A.Sklyarenko: "L'arbre aux quarante écus d'or, at least in the fall". -
The French call ginkgo biloba "l'arbre aux quarante écus." ... The (otherwise
charming) girls in Pushkin's poem have one little defect: they lack what women
have between legs.* [*in a letter of November 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov
wrote: "lift up the hem of our Muse's skirt and you'll see there a flat
spot."] Apparently, it is not the case with Miss Condor (con d'or), as
Lucette dubs the almost naked mulatto girl onboard the Tobakoff who resembles
Ada (3.5).
JM: I once thought that
Nabokov's reference to forty jars in Bend Sinister (I
think) indicated the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Now that
the ginkgo biloba/ "quarante écus" stood out from its sentence, I'd better
abandon my former theory (in its application to Ada) and move
on to maidenhair! (gingko/maidenhair leave quite an impression or, at
least, ink-blots in an early infolio)*
And the
forty damsels lacked something between their legs? I suppose they
would. ( It was Gogol, not Chekov, whose beautiful girls had
a face that was as smooth and flat as an egg, as Nabokov
mentions in his biography of Gogol while he was thinking
about...Freud!)
.............................................................................................................................
*
" ...'Volosyanka.’...vulgar Russian word for
Maidenhair...Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now!
Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of
the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to
the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner
monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert,
n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante écus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never
shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is
showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia,
Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, marée noire
by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!"
wikipedia: Ginkgo (Ginkgo
biloba; in Chinese and Japanese 銀杏, pinyin romanization: yín xìng, Hepburn
romanization: ichō or ginnan), also spelled gingko and known as the
Maidenhair Tree, is a unique species of tree with no close living
relatives. The tree is widely cultivated and introduced, since an early period
in human history, and has various uses as a food and traditional medicine...The
species was initially described by Linnaeus in 1771, the specific epithet biloba
derived from the Latin bis 'two' and loba 'lobed', referring to the shape of the
leaves.[13] Two names for the species recognise the botanist Richard Salisbury,
a placement by Nelson as Pterophyllus salisburiensisand the earlier
Salisburia adiantifolia proposed by James Edward Smith. The epithet of
the latter may have been intended to denote a characteristic resembling
Adiantum, the genus of maidenhair ferns