Abdel Bouazza: "Alexey’s recent postings on Ada’s
Villa Venus reminded me of ...The New Epicurean listed in Pisanus Fraxi’s Index
Librorum Prohibitoru (London 1877-1885)...“the extracts cited are very
interesting when compared to Eric Veen's Villa
Venus.”...
Jansy Mello: Walled-in gardens figured
prominently in the lavish descriptions of Sir Charles's mansion. My
undisciplined associations led me to Sebastian's visits to a movie to
watch a film called "The Enchanted Garden" (there seems to be no relation to Ben
Sirine's translation of "The Perfumed Garden"):and then to "ADA".(what a pity
that Humbert Humbert didn't film Lolita playing tennis, although she might have
appeared in a production by Quilty...)
RLSK: "He went to concerts and plays,
and drank hot milk in the middle of the night at coffee stalls with taxi
drivers. He is said to have been three times to see the same film — a perfectly
insipid one called The Enchanted Garden. A couple of months after his
death, and a few days after I had learnt who Madame Lecerf really was, I
discovered that film in a French cinema where I sat through the performance,
with the sole intent of learning why it had attracted him so. Somewhere in the
middle the story shifted to the Riviera, and there was a glimpse of bathers
basking in the sun. Was Nina among them? Was it her naked shoulder? I thought
that one girl who glanced back at the camera looked rather like her, but sun-oil
and sun tan, and an eye-shade are much too good at disguising a passing
face."
Now my paths forked and it was Ada, in another film,
who proved as fascinating an actress as Nina Rechnoy has been in
her lover's eyes, many many years later
For me, the Ardis part of VN's novel still dominates my vision of the
entire book whereas the fantasies that animate the "floramors"
fiction are almost left aside...
ADA: "The main picture had now
started. The three leading parts — cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his
donkey, and not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna — were
played by solid stars... the picture turned out to be quite good./On the way to
the remote castle where the difficult lady, widowed by his sword, has finally
promised him a long night of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging
libertine nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of robust
belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle
he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl
(lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She
also predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out of the circus
tent to water Juan’s horse, Van knew who she would be./ In the magic rays of the
camera, in the controlled delirium of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had
glanced off and she was again that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as he had
jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman’s mistranslation):
a remembered triviality that intruded upon the chill of his present emotion with
the jarring stupidity of an innocent stranger’s asking an absorbed voyeur for
directions in a labyrinth of mean lanes./Lucette recognized Ada three or four
seconds later...She was absolutely perfect, and strange, and poignantly
familiar. By some stroke of art, by some enchantment of chance, the few brief
scenes she was given formed a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892
looks...Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion
of her shoulder. It is no longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl
twisting an aquarelle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle
is now a bog flower."