According to Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969), all the hundred floramors (palatial brothels built all over the world by David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction, in memory of his grandson Eric) opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875:
Eccentricity is the greatest grief’s greatest remedy. The boy’s grandfather set at once to render in brick and stone, concrete and marble, flesh and fun, Eric’s fantasy. He resolved to be the first sampler of the first houri he would hire for his last house, and to live until then in laborious abstinence.
It must have been a moving and magnificent sight — that of the old but still vigorous Dutchman with his rugged reptilian face and white hair, designing with the assistance of Leftist decorators the thousand and one memorial floramors he resolved to erect allover the world — perhaps even in brutal Tartary, which he thought was ruled by ‘Americanized Jews,’ but then ‘Art redeemed Politics’ — profoundly original concepts that we must condone in a lovable old crank. He began with rural England and coastal America, and was engaged in a Robert Adam-like composition (cruelly referred to by local wags as the Madam-I’m-Adam House), not far from Newport, Rodos Island, in a somewhat senile style, with marble columns dredged from classical seas and still encrusted with Etruscan oyster shells — when he died from a stroke while helping to prop up a propylon. It was only his hundredth house!
His nephew and heir, an honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen (somewhere near Zwolle, I’m told), with a large family and a small trade, was not cheated out of the millions of guldens, about the apparent squandering of which he had been consulting mental specialists during the last ten years or so. All the hundred floramors opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, ‘ryuen’,’ which might have spelled ‘ruin,’ also echoed the name of the ecstatic Neverlander’s hometown). By the beginning of the new century the Venus revenues were pouring in (their final gush, it is true). A tattling tabloid reported, around 1890, that out of gratitude and curiosity ‘Velvet’ Veen traveled once — and only once — to the nearest floramor with his entire family — and it is also said that Guillaume de Monparnasse indignantly rejected an offer from Hollywood to base a screenplay on that dignified and hilarious excursion. Mere rumours, no doubt. (2.3)
According to Dahl (Ada’s beloved lexicographer), ryuen’ (also spelled ruven’, the old Russian word for “September”) comes from ryov oleney (the roar of deer). In his poem Automne malade ("Sickly Autumn") included in his collection Alcools ("Alcohols," 1913) Guillaume Apollinaire mentions roaring stags:
Automne malade et adoré
Tu mourras quand l’ouragan soufflera dans les roseraies
Quand il aura neigé
Dans les vergers
Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs
Au fond du ciel
Des éperviers planent
Sur les nixes nicettes aux cheveux verts et naines
Qui n’ont jamais aimé
Aux lisières lointaines
Les cerfs ont bramé
Et que j’aime ô saison que j’aime tes rumeurs
Les fruits tombant sans qu’on les cueille
Le vent et la forêt qui pleurent
Toutes leurs larmes en automne feuille à feuille
Les feuilles
Qu’on foule
Un train
Qui roule
La vie
S’écoule
Autumn ailing and adored
You will die when the wind storm blows in rose gardens
When it snows
In orchards
Poor autumn
Dies in the whiteness and richness
Of snow and ripe fruit
Deep in the sky
The sparrow hawks glide
Above the tiny gentle green-haired water nymphs
Who have never loved
At the distant forest edges
Stags have been bellowing
And how I love O season how I love your murmurs
The fruits falling without being picked
The wind and the forest that weep
All their tears in autumn leaf by leaf
Leaves
That are trampled
A train
That passes
Life
That slips away
(tr. John Cobley)
Guillaume de Monparnasse is the penname of Mlle Larivière (Lucette's governess who writes fiction). It combines Apollinaire with Maupassant, the author La Maison Tellier (1881), a story in which the action takes place in a brothel. In his "Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant” (1894) Tolstoy says that it was Turgenev who gave him Maupassant's collection Maison Tellier (the title story was dedicated to Ivan Turgenev) and recommended to him the young French writer. In a letter of 7/19 September, 1875, to N. V. Khanykov Turgenev says that on the next day (September 20, 1875, NS) he will move to the new-built chalet at his and Viardot's villa Les frênes ("The Ash Trees") in Bougival:
Я Вас приму в новом своём доме, куда завтра переселяюсь, а г-н и г-жа Виардо будут очень довольны, если Вы при сей оказии останетесь у них обедать, и просят меня пригласить Вас, так же как Салтыкова и Соллогуба.