I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr. Lagosse, Stepan
	Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-
	seventh birthday, and I hear from my wonderful new Everyrest
	chair a spade scrape and footsteps in the snow-sparkling
567.05	garden, and my old Russian valet, who is deafer than he thinks,
	pullout and push in nose-ringed drawers in the dressing room.
	This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true intro-
	duction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent
	likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle.
567.10	Of all their many houses, in Europe and in the Tropics, the
	château recently built in Ex, in the Swiss Alps, with its pillared
	front and crenelated turrets, became their favorite, especially
	in midwinter, when the famous glittering air, le cristal d’Ex,
	“matches the highest forms of human thought—pure mathe-
567.15	matics & decipherment” (unpublished ad).
	At least twice a year our happy couple indulged in fairly
	long travels. Ada did not breed or collect butterflies any more,
	but throughout her healthy and active old age loved to film
	them in their natural surroundings, at the bottom of her garden
567.20	or the end of the world, flapping and flitting, settling on flowers

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