After receiving an anonymous note, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) tears apart his best bow tie:
The novelistic theme of written communications has now really got into its stride. When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: ‘One must not berne you.’ Only a French-speaking person would use that word for ‘dupe.’ Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction — descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. To interview them all — torture the males, rape the females — would be, of course, absurd and degrading. With a puerile wrench he broke his best black butterfly on the wheel of his exasperation. The pain from the fang bite was now reaching his heart. He found another tie, finished dressing and went to look for Ada. (1.40)
In his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735) Alexander Pope asks "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?":
Let Sporus tremble –"What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys,
Breaking on the wheel was a form of torture in which victims had their long bones broken by an iron bar while tied to a Catherine wheel. The phrase "to break a butterfly upon a wheel" became proverbial and is used to suggest someone is employing superabundant effort in the accomplishment of a small matter.
Mrs. Arbuthnot and her son Gerald are the characters in Oscar Wilde's play A Woman of No Importance (1893). In Wilde's play Mrs. Arbuthnot says: "For me the world is shrivelled to a palm's breadth, and where I walk there are thorns." In De Profundis (1897), a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in Reading Gaol, Wilde quotes Mrs. Arbuthnot's words:
I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that. I am quite candid when I say that rather than go out from this prison with bitterness in my heart against the world, I would gladly and readily beg my bread from door to door. If I got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share. I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart. The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all. You can see to what intensity of individualism I have arrived—or am arriving rather, for the journey is long, and ‘where I walk there are thorns.’
Thorns bring to mind 'thorns and nettles' in an old ditty that the peasant girls sing as they walk past through a coppice:
With the fading of that fugitive flame his mood changed. Something should be said, a command should be given, the matter was serious or might become serious. They were now about to enter Gamlet, the little Russian village, from which a birch-lined road led quickly to Ardis. A small procession of kerchiefed peasant nymphs, unwashed, no doubt, but adorably pretty with naked shiny shoulders and high-divided plump breasts tuliped up by their corsets, walked past through a coppice, singing an old ditty in their touching English:
Thorns and nettles
For silly girls:
Ah, torn the petals,
Ah, spilled the pearls!
‘You have a little pencil in your back pocket,’ said Van to Lucette. ‘May I borrow it, I want to write down that song.’
‘If you don’t tickle me there,’ said the child.
Van reached for Ada’s book and wrote on the fly leaf, as she watched him with odd wary eyes:
I don’t wish to see him again.
It’s serious.
Tell M. not to receive him or I leave.
No answer required.
She read it, and slowly, silently erased the lines with the top of the pencil which she passed back to Van, who replaced it where it had been.
‘You’re awfully fidgety,’ Lucette observed without turning. ‘Next time,’ she added, ‘I won’t have him dislodge me.’
They now swept up to the porch, and Trofim had to cuff the tiny blue-coated reader in order to have him lay his book aside and jump down to hand Ada out of the carriage. (1.39)
The Russian coachman in "Ardis the Second," Trofim Fartukov marries Blanche (a French handmaid at Ardis who wrote to Van an anonymous note), and they have a blind child.