📔 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

On a sunny September morning, with the trees still green, but the asters and fleabanes already taking over in ditch and dalk, Van set out for Ladoga, N.A.

Then the anguish increased to unendurable massivity and nightmare dimensions, making her scream and vomit.

There was a crescent eaten out of a vine leaf by a sphingid larva.

He knew she was nothing but a fubsy pig-pink whorelet and would elbow her face away when she attempted to kiss him after he had finished […]

Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists.

I have frequented bordels since my sixteenth year, but […] nothing about them pre-announced the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus.

He must be gaga to have forgotten what she said the last time about her strange anthophobia (somehow stemming from that debauche à trois thirty years ago). Roses she never liked anyway.

Demon screwed in his monocle, unclicked out of its special flat case a small pen-and-wash and said he thought (did not doubt, in fact, but wished his certitude to be admired) that it was an unknown product of Parmigianino's tender art.

no direct access could be obtained to the banned, or burned, books of the three cosmologists, Xertigny, Yates and Zotov (pen names), who had recklessly started the whole business half a century earlier, causing, and endorsing, panic, demency and execrable romanchiks.

Ada, on the grass, kept trying to make an anadem of marguerites for the dog while Lucette looked on, munching a crumpet.