The Luria P— affair: Tine's compromising attachment, and the open loyalty question

pivotal · ongoing (historical into YDAU); resolves nothing

• When: ongoing across the Gentle Era into the YDAU present; the desert-frame discussion is 30 April - 1 May YDAU (per the Marathe/Steeply serial ruling)
• What: Tine's "passionate, ill-disguised attachment" is to Mlle. Luria Perec of Lamartine, county L'Islet, Québec — the "double-amanuensis" who was stenographer to Tine and had long doubled as stenographer-cum-Girl-Friday to DuPlessis, the anti-O.N.A.N. coordinator. This entanglement makes Tine's own loyalty the mirror-case Marathe and Steeply keep returning to on the desert shelf: does Tine "double" for Québec out of love for Luria, or "triple" (pretending to divulge while secretly keeping his U.S. fealty)? Steeply calls it "a great and maybe even timeless love"; the A.F.R. suspect Luria "had him to command, should it ever come to that." Marathe glosses it as pure misplaced attachment — Tine "attached, fanatically" — and the narration explicitly rates Marathe's own wife-love as "no better than M. Rodney 'the God' Tine" (scene 103). n.156 independently corroborates the attachment's grip — Tine "hopelessly smitten with the Québecer Luria P——". In Mario's ONANtiad the affair is the "Tine-as-Benedict-Arnold" subplot, the voluptuous Luria puppet feeding him lines (the romance subplot is Mario's own emphasis: per n.176, Himself's earlier adult ONANtiad centered a doomed Gentle romance, "not Tine and a Québecois fatale"). NOTE: the Tine-Luria material is recorded as attested only; the novel also implies (n.307) the "Swiss hand-model" honeytrap of Orin is Luria — this account resolves NOTHING about Luria's identity, her true loyalties, or whether she is or is linked to Avril; all cited as written and left open.