Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

That library had provided a raised stage for the unforgettable scene of the Burning Barn; it had thrown open its glazed doors; it had promised a long idyll of bibliolatry; it might have become a chapter in one of the old novels on its own shelves; a touch of parody gave its theme the comic relief of life.

22

My sister, do you still recall

The blue Ladore and Ardis Hall?

Don’t you remember any more

That castle bathed by the Ladore?

Ma sœur, te souvient-il encore

Du château que baignait la Dore?

My sister, do you still recall

The Ladore-washed old castle wall?

Sestra moya, tï pomnish’ goru,

I dub vïsokiy, i Ladoru?

My sister, you remember still

The spreading oak tree and my hill?

Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline

Et le grand chêne et ma colline?

Oh, who will give me back my Jill

And the big oak tree and my hill?

Oh! qui me rendra, mon Adèle,

Et ma montagne et l’hirondelle?

Oh! qui me rendra ma Lucile,

La Dore et l’hirandelle agile?

Oh, who will render in our tongue

The tender things he loved and sung?

They went boating and swimming in Ladore, they followed the bends of its adored river, they tried to find more rhymes to it, they walked up the hill to the black ruins of Bryant’s Castle, with the swifts still flying around its tower. They traveled to Kaluga and drank the Kaluga Waters, and saw the family dentist. Van, flipping through a magazine, heard Ada scream and say ‘chort’ (devil) in the next room, which he had never heard her do before. They had tea at a neighbor’s, Countess de Prey — who tried to sell them, unsuccessfully, a lame horse. They visited the fair at Ardisville where they especially admired the Chinese tumblers, a German clown, and a sword-swallowing hefty Circassian Princess who started with a fruit knife, went on to a bejeweled dagger and finally engulfed, string and all, a tremendous salami sausage.

They made love — mostly in glens and gullies.

To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal. Their craving for each other grew unbearable if within a few hours it was not satisfied several times, in sun or shade, on roof or in cellar, anywhere. Despite uncommon resources of ardor, young Van could hardly keep pace with his pale little amorette (local French slang). Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint lazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue — the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September. The orchards and vineyards were particularly picturesque that year; and Ben Wright was fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home from the Vendange Festival at Brantôme near Ladore.

Which reminds us. Catalogued in the Ardis library under ‘Exot Lubr’ was a sumptuous tome (known to Van through Miss Vertograd’s kind offices) entitled ‘Forbidden Masterpieces: a hundred paintings representing a private part of Nat. Gal. (Sp. Sct.), printed for H.R.M. King Victor.’ This was (beautifully photographed in color) the kind of voluptuous and tender stuff that Italian masters allowed themselves to produce in between too many pious Resurrections during a too long and lusty Renaissance. The volume itself had been either lost or stolen or lay concealed in the attic among Uncle Ivan’s effects, some of them pretty bizarre. Van could not recollect whose picture it was that he had in mind, but thought it might have been attributed to Michelangelo da Caravaggio in his youth. It was an oil on unframed canvas depicting two misbehaving nudes, boy and girl, in an ivied or vined grotto or near a small waterfall overhung with bronze-tinted and dark emerald leaves, and great bunches of translucent grapes, the shadows and limpid reflections of fruit and foliage blending magically with veined flesh.