In A NIGHT AT THE MAJESTIC ( 2006) by Richard Davenport-Hines, the author describes a historical meeting at the Majestic Hotel, in May 18 May, 1922, between James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev and Igor Stravisnky. The dinner had been offered by Sydney Schiff and his wife Violet to honor Marcel Proust and celebrate the opening of "Le Renard", a ballet by Stravinski.

There is a short reference to Nabokov on chapter 6 ( "The permanent possibility of danger"), in relation to VN's comments about Proust's sexual experiences, as it appears in part I, chapter 27 of "Ada or Ardors".

According to Davenport-Hines VN considered the narrator's jealousy about Albertine's excursions to Gomorra very implausible. He then quotes Van, pointedly addressing both Ada and Cordula : " It makes sense if the reader knows that the narrator is a pansy, and that the good fat cheeks of Albertine are the good fat buttocks of Albert. It makes none if the reader cannot be supposed, and should not be required, to know anything about this or any other author’s sexual habits in order to enjoy to the last drop a work of art. My teacher contends that if the reader knows nothing about Proust’s perversion, the detailed description of a heterosexual male jealously watchful of a homosexual female is preposterous because a normal man would be only amused, tickled pink in fact, by his girl’s frolics with a female partner."

In Nabokov's "Ada", the sentence ends with "quelquer petite blanchisseuse who has examined the author's dirty linen...", when Ada tiredly notes: ‘you do not realize that the Advanced French Group at my school has advanced no farther than to Racan and Racine.’

I: - I wonder if VN's "Majestic" could be an indication of this hôtel de luxe at the avenue Kleber, visited by Czar Nicholas II in 1896 and where the British delegation for the Versailles Peace Treaty had been installed, in 1919 ( R.D.H sources: "The Churchill College Archives, Cambridge, HNKY 3/24, ltter from Sir M. Hankey to Adeline Hankey. Also Sisley Huddleston's "In and About Paris" (1927), 174-5). Besides the various hotels mentioned in "Ada", we may find it emplyed as an adjective in the lines about " the majestic touch", in Shade's "Pale Fire". I considered checking into more info on writer Sydney Schiff and his wife, Violet, in "Ada", besides various other names and anedoctes cited in connection to this encounter - but I abandoned the idea.

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