James Joyce's World by Hutchins Patricia

Author:Hutchins, Patricia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-23034-2
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

RUE CARDINAL LEMOINE 1921

Sylvia Beach, in the article already mentioned, shows that Valery Larbaud, the poet and translator, had introduced her to Stephen Gwynn and later she reciprocated by sending him James Joyce. Larbaud had been born in Vichy, where his family owned some of the famous sources. He lived much in Italy and Spain, and translated Thomas Gray, Samuel Butler, Walt Whitman and other writers into French. Although his name was not familiar to the wider reading public at that time, he had a considerable position in the literary world. At Vichy, as I shall mention later, his correspondence with Joyce, extending over twenty years, is preserved at the Municipal Library.

Valery Larbaud had read what had been printed of Ulysses in The Little Review and Joyce lent him part of the book not yet in print. Miss Beach transmitted Larbaud’s enthusiastic comment. ‘C’est merveilleux! Aussi grand que Rabelais. Mr Bloom est immortel comme Falstaff.’ Later it was planned that Larbaud should give a lecture on Joyce’s work for Les Amis des Livres, to be arranged by Adrienne Monnier.

During the summer of 1921, while the Larbauds were in England, Joyce was lent their first-floor flat at 71 rue Cardinal Lemoine. Once installed, Joyce began to write again at a desk before a window which looked upon trees and a quiet courtyard of old, sand-coloured houses. In June he told Larbaud that some of the typescript of his book had been destroyed by a typist, or her shocked husband, but that proofs of the Ithaca and Penelope episodes were reaching him from the printers and that, although he was nearly killed by ‘work and eyes’, he was still adding much to the text. It must have been about that time that Joyce sent Larbaud a comic postcard which shows a drunk man in a topper falling into a horse trough, with his umbrella in his hand, entitled, ‘Prier pour ceux qui sont en mer’—pray for those at sea, to which Joyce has added ‘Ulysses arrive à Ithaque!’

To reach the rue Cardinal Lemoine, in the 5ème arrondissement, is to walk over the pavements which Joyce followed so many years ago on his way from the Grand Hôtel Corneille to lectures in medicine in the rue Cuvier. Leaving the students, the cafés and heavy traffic of the Boulevard St Michel, I took the broad rue Soufflot which is surmounted by the huge, blank-walled bulk of the Panthéon. Changed so many times from church to national tomb, now the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Zola, and the heart of Gambetta are enclosed there. The windows of the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève seem a dim sea green as the last students emerge; on the Panthéon steps an old woman examines the side of her broken shoe, and an artist sketches in what remains of the evening light.

Having recently purchased Evocation du Vieux Paris by Jacques Hilliaret, which deals with each street and its notable buildings in direct, workmanlike manner, my mind was full of the history of the Montagne Ste Geneviève.

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