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M-r Champagne (Alphonse Ludovikovich Champagne)
Champagne
also: Шампунь, m-r Шампунь, Альфонс Людовикович, Alphonse Ludovikovich, Альфонс Шампунь, Alphonse Champagne
A clean-shaven old Frenchman, once Kamyshev's children's tutor, now kept on as a kind of live-in companion (a "male governess") who must endure his patron's endless chauvinistic tirades against France and the French; his surname is a comic Russianized rendering of a French name (Шампунь literally reads as "shampoo" in Russian).
Reading notes
- In a Foreign Land §2 male nanny
A translation of the Russian "бонна мужского пола" (literally "a male bonne/governess"), a wry coinage -- a bonna was normally a live-in nursemaid or governess for young children, an exclusively female role, so applying it to a grown man kept on past his usefulness underscores Champagne's degraded, dependent, almost feminized position in the household.