Additionally, Despair is also a tale of false doubles, one of Nabokov's favorite themes. The very title of the novel announces this theme as French-speaking Nabokov chose a word (despair) which in French means 'some pairs', or simply 'pairs' ("des paires"). But it also means, so to speak, 'to undo a pair', to 'dis-pair', i.e. the process going on in the novel by which the pair Hermann thought did exist actually revealed itself false. In it, doubling seems to be only an obsession with physical resemblances. Almost all of Nabokov's fictions make ample use of doubling, duplication, and mirroring, such as in "Pale Fire" and "Lolita".