PALE FIRE, Line 247: John Shade’s wife, née Irondell (which comes not from a little valley yielding iron ore but from the French for "swallow"). She was a few months his senior. I understand she came of Canadian stock, as did Shade’s maternal grandmother (a first cousin of Sybil’s grandfather, if I am not greatly mistaken).
TRANSPARENT THINGS: 1. He had retained the hotel's name, Locquet, because it resembled the maiden name of his mother, a French Canadian, whom Person Senior was to survive by less than a year. He also remembered that it was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the rez-de-chaussee windows of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters.
2....have never been able to get rid of my mother's Canadian accent, though I hear it clearly when I whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Déjanire that I may mount sur mon bucher ( poor burning Hugh...)
................................................................................................................................................................................
Probably my observation below is way off the mark but... since I'd been reading through various other paragraphs of Pale Fire and came across a complicated reference (in this respect I'm like Kinbote) to various "obtained" flowers, insects and birds from "Canada to Austral regions", - that ends mentioning "atlantis" - I decided to quote it here for it reminded me of Jerry's: "Maybe some reference to the European-versus-American-names theme, though" and Boyd's "As Shade and Nabokov would know, the rather local Toothwort White butterfly could not feed on the flowers of this European family without crossing the Atlantic."