hallucinatory episode. Upon grasping the situation regarding Van and Ada, he tells Van that Ada would be happier if he "gave her up"—and that he would disown Van completely if he failed to do so. Van acquiesces, leaves, and attempts suicide, which fails when his gun fails to fire. He then leaves his Manhattan apartment and preoccupies himself with hunting down a former servant at Ardis, Kim Beauharnais, who had been blackmailing them with photographic evidence of their affair, and beating him with an alpenstock until he is blind. Part 3: 8 chapters (1893–1922) With Ada having married Andrey Vinelander, Van occupies himself in traveling and his studies until 1901, when Lucette reappears in England. She has herself booked on the same transatlantic liner, the Admiral Tobakoff, that Van is taking back to America. She attempts to seduce him on the crossing and nearly succeeds, but is foiled when Ada appears as an actress in the film, Don Juan's Last Fling, that they are watching together on the onboard cinema. Lucette consumes a number of sleeping pills and commits suicide by throwing herself from the Tobakoff into the Atlantic. In March 1905, Demon dies in a plane crash. Later in 1905, Ada and Andrey arrive in Switzerland. Van meets with them, and has an affair with Ada while pretending that they are engaged in uncovering Lucette's fortune, concealed in various hidden bank accounts. They formulate a plan for her to leave her husband and live with him. This is now considered possible due to the death of Demon. During their stay in Switzerland, however, Andrey falls ill with tuberculosis, and Ada decides that she cannot abandon him until he has recovered. Van and Ada part, and Andrey remains ill for 17 years, at which point he dies. Ada then flies back to Switzerland to meet with Van. Part 4: Not subdivided (i.e. 1 chapter) (1922) This part consists of Van's lecture on "The Texture of Time", apparently transcribed from his reading it into a tape recorder as he drives across Europe from the Adriatic to meet Ada in Mont Roux, Switzerland, while she is on her way from America via Geneva. The transcription has then been edited to merge into a description of his and Ada's actual meeting, and then out again. This makes this part of the novel notably self-reflexive, and it is sometimes cited as the "difficult" part