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342 J A M E S [ 1913-1914 ]write studies of Kant, Croce, and Masaryk. Furlan was in a phase ofenthusiasm for Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which Joyce tried to chokeby urging that Thomas Aquinas was the greatest philosopher because hisreasoning was 'like a sharp sword.' He read him, he said to Furlan, inLatin, a page a day. Joyce took pleasure in demonstrating to his youngpupil that morality was not confined to heroic decisions. 'Have you,' heasked him one day, remembering the incident with Skeffington ten yearsbefore, 'the moral courage to go round to the corner shop and ask forfive centesimi worth of rock drips?' Furlan enjoyed this kind of discussion,but was less pleased when he was asked to describe an oil lamp. Hefumbled helplessly for the technical language, and Joyce then took overand spent half an hour, in what seemed to Furlan 'a descriptive lust,'explaining the lamp's obvious and minute details.*So easy and intimate was the relationship of this teacher to his pupilsthat it is no wonder that with one of his girl students Joyce dreamed of acloser intimacy. This may well have been Amalia Popper, the daughterof a Jewish businessman whose first naniU TCas 1Luupuldu, thuuglnheong-rfjWhrTrrodels for the character and Southern European looks of/Molly Bloom^flut Joyce also wrote an account of the affair in his best^eal4*grap4lyunder the ironic title of Giacomo Joyce, t Though it reflectslong brooding, and refers to events that occurred between 1911 and 1914,Joyce appears to have written it down only in July or August 1914. 8 Heconveys in it the erotic commotion and ironic amusement involved inmeetings at once lush and sterile. He envisions this signorina as a Jewesscome out of the dark East to hold his western blood in thrall.The notebook opens abmptiy^JWho?' and answers, 'A pale face surroundedby heavy odoro^j^Tiurs. Her movements are shy and nervous.She uses quizzing-glasses/ies: + a/brief syllable. A brief laugh. A briefbeat of the eyelids.' He h^mnsa^Kl mocks his desire:Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation:a young person of quality.I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech; Swedenborg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos, Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Herclassmate, retwisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian:* Compare the explanation in Ulysses of how Bloom let Stephen out of his house: 'Byinserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an unstable female lock,obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and turning its wards from right to left,withdrawing a bolt from its stable, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhingeddoor and revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress' (703 [826]).t The name is inscribed in another, unknown hand. Joyce's acceptance of it to ornamenta study of love must have expressed his sense of depaysement as a Triestine Dublinerpining for requital in two languages. He was content to keep what he had written underthis heading.t A hint of the ending of Ulysses.