Gaston Godin
Gaston Godin, a French teacher at Beardsley College, serves as Humbert Humbert's chess partner and unwitting social shield during the Beardsley period. A flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor with a conical pear-head and phenomenally stout legs, he ambulates with elephantine stealth and wears black constantly, seldom bathing. His English is a burlesque, yet the community considers him a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow. He is a mediocre teacher and worthless scholar, but his presence in Humbert's life is crucial: his own hidden perversions make him a perfect, oblivious foil for Humbert's far more dangerous secret.
Appearance, Character, and Hidden Life
Gaston is physically grotesque: enormous in his lower body, with narrow, uneven shoulders, sleek black hair on one side of his head and only a few plastered wisps on the other. He paints a little, a fraud, and his garret studio is decorated with large photographs of André Gide, Tchaikovsky, Norman Douglas, Nijinsky, and Marcel Proust. He keeps an album of snapshots of all the local boys, the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and murmurs wistfully, "Oui, ils sont gentils." He has these boys perform simple chores around his house and rewards them with fancy chocolates with real liqueurs inside, in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, adorned with amusing daggers and pistols. Despite this, he is crooned over by the old and caressed by the young in priggish New England, fooling everybody.
Chess Games and Unwitting Complicity
Humbert prefers his own house for their chess games, which occur two or three times weekly. Gaston sits like an old battered idol, his pudgy hands in his lap, staring at the board as if it were a corpse, wheezing for ten minutes before making a losing move. He is utterly oblivious to the sounds of Lolita's bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room below, only rubbing his head or cheek when her jumping disturbs his concentration. When Lolita occasionally slouches in, Gaston ceremoniously rises to shake her hand, releases it, and descends again into his chair without once looking at her. One day around Christmas, after a fortnight's absence, he asks Humbert, "Et toutes vos fillettes, elles vont bien?" revealing that he has multiplied Humbert's single Lolita into a plurality based on the different clothes he has glimpsed her wearing. This profound obliviousness is precisely what makes Gaston's company so safe for Humbert.
Role as Social Shield and Irony
Gaston speaks well of Humbert to the Beardsleyans, acting as his good herald. Humbert enjoys his company because of the "spell of absolute security that his ample person cast on my secret." Had Gaston discovered Humbert's tastes and Lolita's status, it would have interested him only insofar as it shed light on Humbert's easy attitude toward him. The irony is profound: Gaston, a glum, repulsive, fat old invert, is accepted and pampered by society, while Humbert, who considers himself far more discreet, lives in constant terror of exposure. Gaston's presence provides Humbert with a plausible social context, a label and a background, and his company is particularly safe because of his own hidden nature. He also gives Humbert a copper money box, a "luizetta" from Algiers, which Humbert repurposes to store his loaded automatic pistol.
Departure and Fate
Gaston eventually leaves for a voyage to Europe from which he does not return. Humbert learns that he got involved in a "sale histoire" in Naples of all places. His departure marks the end of a peculiar but vital chapter in Humbert's life, removing the one person whose very presence provided a bizarre form of cover for Humbert's crimes.
