James Joyce would have felt at home in the Espace Paul Ricard in Paris's Rue Royale on Monday night. There was drink aplenty, diplomats, artists and expatriates - even the writer's own grandson, Stephen. In every direction you saw the writer's face or images based on his work.
In just a year, the Joycesight exhibition has been to Trieste, Rome, Perugia, Dublin, Galway and Cobh before coming to Paris. Patricia Noone, the Galway psychiatrist and president of the George Moore Society who first organised the show, ushered visitors around like a proud mother.
About a dozen guests felt inspired to buy. At 2,000 francs (£240) each, Micheal Farrell's lithographs of the great man wearing a celtic-patterned tie sold briskly. Solange Joyce, Stephen's French wife, bought Anne Donnelly's painting entitled The gulls swooped silently. "It's from Ulysses, where he talks about voracious, cruel birds swooping down," said Donnelly.
Farrell was discussing a large, acrylic showing Picasso, Proust, Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Joyce. "It was to do with that painting that I wrote to Samuel Beckett to ask him did that party ever happen - because Beckett was Joyce's secretary for a while," Farrell said.
Solange Joyce interrupted indignantly. "He was not his secretary," she said. "That's very important."
"Anyway", Farrell continued, "Beckett wrote back, saying: `Joyce never spoke to me/of that unlikely partee'." Gazing at his painting, he added, "it's the whole culture of Europe in one room."
Stephen Joyce stood off to one side, scowling and looking like his grandfather, with his slicked-back grey hair, goatee and moustache, and dark, round glasses. "You can say `hello' to me and that's about it," he said when I approached him. "I don't give interviews - ever." I had not asked for an interview. Then Joyce offered an unsolicited opinion: "If you want to know what I think of this, I think it's pretty grim." He suggested that I go talk to some of the other guests, "who claim they're related to James Joyce".
