Paris

Paris is the European capital where Humbert Humbert spends his formative adult years, and it functions in his memoir as the dense, cultured, and corrupt backdrop against which his European identity, his literary career, and his disastrous first marriage take shape before his transatlantic migration to America.

Humbert's Parisian Life and Literary Career

Born in 1910 in Paris to a Swiss father and an English mother, Humbert grows up on the Riviera but returns to Paris as a young man. There he pursues his studies with meticulous intensity, first planning a degree in psychiatry before switching to English literature. Paris suits him: he discusses Soviet movies with expatriates, sits with uranists at the Deux Magots, publishes tortuous essays in obscure journals, and composes pastiches. He launches an "Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise" for a prominent publishing firm and begins compiling a manual of French literature for English-speaking students that will occupy him throughout the 1940s. He also finds work teaching English to adults in Auteuil and later at a school for boys. During these years, he takes advantage of acquaintances among social workers and psychotherapists to visit orphanages and reform schools, where he can stare at pale pubescent girls with impunity.

Marriage to Valeria in Paris

In Paris, Humbert marries Valeria, a woman who attracts him because she gives an imitation of a little girl. The marriage lasts from 1935 to 1939, and the couple lives in a small, squalid flat with two rooms, a hazy view from one window, a brick wall from the other, a tiny kitchen, and a shoe-shaped bathtub. They spend cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir while he works at a rickety table; they go to movies, bicycle races, and boxing matches. The grocer opposite has a little daughter whose shadow drives Humbert mad, but with Valeria's help he finds some legal outlets for his predicament. They eat most of their meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte. The marriage ends when Valeria announces she has another man, a White Russian ex-colonel and taxi driver named Maximovich, and leaves Humbert in Paris.

The Parisian Underworld of Prostitution

Humbert's Paris years also include his encounters with the city's commercial sex trade. He meets Monique, a short, slim girl with brown bobbed hair and luminous gray eyes who comes up hardly to his chest hair; she asks for "cent" and leads him up steep stairs to an abject room with a bed and bidet. She is the only prostitute among the eighty or so he has had who gives him a pang of genuine pleasure. He also visits Mlle Edith's office, where an advertisement in a lewd magazine lands him, and is taken by an asthmatic, garlicky procuress to her domicile, where a monstrously plump, sallow girl of at least fifteen sits nursing a bald doll. When he tries to leave, two men join in the squabble, and he thrusts a banknote into the indifferent hand of the girl, Marie, before being allowed to leave.

Paris as a Point of Departure

Paris is the city from which Humbert departs for America. In the summer of 1939, his uncle in America dies, bequeathing him an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition he come to live in the States and show some interest in his business. The prospect is welcome; Humbert feels his life needs a shakeup. Divorce proceedings delay his voyage, and after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, he at last reaches the States. Paris thus stands as the terminus of his European existence and the origin of the American journey that will lead him to Lolita. In his later years, after losing Lolita, Humbert returns to Paris in memory: he recalls a woman at a tea there who tells him that her daughter, now married, had been crazy about him when she was ten, and he cannot even remember if he ever noticed her in that garden next to those tennis courts a dozen years before.