Maurice Couturier writes:

 

Though I have practically completed my annotations of "Lolita" (which Brian
Boyd has already read and annotated), I have just made a new discovery which I
can't wait to tell you about. As an aficionado of Guillaume Apollinaire, I
recently came across a long introduction to "Fanny Hill" which he published in
1914 in which he writes about the London world of prostitutes in the
eighteeenth century. He relies mostly on two sources, Casanova's "Memoirs" and
a book entitled "Les sérails de Londres ou les amusements nocturnes, contenant
les scènes qui y sont journellement représentées, les portraits et la
description des courtisanes les plus célèbres et les caractères de ceux qui
les fréquentent", allegedly a translation of an English book (no name of
author nor of translator), published in Paris, "chez Barba", in 1801. I tried
to trace the "original" in the catalogue of the British Library but couldn't
find it; but I found, instead, a reference to that French "translation".

 

In the long passages quoted by Apollinaire in that introduction, there is a
long evocation of a famous prostitute named "Charlotte Hayes, femme bien
connue pour sa galanterie et ses intrigues..." who was supported by a man
called Tracey, "un des hommes les plus dissipés du siècle par rapport au beau
sexe." Considering the similarity of this name with "Charlotte Haze" and "Mrs.
Hays" ("the brisk, brickly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court",
Part II, ch. 22), it is reasonable to assume that Nabokov lifted them  either
from the book published in 1801 or from a reprint of it published in 1911, or,
more likely, from that introduction. My bet would be that he came across that
French edition of "Fanny Hill" in the stall of a "bouquiniste" along the Seine
while he lived in Paris; or perhaps he went to the "Bibliothèque Nationale"
which has both that edition of "Fanny Hill" and the 1911 edition of "Les
sérails de Londres".

 

If anybody comes across the English "original" of "Les sérails" I'd very much
like to hear about it.

 

Maurice Couturier