Madam, – Reading Frank Callanan’s intriguing article on the political awareness of the young Joyce (Weekend Review, January 22nd), I was reminded by the reference to the former Grand Hôtel Corneille of the place where Joyce stayed as a student in Paris.
Bill McCormack has written of how the hotel was a base for the Fenian exile, John O’Leary, well known from the Yeats poem, September 1913. The hotel was also a magnet for aesthetic types and in George du Maurier’s Trilby, which was published in 1894, the young English artist, Little Billee, lodges at the hotel. Joyce read du Maurier’s novel but it was on Yeats’s recommendation that he stayed at the Corneille in 1902 and 1903. It was also the place where he met Synge, who in March 1903 wrote to Joyce: “Can you meet me tomorrow under the Odéon cloisters in front of your door at 10am?” The arches of the Théâtre de l’Odéon under which the pair set off to discuss Synge’s plays and Joyce’s aesthetic theories are still there.
In December 1896, it was at the Corneille that Yeats met Synge and may have advised him to “Give up Paris” and make the Aran Islands the subject matter of his writing. Heading ultimately in the opposite direction, a 25-year-old Samuel Beckett stayed in the same hotel at 5, rue Corneille in July 1931.
Just as we might fail in Dublin to find a sign identifying buildings associated with Joyce such as Finn’s Hotel on Nassau Street or the Antient Concert Rooms on Pearse Street, a few years ago Vincent Woods wrote of how he looked in vain for a plaque at the Corneille site.
The hotel may have gone but the building remains as a place whose environs are haunted by the passage of Irish writers. It was at this modest establishment that they established a foothold in continental Europe and fleetingly exchanged embryonic ideas. For all the transience of these encounters they were manifestations of new cosmopolitan directions that would take Irish literature back into and far beyond Ireland itself. – Yours, etc,