Franz von Stuck, Tilla Durieux as Circe, 1913 (Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin).
Extract from “Circe,” the episode from Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom appears to hallucinate in a brothel:
(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils. She has lace pendant beryl eardrops.)
BELLA: My word! I’m all of a mucksweat.
(She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her lace fan winnows wind towards her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)
THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly) Married, I see.
BLOOM: Yes… Partly, I have mislaid.
THE FAN: (Half opening, then closing) And the missus is master. Petticoat government.
BLOOM: (Looks down with a sheepish grin) That is so.
THE FAN: (Folding together, rests against her eardrop) Have you forgotten me?
BLOOM: Yes. No.
THE FAN: (Folded akimbo against her waist) Is me her was you dreamed before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now we?
(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)
BLOOM: (Wincing) Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women love.
THE FAN: (Tapping) We have met. You are mine. It is fate.
Bloom: (Cowed) Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A dog’s spittle, as you probably… (He winces) Ah!
