The Cat and the Devil

‘He said he could make as good a bridge as ever was made and make it in one night.’
The Cat and the Devil, James Joyce

Scribing a letter to his grandson, whom he addresses as Stevie, James Joyce thought to share a story too - about a cat and the devil and the building of a bridge.

You see, the townspeople of Beaugency longed for a bridge but had no money to build one. They did have a Lord Mayor, one Alfred Byrne, who made a pact with the devil who promised to build the bridge if, in return, he could have the first soul to pass over it. Monsieur Byrne agreed and when the people threw open their shutters the next morning there was a grand, stone bridge of 26 spans across the River Loire - and the devil dancing up and down, gleefully rubbing his hands.
 
The townspeople gathered on the opposite bridge end, mumbling and grumbling until the mayor arrived, cradling a cat in one arm and carrying a bucket of water on the other. Quick as a flash, the mayor dropped the cat, doused him in water and he fled across the bridge and into the arms of the devil! Thus one wily, old Lord Mayor got the better of the devil. And so ends the story. 

Or does it?

Did James Joyce, in his charming, children’s tale, perform the first European town twinning exercise? First, he had Alfred Byrne, Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1930 to 1939, make a (fictional) visit to Beaugency!  Like Dublin, Beaugency, situated on a grand, sweeping river and proud of its stone bridge, witnessed much conflict with English invaders. Joyce, when he visited there in 1936, may have read some of its history. How the English general sent to command the troops against Joan of Arc, was one Lord John Talbot, previously Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.  Joan led her troops to victory at the Battle of Beaugency in 1429, surely a victory for Dublin too against the heavy handed Talbot.

In the first edition of The Cat and the Devil published in 1964, illustrator Richard Erdoes drew on the similarities between Beaugency and Dublin, he even had a Viking boat transport the townspeople across the Loire before the bridge was built. Beaugency is portrayed as medieval Dublin once was - a maze of streets and a clutter of gables huddled on the banks of a river which took a thousand steps to cross, as Dublin was 1,000 years old.

And then there is Monsieur Byrne ( a contemporary of Joyces having also been born in 1882) and how Joyce, makes fun of him, in the way Dubliners do of each other. Being an avid reader of newspapers (as was the devil in the story), Joyce was no doubt familiar with Byrnes’s love of pomp and circumstance. The Eucharistic Congress of 1932, might well have been on his mind, and how the scarlet robed Byrne, travelling in the Lord Mayor’s coach, (last used by Daniel O’Connell) was heralded on his way by four trumpet blowing ensigns in medieval garb of red and white quartering. Weighed down by his gold chain of office, he climbed upon a soft, carpeted pedestal to welcome the papal legate to Dublin. In Stevie’s tale, the somewhat comic Lord Mayor climbed into bed clad in his mayoral garb, so found of it he was and when he appeared in front of the people, bugles called them to attention, for he liked them to be silent.
 
The devil, like Joyce, is viewing it all from afar, training his spyglass across the water and, like Joyce, speaks a language of his own, but also bad French in a Dublin accent. Ultimately the devil, like Joyce, is banished from town for his want of a soul. But it seems Dublin, her river and her bridges were never far from Joyce’s mind, albeit that Joyce may have felt like the devil himself when it came to his home town!

by Annette Black, Wicklow
Published on 03rd September 2013