I’d been examining John Shade’s disappointment with his daughter Hazel [“She might have been you, me, or some quaint blend:/ Nature chose me so as to wrench and rend/Your heart and mine…[   ]Alas, the dingy cygnet never turned/ Into a wood duck”],  after a chance encounter with Emma Bovary’s own misgivings about her little girl, Berthe [MB,ch 6:  "It is very strange," thought Emma, "how ugly this child is!"]

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2413/old/mbova11h.htm

But, before I could grasp the true strength of his admission [ “ She was my darling: difficult, morose — / But still my darling.”] and his wife’s grief, I got side-tracked, as usual, by various online blogs on “Nabokov and Flaubert,” even a 2013 article which I think hasn’t been posted at the VN-L, approaching “The Tragedy of Mr.Morn” and VN’s “deeper truth,” one that found its way into “Pale Fire”* (the focus now is on CK’s Zembla).

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* - "Pieces," by Michelle Bailat-Jones - "Nabokov on Madame Bovary" Posted: July 3, 2008 ; http://michellebailatjones.com/http://michellebailatjones.com/
Excerpts: “Of the essays I’ve read so far in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, the one on Madame Bovary was the most complex [   ] It’s clear he knew the book practically by heart [  ] For this particular lecture, Nabokov doesn’t only focus on the actual text of “Madame Bovary” but he brings in a discussion of Flaubert’s letters to his then lover, Louise Colet…That added input adds a whole new dimension to understanding Flaubert’s intent. We often wonder whether great writers do things on purpose in their books, or if critics see things or find connections/allusions/hidden meanings the writer created by accident or maybe wasn’t fully aware of. The excerpts of these letters show that Flaubert knew exactly what he was doing at all times…Nabokov taught Madame Bovary to his students at Wellesley and Cornell using a translation by Eleanor Marx Aveling (the daughter of Karl Marx) which is available at Gutenberg. I don’t know how many other translations were around at the same time, but Nabokov has nothing but angry criticism for “the translators”…[  ]

Beautiful Failures: Nabokov and Flaubert's Early Attempts, Benjamin Lytal. April 2013.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/nabokov-mister-morn-flaubert-anthony-novels.html Excerpts: "A first novel is like spring lamb, tender and pink [  ]But then there are the real treasures, the rehearsals that never got published, the artifacts that invite you to reconstruct what an author wanted to do, before she did it. Did Jane Austen know, sitting with “Elinor and Marianne” on her lap, that she would keep writing, that she would never stop, that the rudiments on her page would refine themselves into anything like “Pride and Prejudice”? [  ]Even Vladimir Nabokov, the high priest of readerly hygiene, occasionally allowed himself this kind of communion. He may have forbidden his Cornell students from identifying or sympathizing with any fictional characters. But identifying with the author was a different matter. Nabokov told his students of writers’ travails, urging them to consider the number of days Flaubert took to write the scene with Emma and Leon in the Lion d’Or [  ] Now we have an invitation to root for the young Nabokov. His first major effort, “The Tragedy of Mister Morn,” has been translated for the first time. “Mister Morn” is a verse play, but its speeches are bright with Nabokovian gems [   ]Reading this tale of an exiled king from a fantasy kingdom, one wonders if Nabokov realized, in 1924, that he was writing the first draft of “Pale Fire” (1962)[  ] It’s “Mister Morn,” however, that seems most enticingly predictive of Nabokov’s great work. The flutter of magic, the avuncular twinkle, the B-movie danger—it’s all here.[  ] Every speech in the play seems to take some kind of renunciation as its occasion [  ]Nabokov’s first, crazier effort is the one that shows his ambition plain [   ]Call it the Icarian début. The kind that might not even get published, because the author has flown too close to the sun. Gustave Flaubert would be the archetype [   ] as the biographer Enid Starkie notes, his friends knew full well that romanticism was on the wane [  ]His next book would be a masterpiece of restraint called “Madame Bovary.”  But Flaubert always came back to his “Temptation.”[  ] We know that Nabokov was rereading Flaubert when he was writing “The Tragedy of Mister Morn.” He had already read all of Flaubert in French by the age of fourteen or fifteen; in his thirties he would report that he had recently read “Madame Bovary” “for the hundredth time.” Both writers are famous for their obsessive perfectionism. Yet both wobbled between different modes; both started their careers with missteps their friends could have corrected. The history of their early failures speaks to a drive deeper than a superficial scratching around for le mot juste. Nabokov knew he was a magician. And Flaubert was a voluptuary [   ] Nabokov, in exile, had a ready-made metaphor for impossible dreams: as the eponymous hero of “Mister Morn” explains, “I’ll quietly live out the rest of my strange life / to the secret tune of my royal memories.”… Flaubert and Nabokov…lunged early, striking out with full faith in their own sense of direction. They got nowhere; they went back and started in a different course. But each came back, in the end.”