place
Menton
also: Ментона, Ментоне, Menton
A town on the French Riviera near the Italian border, a fashionable resort for wealthy Russians in the nineteenth century; Volodya lived there with his father, then in mourning for another woman, at age seven, and recalls it -- along with the color of the sky and sea -- in his final hours, and again in his death-vision of his father.
Reading notes
- Volodya §121 his late father, in a top hat with a wide black band
Volodya's dying vision returns to his father, whom he recalls (section 101) as having lived with him in Menton in mourning dress for an unnamed woman when Volodya was seven; the hallucinated embrace and fall into darkness closes the story on an image of the one wholly loving memory Volodya has access to, recovered only in the instant of death.