And here is that other frenzy of metamorphosis and insectoid mutation I alluded to, from Nabokov's 'Ada or Ardour: a Family Chronicle':


On those relentlessly hot July afternoons, Ada liked to sit on a cool piano stool of ivoried wood at a white-oilcloth'd table in the sunny music room, her favourite botanical atlas open before her, and copy out in colour on creamy paper some singular flower. She might choose, for instance, an insect-mimicking orchid which she would proceed to enlarge with remarkable skill. Or else she combined one species with another (unrecorded but possible), introducing odd little changes and twists that seemed almost morbid in so young a girl so nakedly dressed. The long beam slanting in from the french window glowed in the faceted tumbler, in the tinted water, and on the tin of the paintbox - and while she delicately painted an eyespot or the lobes of a lip, rapturous concentration caused the tip of her tongue to curl at the corner of her mouth, and as the sun looked on, the fantastic black-blue-brown-haired child seemed in her turn to mimic the mirror-of-Venus bloom.


Ada also, Hesse-Honiger-like, has a 'larvarium' full of insects, which serve via their (often mutating and deliberately mispronounced) names, like the Wolf Man's multi-lingual butterfly, as hot-beds of enmeshing or encryption.