A Dr Froid, one of the administerial
centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of
the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same
man, because they both came from Vienne, Isère, and were only sons...
(Ada, 1.3)
According to Karamzin ("The Letters of a Russian Traveller", a
letter of 1790 from Lyon), Vienne (spelled Vien' by our traveller) is
the home town of Pontius Pilate who committed suicide near Vienne:
Я не увижу плодоносных стран Южной Франции,
которыми прельщалось мое воображение!.. Не увижу и тебя, отчизна Пилата
Понтийского! (Город Вьень.) Не взойду на ту высокую гору, на ту высокую башню,
где сей несчастный сидел в заключении; не загляну в ту ужасную пропасть, в
которую он бросился из отчаяния! (Так говорит предание. Сию башню и сию пропасть
показывают близ Вьеня.)*
On Antiterra Tolstoy's Detstvo i Otrochestvo
("Childhood and Boyhood") was published (as "Childhood and Fatherland") by
Pontius Press. (1.1)
Like Karamzin, Tolstoy traveled in Switzerland (where VN lived
since 1964), the fact stressed in Ada (1.24):
They parted again, Demon sailing back to
America, and Van with his tutor going first to Gardone on Lake Garda, where
Aksakov reverently pointed out Goethe's and d'Annunzio's marble footprints, and
then staying for a while in autumn at a hotel on a mountain slope above Leman
Lake (where Karamzin and Count Tolstoy had roamed).
*Wiki: Eusebius, quoting early apocryphal accounts,
stated that Pilate [who probably came from Central Italy] suffered
misfortune in the reign of Caligula (AD 37–41), was exiled to Gaul and
eventually committed suicide there in Vienne. (Historia Ecclesiae ii:
7)