FURTHER RECOLLECTIONS OF JOYCE
537
On one occasion I stayed the night in the Joyces' flat in Paris.
Joyce was ill and looked it, and Mrs. Joyce thought that an extra man
in the house might come in handy in case of emergency. The emergency
arose at about eight the next morning. I went into Joyce's room and
found him short of breath, looking very pale with a cold damp fore–
head, and evidently holding on to himself very tightly in a state of
intense anxiety.
If
I had known then what I learned later in Civil
Defense during the war, I should have felt obliged to suggest first aid
treatment for shock. Mrs. Joyce sent me for a doctor. Lunching with
them later in the day I asked Joyce, then somewhat recovered, what
the doctor had said, and Joyce replied that the doctor had asked him
what he was afraid of.
"I told him," said Joyce, "that I was afraid of losing consciousness,
and he said that from all the signs and symptoms, pulse, temperature,
etc., I had nothing to fear on that score."
Unlike most natives of the British Isles, Joyce disliked and feared
dogs, perhaps on account of his poor sight and the dog's unpredictable
temper. He would never go in for his evening treatment in the eye-clinic
in the rue du Cherche-Midi until Madame had doubly assured him that
the dog was on the chain. But he had a considerable sympathy for the
cat with its persuasive manners and its compact self-sufficiencies. One of
the waiters at (I think) Fouquets gave the Joyces a black cat and on
my first visit to them after this acquisition I found Joyce in the middle
of the living room putting on an act of homeless despair.
"Look," he said, pointing to his chair on which Fran<;ois lay curled
up and fast asleep. "Since this animal came to live with us I haven't
a chair to sit on." I heard, alas, that Fran<;ois had to go. Unlike the
London cat with his countless back gardens, the Paris cat has few free
spaces where he can pursue his loves and wars and practice at leisure
his fastidious sanitary engineering.
Once as we were walking up the Champs Elysees together, I pointed
to a beautiful white goat harnessed to a children's cart and said how
much I admired these courageous and inquisitive creatures. Joyce fully
agreed and, stopping to contemplate the stately little animal, said he
couldn't see why the goat had been selected as a satanic symbol.
"Hircus
Civis Eblanensis."
There was a good deal of the surefootedness and
toughness of the mountain goat in Joyce's own composition and more
than a little of the relaxed vigilance of the cat.
The front that Joyce presented to the world was anything but that
of the extrovert broth-of-a-boy Irishman of stage and screen, but in
Zurich he did occasionally exhibit a certain impishness said to be an
Irish characteristic. In Paris I saw none of this. I have known him, for
