Monsieur
Couturier,
Please find
attached the scan of a few pages containing all the information
you require.
The pages are from
Index Librorum Prohibitoru by Pisanus Fraxi [Henry
Spencer Ashbee]
(Privately printed
1877-85), more exactly from the 1962 facsimile reprint as Bibliography of
Prohibited Books in 3 vols. by Jack Brussel, New York.
The French translation in
question is of Nocturnal Revels; or, the History of King's-Place,
and
other Modern
Nunneries....In Two Volumes. London: Printed for M. Goadby,
Pater-Noster Row. 1779.
Charlotte Hayes is
mentioned earlier in the book, on page 257, under "Fashionale Lectures:
composed
and delivered with Birch
Discipline, By the following, and many other Beautiful Ladies, Who have
filled
with universal
approbation, the characters of Mother, Step-Mother...."
By the way, the work
mentioned before Nocturnal Revels is The New
Epicurean; or, the Delights of Sex,
Facetiously and
Philosophically Considered, in Graphic Letters Addressed to Young Ladies of
Quality.
London 1740. The extracts
cited are very interesting when compared to Eric Veen's Villa
Venus.
A. Bouazza.
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
All private
editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.