“Odd names crop up in all Roussel’s texts, and we know he had extreme difficulty in arriving at each final choice. Leiris records that he sometimes asked Eugène Vallée, the overseer at the Lemerre printing house, to fill in the blanks or initials he had left in the manuscript, but then invariably replaced Vallée’s suggestions with other names. La Seine contains an especially eccentric range: Ernest Arson, Buss, Bopp, Burc, Bals, Roolf, Pauline Bux, Orry, Raga, Saerck, Èche, Renée Wunster, Lay… The manuscripts offer no indication as to how he arrived at these names.”

Footnote in Raymond Roussel And The Republic Of Dreams by Mark Ford (2000)