[PW] "speechless multilinguist" in Nabakov's ADA

[Dennis Lien]

The following passage appears in Nabakov's ADA, OR ARDOR:

http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/

(part one, chapter 36)

  	By July the ten A's had dwindled to nine, and the four D's to
	three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned
	Armchair, but the D was lost—faking the fate of its apostro-
	phizable double as imagined by a Walter C. Keyway, Esq., just
224.10 	before the latter landed, with a couple of unstamped postcards,
	in the arms of a speechless multilinguist in a frock coat with
	brass buttons. The wit of the Veens (says Ada in a marginal
	note) knows no bounds.

**********

The context is a scrabble game;  "Walter C. Keyway, Esq." is apparently
a pun for  "Walter seek a way, ask."  But a colleague is trying to
puzzle out what the rest of this passage means -- especially if there
is some famous (or obscure) "speechless multilinguist in a frock
coat with brass buttons" whose initials are D D in history or literature
or whatever that he should be recognizing.  (The annotations in the version
of ADA above haven't gotten to this point yet.)  Does anyone have a suggestion?

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu