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340 J A M E S [ i9i3-»9Uby indulgent pupils. Among these was Paolo Cuzzi, now an eminentTriestine lawyer, who heard about Joyce from Ettore Schmitz, and tooklessons from 1911 to 1913. Joyce was impatient with the early stages oflearning; he brought Cuzzi quickly through the elementary Berlitz texts,then moved on to Boswell's Life of Johnson. But the principal part of thelesson was devoted to conversation. Master and pupil sat in a room inJoyce's flatwhich was furnished, oddly enough, only with chairs. Thechairs were exact replicas of some antique Danish chairs Joyce had seenin a photograph; perhaps in a burst of post-Ibsenite feeling, he had commissioneda Triestine carpenter to duplicate them. Joyce stretched hisback on one chair, his legs on another, and puffed at the Virginia in hisyellowed fingers. Soon he and Cuzzi were off on a discussion which, asCuzzi said, might end anywhere. A favorite subject was Thomistic morality,about which Joyce theorized with precision and ingenuity. Butoften their subjects were less predictable, as when Cuzzi, who was studyingVico in school, discovered that Joyce was also passionately interestedin this Neapolitan philosopher.* Freud too became a subject of conversation.Cuzzi was reading Freud's Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, andhe talked with Joyce about slips of the tongue and their significance.Joyce listened attentively, but remarked that Freud had been anticipatedby Vico.t 3Cuzzi's sister Emma, and two of her friends, also became Joyce's pupils.5Their lessons were held in the Cuzzis' house. The three fourteenyear-oldgirls liked their master, who usually appeared wearing the huntingwaistcoat which his father had given him in 1912. Almost anythingcould serve as the text of the girls' lesson: a Shakespearean song, or, oneday, a fortune which Joyce had purchased from a beggar. The fortune,which was intended for a woman, predicted that its recipient would sufferthe loss of something precious to her but would recover it. The masterwas credulous, the pupils skeptical. When Emma accompanied Joyce tothe front door at the lesson's end, he suddenly asked her if in fact she'Joyce also knew Croce's Estetica, with its chapter on Vico. 2Croce's restatement ofVico, 'Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts ofsociety: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over again the paths hehas already traversed, reconstructs the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and trueknowledge,' is echoed in Stephen's remark in Ulysses (505 [623]), 'What went forth tothe ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercialtraveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. . . . Self which it itselfwas ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!'t Joyce had in his possession in Trieste three small pamphlets in German, Freud's AChildhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Jones's The Problem of Hamlet and theOedipus Complex, and Jung's The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual.They were all published in German between 1909 and 1911, and it seems likelythat Joyce purchased them during that period. He probably heard about psychoanalysisfrom Ettore Schmitz, whose nephew, Dr. Edoardo Weiss, introduced psychoanalysis intoItaly in 1910. 4