Several descriptions of Leonor Fini’s paintings and of photographs of her derive from illustrations in: Museo Revoltella Trieste, Leonor Fini: L’Italienne de Paris [exhibition catalogue] (Trieste: 2009), and Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome Press, n.d.).
A few descriptions of elegant Triestinas are based on photographs in Elvio Guagnini and Italo Zannier, eds., La Trieste dei Wulz: Volti di una Storia: Fotographie 1860–1980 (Trieste: Alinari, 1989).
The shy little marble girl— Sculpted by Donato Barcaglia, 1871. Now in the Museo Revoltella in Trieste.
The story (which Leonor especially loved) of Maximilian and “La Paloma”— From Webb, p. 10.
The “slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog”— Based on a painting by Giuseppe de Nittis, 1878, La Signora del Cane (Ritorno dalle Corse), which I saw at the Museo Revoltella.
Description of Rijeka— After a visit there in 2009.
The pale man in the photographer’s doorway in Prague— After a photograph in Pavel Scheufler, Fotografiké Album Čech 1839–1914 (Prague?: Odeon, 1989).
Leonor’s inability to face the death of her own cats— Webb, p. 207.
Leonor’s interest first in cadavers, then in mummies and skeletons— Somewhat after a direct quotation in Webb, p. 11.
“I dislike the deference with which your Rossetti’s been treated.”— Ibid., p. 71, somewhat altered.
The perfumed cat excrement at Leonor’s— After Webb, p. 46, who implies that the story may be apocryphal.
The pale women wading naked in dark water— After Museo Revoltella Trieste, pp. 160–61 (La Bagnanti, 1959).
“The men around me are dead…”— Altered from Webb, p. 143.
“I prefer cats…”— Altered from Webb, p. 25.
“femininity triumphing over a city”— Webb, p. 11 (Leonor is describing her relief of Amazons trampling men).
The “woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair”— After Museo Revoltella Trieste, p. 125 (Streghe Amauri, 1947).
Descriptions of mummies, Sekhmet, Hathor, etcetera— Based on visits to the Museo Egizio di Torino in 2009 and 2012.
THE TRENCH GHOST
Description of the trenches at Redipuglia— After a visit there in May 2012.
“I am not this.”— This simple yet profound point is indebted to I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, trans. from the Marathi taperecordings [sic] by Maurice Frydman, rev. & ed. Sudhakar S. Dikshit (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1973), p. 59: “To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not.”
Description of the pillboxes at Tungesnes (on the coast west of Stavanger)— After a visit there in September 2011.
“Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I.’”— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, p. 12.
“the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless.”— Ralph D. Sawyer, with Mei-Chün Sawyer, comp. and trans., The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (San Francisco: Westview, 1993), p. 335 (“Questions and Replies between T’ang T’ai-tsung and Li Wei-king” [written in Tang or Sung period], quoting Sun-tzu).
“It is the body that is in danger, not you.”— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, p. 412.
THE FAITHFUL WIFE
A few details of daily life in preindustrial Bohemia are indebted to information in Sylvia Welner and Kevin Welner, eds., Small Doses of Arsenic: A Bohemian Woman’s Story of Survival (New York: Hamilton Books / The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2005), pp. 4–23, 33–35. [The letter-writer’s surname is not given; she is simply introduced as Tonca, writing to her son Jaroslav. Her childhood recollections take place in the early twentieth century; I have assumed that the early-nineteenth-century existence of Michael and Milena’s family was no richer than hers.]
Return of female Romanian vampires; tale of Alexander of Pyrgos— Summers, The Vampire in Europe, pp. 310, 232.
The Bohemian custom of masking oneself on the way home from a funeral— Ibid., p. 287.
The seventh Mansion of the Moon, called Alarzach— Francis Barrett, A Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer: A Complete System of Occult Philosophy (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975 pbk. repr. of 1975 ed.; orig. pub. 1801), Book I, p. 154.
The tale of Merit— Her grave-goods and her husband’s are on display (“the tomb of Kha”) at the Museo Egizio di Torino.
“I have found a woman more bitter than death…”— Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Rev. Montague R. Summers (New York: Dover, 1971 repr. of 1948 rev. ed; orig. Latin ed. ca. 1484), p. 47. (Sentence originally began with “And I have found…”).
The vampire who first chuckles, then whinnies like a horse— Pëtr Bogatyrëv, Vampires in the Carpathians: Magical Acts, Rites, and Beliefs in Subcarpathian Rus’, trans. Stephen Reynolds and Patricia A. Krafcik, w/ bio. intro. by Svetlana P. Sorokina (New York: East European Monographs, dist. Columbia University Press, 1998; orig. French ed. 1929), p. 132.
The Dark Man by the water (“he torments people when he finds them by the waterside”)— Ibid., p. 133.