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[ Aetat. 36-37 ] J O Y C E 449around the corner from the Universitatstrasse. She was aware of his presencebut pretended to ignore it. Joyce felt that the moment had come fora declaration. He wrote her an ardent letter in French (his French beingbetter than his German), asking her to cease to disregard him, confessinghe did not even know her name but found her astonishingly like the girlin Ireland sixteen years before. She will not mind, he hopes, if he suggeststhat perhaps she is Jewish, though she may not be, for after all Jesuslay in the womb of a Jewish mother. As for himself, he is a writer, andat a pivotal moment in his life: his age is the same as Dante's when hebegan the Divine Comedy, and as Shakespeare's when he fell in love withthe Dark Lady of the Sonnets. He is very unhappy; he must see her. 3Sobegan an episode in Joyce's life which, though couched in sentimentalidiom, was set in the comic mode.The young woman whom he saw was a Swiss named Marthe Fleischmann,the first of two Fleischmanns to be prominent in his life. On hermother's side Marthe was descended from the Bernese gentry, and pridedherself on her aristocratic bearing. Her father was from an ordinary middle-classfamily, and she had only to remember this undercutting of hernoble origins to grow distressed. A few years before Joyce met her shehad become, by a romantic series of events, the mistress of an engineer,Rudolf Hiltpold. The affair began on a Sdchseliite day. She was watchingthe pageantry in the Bahnhofstrasse when Hiltpold, whom she did notknow, came riding by at the head of the fashionable Kdmbelzunft (CamelGuild). He carried a bouquet of red roses, and when he caught sight ofMarthe, instead of following the usual custom of tossing a rose or two ata handsome girl, he paid her the pretty compliment of flinginghis wholebouquet at her feet. She did not see him again until the next year at thesame festival. Standing then on a balcony, she saw him riding past again,this time alone, on his way to join his guild. He caught sight of her,dismounted, and talked with her; they exchanged letters and before longshe had broken off an engagement with another man and was occupyinga flatnext to Hiltpold's. Later on she moved into the same flat. 4Marthe did not work; she spent her days smoking, reading romanticnovels, and primping. She was vain and wished to be snobbish. Whenshe realized that Joyce was in some way distinguished, she wrote to him,and they began a correspondence that was kept from both Nora's eyesand Hiltpold's. Joyce's attitude toward her was in the best romantic traditionwith one curious and telltale exception: he signed his letters to herwith Greek e's instead of Roman e's in the name James Joyce. It seemsunlikely that he could have supposed that this slight graphic change wouldbe of any use in a court test of handwriting; it could have meant to himlittle more than a sign that he was reserving part of himself in the correspondence,amusing himself with his own folly. In Ulysses MartheFleischmann is one of the prototypes of the limping Gerty MacDowell,whom Bloom ogles from a distance, and in part the prototype of Bloom's