"You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the
other devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C.
N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles."
(Physics, chemistry, and biology.) Stephen pronounces the
initials as the French do, thinking wryly of his pretense of
being a premedical student. Like Stephen, Joyce dabbled
halfheartedly in these studies for a time. Ellmann comments,
"Paris was Dublin's antithesis. The daydream of himself as Dr.
Joyce, poet, epiphanist, and physician, surrounded by fair
women, was not at all dampened by the small amount of money
beyond his fare that his father could give him . . ." (111).
In December 1902 "he prevailed upon Dr. Paul Brouardel, dean
of the faculty at the École de Médecine, to grant him a
provisional card of admission to the course for the
certificate in physics, chemistry, and biology" (113). In
actuality Stephen led a most unglamorous life in those days, "Eating
your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots
of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen."
Gifford identifies mou en civet as "a stew made of
lungs, the cheapest of restaurant dishes." The "belching
cabmen" jammed in beside Stephen on a cheap bench
complete the picture.
Despite the dismal circumstances and the silly pretentions,
Stephen has supposed that the glamor of the great city will
rub off on him. He imagines alluding to it after he leaves, to
impress people: "Just say in the most natural tone:
when I was in Paris, boul' Mich', I used to."
The Boulevard Saint-Michel, Gifford notes, is "a
street on the left bank of the Seine in Paris and the café
center of student and bohemian life at the turn of the
century." He quotes Arthur Symons' The Decadent Movement
in Literature (1893) on the "noisy, brainsick young
people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel
and exhaust their ingenuities in theorizing over the works
they cannot write." Stephen is purportedly so intimate an
inhabitant of this hip scene that he abbreviates the name in
the most "natural" way.
Recollections of his pretentiousness give way to other kinds
of silliness. Fantasizing that some doppelgänger of
his would commit a crime and he would be charged for it,
Stephen prepared alibis in advance: "Yes, used to
carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you
for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the
seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two
witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie,
overcoat, nose. Lui, c'est moi." The
French phrase (I am he) parodies Louis XIV's famous saying L'état,
c'est moi" (I am the state). From here, Stephen
transits to a time when he wanted to commit murder.
Desperate with hunger, rushing to the post office to cash his
mother's money order for eight shillings, he found the door
slammed in his face by the usher and protested: "Encore
deux minutes. Look clock. Must
get. Fermé. Hired dog!" He gestured
for the doorman to look at the clock and see that there were
"still two minutes" to go till closing time, but the post
office was definitively "closed."
The jagged, ungrammatical fragments he recalls speaking in
his own language ("Look clock", "Must get") seem to be
examples of "Pretending to speak broken English,"
which he mentions in the next paragraph in connection with
returning to Ireland by way of England. Coming back from his
continental adventure to "the slimy pier at Newhaven,"
the cosmopolitan Stephen is so pretentious (I'm really very français,
don't you know?) that he affects not to understand
something said to him in his own language: "Comment?"
(What?). But all he really has to show for his misspent voyage
are "Le Tutu, five
tattered numbers of Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge,"
and a French telegram from his father, announcing that his
mother is dying and he must come home.
