Racy Literature – An Irishman’s Diary about James Joyce, adultery, and the Ascot Gold Cup

Traditionalists are still reeling from those shock scenes at Royal Ascot this week, in which gentlemen removed their jackets because of the heat and were allowed to do so by the event’s usually merciless dress police.

Things were of course different in 1904, the year in which the meeting provided a sub-plot in Joyce's Ulysses. Back then, not only did jackets stay on. So, contravening another tradition, did top hats, even when the winner of the week's big race, the Gold Cup, returned to the enclosure.

The problem was that the horse in question, Throwaway, had been a 20-1 outsider – or "the despised 20 to 1 chance", as the Sporting Times reported afterwards – in a field of four.

Suspicions about the result were therefore rife.

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The ST correspondent affected reluctance to say much, then said plenty. It had been a "slow race"; it looked "on the face of it all wrong"; and the result was "worse than the burning of Moscow", he commented. Then he reined himself in belatedly: "I prefer to await developments before expressing an opinion".

The alleged Gold Cup scandal of 1904 was the subject of one of the more entertaining talks of this year’s Bloomsday commemorations in Dublin, last weekend, when journalist and Joycean Senan Molony explored its role in Ulysses.

But as he explained, whatever shenanigans went on at Ascot that day were secondary to the scandal at the book’s heart – Leopold Bloom’s cuckolding by his wife and Blazes Boylan, whose mid-afternoon tryst coincides with the race. Boylan, an impresario to Molly Bloom’s operatic career, has placed a large bet on the Gold Cup second-favourite, a filly named Sceptre. Then he sets out for Eccles Street, where the phrase “And they’re off!” is about to take on another meaning.

Meanwhile, behind him, in one of the novel’s more outrageous double-entendres, other characters consider Sceptre’s form. “Who’s riding her?” asks McCoy, in (nearly) all innocence.

Happily, among the many things that ruin Ulysses as a potential Carry On Up the Liffey screenplay is that, loving his wife regardless, Leopold Bloom endures his humiliation stoically. He is the despised outsider, just like Throwaway.

But “at the end of the day” (as Molony summed up, reclaiming sport’s biggest cliché for literature), he somehow wins. Life, like the the two-and-a-half mile Gold Cup, is for stayers.

This year's race, by the way, takes place today – a week later than in 1904. Unfortunately (or maybe not) for coincidence backers, a horse called Ulysses ran in yesterday's feature event instead. So there are no obvious Joycean references in the Gold Cup field. And it remains a prize irony that the most successful horse in the event's 210-year history is the Aidan O'Brien-trained four-time winner, Yeats.

Getting back to Molly Bloom, and romantic adventures in opera generally, I wonder if the magpie-like Joyce ever made note of a story recorded for today's date in that great Victorian almanac, Chambers Book of Days.

It happened in 1808, in Paris, and culminated in a fatal duel.

But one of several reasons it might have interested Joyce were the apt names. The losing duellist was a Monsieur “Le Pique”. The woman involved – “a lady engaged at the Imperial Opera” – was a Mademoiselle “Tirevite”, or “shoot fast” in English.

According to one contemporary report, Mlle Tirevite had been “kept” by a Monsieur Granpré but had been discovered “in an intrigue” with Le Pique. So naturally, the rivals decided to resolve their differences by the traditional method of homicide, but with a twist. Inspired by the recent development of balloon aviation, they agreed to have their shoot-out in mid-air and, using blunderbusses, to aim not at each other but at their balloons. Mademoiselle Tirevite did not expect them to see it through. “They will not be so silly,” she said. “They are children, but alas! also, they are so charming.”

Alas! again, however, they did. On the appointed day, a large crowd watched them ascend over the Tuileries Gardens. They reached an altitude of half a mile, the height of foolishness. Then, on an agreed signal, they fired. Le Pique missed but Granpré didn’t, whereupon the unfortunate former plummeted to his death.

Not the least impressive detail about this appalling story is that both men were accompanied by “seconds”, who were condemned to share their fates. So Le Pique’s man went down with him, whereas the winner and his attendant landed safely. In one version of the story, Mlle Tirevite subsequently passed over Granpré and married the co-pilot.