Vladimir Nabokov. Solus Rex
Vladimir Nabokov. SOLUS REX
The riding whip had come the previous day but had not been taken: the prince (who, by the way, had set the fashion of using bad French at court) had called it with scorn ace machin ridicule" and contended that it belonged to the groom's little boy, who must have forgotten it on the king's porch. "Et mon bonhomme de pere, tu sais, a une vraie passion pour les objets trouves."
"I've been thinking how much truth there is in what you were saying. Books say nothing about it at all."
"About what?" asked the prince, laboriously trying to reconstruct which stray theor