Madame Charles Chamar:
"Diablonnet always reminds me of the Russian for 'apple trees':
yabloni." (Transparent Things,
12)
Diablonnet combines French diable (devil) with
Russian net (no; there is not).
According to Charles Baudelaire (Petits Poèmes en
prose, 1869), la plus
belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!
(the
greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not
exist)
Another trick of the devil was
offering Eve an apple (the fruit of knowledge). One of the characters in R.'s
Tralatitions (TT, 19) is Adam von Librikov (a sly
scramble, as Hugh Person correctly suspects).
A great part of his life's
last two years the author of Les Fleurs du mal spent in Belgian
hospitals (in his poem Exile VN mentions great
Baudelaire and his Belgian hell). Armande's mother dies in a Belgian
hospital (TT, 18).
Alexey
Sklyarenko