on the very even of a new era, when my alembics told me she should stop being a nymphet, stop torturing me. (2.22)
Humbert's soyons logiques brings to mind soyons raisonnables (let's be sensible), a phrase used by Clare Quilty (Lolita's abductor) in an attempt to save his life:
“Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing face is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything - sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre , sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere - is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today, but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégé to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables . You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play - I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow - you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa - curious name - who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thingyou are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable workdrop that gunwith photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skiesdrop that gunand moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow” (2.35)
According to Gabriel Reuillard, in a conversation with Gustave Flaubert Louis Bouilhet (Flaubert's schoolfellow and fellow writer, 1821-69) used the phrase soyons raisonnables:
Pendant qu’elle s’éclipse pour rejoindre ses autres invités, les isolés fument, boivent, bavardent :
— Au fait, s’écrie Bouilhet, vers les onze heures, et « L’Immortalité ? »
— Zut ! grommelle Flaubert.
Et ils se remettent à siffler du schnaps.
À minuit moins le quart, Bouilhet supplie Flaubert :
— Soyons raisonnables, mon vieux… « L’Immortalité ? »
Flaubert rechigne toujours ; puis, soudain résigné, allonge la main vers un rayon de la bibliothèque, saisit un Lamartine et, l’ouvrant au hasard :
— Écris !
Et il dicte deux cents vers des « Harmonies ».
Après le point final, il ordonne, non moins tranquillement :
— Ajoute le titre : « L’Immortalité ! » (Le Pensum de Flaubert, Paris Normandie, vendredi 13 novembre 1953)
L'immortalité (1820) is a poem by Lamartine, the author of Le papillon ("The Butterfly"):
Naître avec le printemps, mourir avec les roses,
Sur l’aile du zéphyr nager dans un ciel pur,
Balancé sur le sein des fleurs à peine écloses,
S’enivrer de parfums, de lumière et d’azur,
Secouant, jeune encor, la poudre de ses ailes,
S’envoler comme un souffle aux voûtes éternelles,
Voilà du papillon le destin enchanté!
Il ressemble au désir, qui jamais ne se pose,
Et sans se satisfaire, effleurant toute chose,
Retourne enfin au ciel chercher la volupté!
According to Quilty, he has been called the American Maeterlinck. "Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I." Schmetterling is German for 'butterfly.' Der Schmetterling is a poem (set to music by Franz Schubert) by Friedrich Schlegel. In comparision to Rita (a girl whom Humbert picks up at a roadside bar between Montreal and New York), Valechka (Humbert's first wife) was a Schlegel and Charlotte (Humbert's second wife, Lolita's mother) a Hegel.
At the end of his manuscript Humbert mentions the only immortality that he and Lolita may share:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (2.36)