Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
Close to the end of the ‘Circe’ episode, at a moment when Stephen Dedalus has taken over the parodic energy and the infectious mimicry previously reserved for Buck Mulligan, he impersonates a French barker who attracts customers to a sex-shop like those of Pigalle:
Stephen
(gabbles with marionette jerks) Thousand places of entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous. Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants. (he clacks his tongue loudly) Ho, là là! Ce pif qu'il a!
(U 15. 3881–94)Indeed, the promise of a ‘great success of laughing’ (U 15. 3000–1) has been kept for Ulysses at least, even if it has meant that for more than half a century the novel was considered as all too ‘French’ and therefore a pernicious influence on (among others) Irish readers.
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