- The longer Mademoiselle stays with the Nabokovs, the less she teaches and the more her mood sours.
- Compared to the others, after six years she feels like a member of the family. There are over fifteen staff in the town home, and double that in Vyra.
- When Mademoiselle is seated too far from the family at dinners, she pouts. She is hard of hearing and sensitive, and feels left out.
- Nabokov admits that it was her lovely, elegant voice that made him first fall in love with French. "This is why it makes me so sad to imagine now the anguish Mademoiselle must have felt at seeing how lost, how little valued was the nightingale voice which came from her elephantine body." (5.6.5)
- Perhaps, Nabokov thinks, she stayed too long at the party, but it was the radical Russian tutor Lenski who eventually forced her out.
- Lenski adored Vladimir's father for his political work, but hated how fancy the rest of the household was.
- Mademoiselle, with her French and formalities, was hated too. Often, Lenski outright ignored her. "'The brute! The cad! The Nihilist!' she would sob later in her room—which was no longer next to ours though still on the same floor." (5.6.7)
- In these days, Mademoiselle often threatens to leave, until one day, she does.