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126 J A M E S [ 1902-1903 ]father. Joyce was sorry for the old man, who eagerly fancied Joyce was asFenian as he. In Ulysses, where Casey is called Kevin Egan (a nameborrowed from another Fenian), Stephen remembers with pity theirlunches together: 'Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten KevinEgan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.' 67He contrasts himwith Casey's bunny-faced soldier son, who returned to Paris on furlough:to Patrice socialism, atheism, and the French sweepstakes were of equalconsequence; his father, however, was an aged nuisance.Besides meeting his friends, always a more important part of his lifethan he cared to admit, Joyce entered into some of the pleasures of Paris,which he called 'that lamp for lovers hung in the wood of the world.' 68He wrote his family he could not afford to go to the theater, but hemanaged to attend one of the firstperformances of Debussy's Pelleas etMdlisande at the Opera Comique; he saw Bernhardt and Rejane; he sawSignoret act in Heijermans's La Bonne Esperance at the Theatre Antoine.At the high cost of 7 francs 50 centimes he bought a gallery seat to hearJean de Reszke sing Pagliacci, and marvelled to discover that his father'svoice had the same quality. (He was delighted later when an Italian musicianin Dublin, Michele Esposito, said that James Joyce's own voicewas like de Reszke's.) 69 He considered taking singing lessons again, founda teacher, but gave up the idea when payment was demanded in advance.He enjoyed some of the sexual pleasures of Paris, and he also attendedvespers at Notre-Dame and Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois.He was able to take two trips away from the city. One was to Nogent,where he watched the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, as inZurich later he would go often to see the confluence of the Sihl and theLimmat; he walked back through the woods to Sevres and took a riversteamer to the city. The second trip, to Tours, was to have an unexpectedinfluence in helping him put English literature out of countenance. Joycemade friends with a Siamese who was also reading at the BibliothequeSainte-Genevieve, and arranged with him to go to Tours to hear a remarkabletenor sing there at the cathedral. On the way he picked up ata railway kiosk a book by Edouard Dujardin, 70 whom he knew to be afriend of George Moore. It was Les Lauriers sont coupes, and in later life,no matter how diligently the critics worked to demonstrate that he hadborrowed the interior monologue from Freud, Joyce always made it apoint of honor that he had it from Dujardin.* The Siamese was also to* See pp. 519-20, 634. Dujardin's novel is a soliloquy without any interposition by theauthor. The technique makes for some clumsiness when the hero has to describe outercircumstances, and Joyce had to modify it. But what could not fail to draw his attentionwas a philosophical act of self-creation on the part of Dujardin's hero, who on the firstpage invokes himself into being 'from beneath the chaos of appearances.' Dujardin hadas a starting point a sentence of Fichte, 'The J poses itself and opposes itself to the not-I.' He also held that 'the life of the mind is a continual mixing of lyricism and prose' andthe novel therefore an incessant balancing 'of poetic exaltation and the ordinariness ofany old day.' 71