Monique

Monique is a young Parisian prostitute whom Humbert Humbert encounters during his European years, and she stands out among the many paid women he has used as the only one who gives him a pang of genuine pleasure, because she retains a nymphic echo of the child she recently was.

Identity and Appearance

Monique is a short, slim girl with brown bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes, and pale skin. She wears a tight-fitting pearl-gray tailored dress that sheaths her young body, and her hips are no bigger than those of a squatting lad. Humbert notes that her compact, neat, curiously immature body suggests she is adding one or two years to her age when she claims to be eighteen. Her hands are grubby, with dirty fingernails, and she speaks with a melodious, silvery precision. She has a dimpled round little face, long lashes, and a childish something mingling with the professional fretillement of her small agile rump.

The Encounter and Its Significance

Humbert meets Monique on a gray spring afternoon near the Madeleine in Paris. She passes him at a rapid, high-heeled, tripping step; they glance back at the same moment, stop, and he accosts her. She asks her price and promptly replies "Cent" with melodious precision. When he tries to haggle, she sees the awful lone longing in his lowered eyes and says "Tant pis," making as if to move away. The evocation that perhaps only three years earlier he might have seen her coming home from school settles the matter, and he follows her up the usual steep stairs to the abject room, all bed and bidet. She asks at once for her petit cadeau and gives her name as Monique and her age as eighteen. Humbert, well acquainted with the banal way of streetwalkers, notes that they all answer "dix-huit"—a trim twitter, a note of finality and wistful deceit which they emit up to ten times per day. But in Monique's case he deduces from many details of her compact, neat, curiously immature body that she is, if anything, adding one or two years to her age. Having shed her clothes with fascinating rapidity, she stands for a moment partly wrapped in the dingy gauze of the window curtain, listening with infantile pleasure to an organ-grinder in the dust-brimming courtyard below. When Humbert examines her small hands and draws her attention to their grubby fingernails, she says with a naive frown "Oui, ce n'est pas bien" and goes to the wash-basin, but he says it does not matter. He declares that among the eighty or so grues he has had operate upon him, she is the only one that gives him a pang of genuine pleasure. She comments amiably, "Il etait malin, celui qui a invente ce truc-la," and gets back into her clothes with the same high-style speed.

The Second Meeting and Aftermath

Humbert asks for another, more elaborate assignment later the same evening, and she meets him at the corner cafe at nine, swearing she has never pose un lapin in all her young life. They return to the same room. He cannot help saying how very pretty she is, to which she answers demurely "Tu es bien gentil de dire ca." Noticing what Humbert notices too in the mirror—the dreadful grimace of clenched-teeth tenderness that distorts his mouth—dutiful little Monique wants to know if she should remove the layer of red from her lips avant qu'on se couche in case he plans to kiss her. He lets himself go with her more completely than with any young lady before, and his last vision that night of long-lashed Monique is touched up with a gaiety he finds seldom associated with any event in his humiliating, sordid, taciturn love life. She looks tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty he gives her as she trots out into the April night drizzle with Humbert lumbering in her narrow wake. Stopping before a window display, she says with great gusto "Je vais m'acheter des bas!" and he never forgets the way her Parisian childish lips explode on "bas," pronouncing it with an appetite that all but changes the "a" into a brief buoyant bursting "o" as in "bot." He has a date with her the next day at 2:15 P.M. in his own rooms, but it is less successful; she seems to have grown less juvenile, more of a woman overnight. A cold he catches from her leads him to cancel a fourth assignment, and he is not sorry to break an emotional series that threatens to burden him with heart-rending fantasies and peter out in dull disappointment. He lets her remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a delinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.

Connection to Later Memory

Years later, when Humbert confronts Lolita in Coalmont and is struck by her flushed prominent pommettes, dead mother, big front teeth, and a bit of dingy red ribbon in her country-brown hair, the evoked image is not of Monique but of another young prostitute in a bellhouse, ages ago, who had been snapped up by somebody else before he had time to decide whether her mere youth warranted his risking some appalling disease. The memory of Monique, however, remains distinct as the one paid woman who gave him genuine pleasure, a figure who briefly embodied the nymphic echo he spent his life pursuing.