"He [Van]
started to caress her [Cordula] under the table, but
she gently removed his hand, whispering 'womenses,' as whimsically
as another girl had done in some other dream... She talked on and on...
reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana."
(Ada, 1.42)
As has been pointed out before, "Quizz
Quisana" hints at Quisisana, a popular restaurant on the Nevsky
Avenue in the pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg. The place teemed with
prostitutes, syphilitics, cocaine addicts, etc. The jokers used to say: "mens
sana in Quisisana."
There is mens in menses and
menses in 'womenses' (the Brownhill schoolgirl slang). Btw.,
in my translation of Ada I coined the word женструация that neatly
blends женщина (woman) with менструация (menstrual flow).
Alexey Sklyarenko