irishmen in paris

J.M. Synge (Rathfarnham, Dublin 1871-Dublin 1909) was a young upper-class Protestant with a not altogether clear idea of what to do for a career when he first arrived in Paris in early 1895. He had obtained a mediocre arts degree (pass) from Trinity College Dublin and spent some time studying music and language in Coblenz, Germany. In Paris, he lived in an attic room at 94, rue Lafayette (10th arrondissement) before moving for a couple of months to 2, rue Léopold Robert (14th arrondissement), near Montparnasse railway station. He enrolled in a modern and medieval French literature course at the Sorbonne and a comparative phonetics course at the Ecole Pratique des Hauts-Etudes. In June 1895, as he was to do each year, he left Paris to spend the summer holidays with his family in Co. Wicklow.

Synge frequented a wide range of people and organisations while in Paris, including (briefly) Maud Gonne’s Association Irlandaise before deciding that Gonne’s strident nationalism was not for him. Gonne later returned the compliment by lending her voice to those who attacked Synge’s play The Shadow of the Glen. He even attended some anarchist meetings, although his ideas seem to have been closer to agnostic socialism. (But, ironically enough, in his late-twenties Synge was still largely living off money sent by his mother, part of whose inheritance came from land worked by tenant farmers in Co. Galway).

In early 1896, Synge was back in Paris, staying at the Hôtel Corneille at 5, rue Corneille (6th arrondissement). After a trip to Italy and a brief stay in a different hotel (Hôtel de l’Univers) back in Paris, he returned to the Hôtel Corneille in October 1896. It was at the Corneille in December 1896 that he met W.B. Yeats. The latter’s opinion of his younger compatriot is slightly unkind but may not be too wide of the mark.

“I was very poor,” Yeats wrote, “but he was much poorer. He belonged to a very old Irish family and though a simple courteous man, remembered it and was haughty and lonely. With just enough to keep him from starvation and not always from half-starvation, he had wandered about Europe, travelling third-class or upon foot…He was the man that we needed because he was the only man I have ever known incapable of political thought or of a humanitarian purpose. He was to do for Ireland, though more by his influence on other dramatists than by his direct influence, what Robert Burns did for Scotland.”

In late December 1896, Synge moved back to rue Léopold Robert, where, according to his mother’s diary, he was “troubled by bugs”. He stayed there until May 1897, During this time, while sitting with a group of Irish friends on the terrace of the Café d’Harcourt on Place de la Sorbonne (5th arrondissement, café no longer exists) one day, he was nearly knocked unconscious in a scuffle between French police and supporters of Greece’s war against Turkey.

According to his nephew, Edward Stephens, Synge became anxious about his health in the summer of 1897. “His hair fell out and a large lump developed on his neck…”, wrote his nephew. This was the first manifestation of Hodgkins’s disease, or lymphatic sarcoma, from which Synge ultimately died. He underwent an operation at Mount Street Nursing Home in December 1897, but he was back in Paris in mid-January 1898. There, he began to attend lectures in Celtic studies at the Collège de France. From January to April 1898, when he left Paris again, Synge was staying at the Saint Malo Hotel at 2, rue Odessa (14th arrondissement) in Montparnasse. Back in Paris in autumn 1898, he took an unfurnished room on the top floor of 90, rue d’Assas (6th arrondissement), for which he was to pay rent until March 1903. As usual, he returned to Ireland for the holidays in May 1899 and May 1900. During summer 1900, a gland formed again at the back of his neck, but that did not stop him returning to the French capital in October of the same year. But by this stage, his mother was seriously worried. She wrote in her diary: “J.M. has been more pleasant and chatty than usual of late. I think his queer time in Paris always injures him, and he is so queer when he comes home and so out of all our ways, and then it wears off by degrees. I am trying to persuade him to give up his room in Paris in spring and make a fresh start nearer home.”

His mother was never too enamoured at her son’s stays in Paris, writing once that she would no longer give him money “to go and live in Paris idle.” Finally, her injunctions got to Synge. After a long stay in Ireland, he returned to the French capital in March 1903 to move his personal effects from the rue d’Assas and give up his connection to Paris. During the few days he was there, he met James Joyce, who was staying at the Hôtel Corneille, by now a focal point for Irish writers. According to Sanislaus, Joyce’s brother, “the two had many quarrelsome discussions…about language, style, poetry, drama and literature in general.” Joyce at first disliked Synge’s Riders to the Sea, putting it down as “non-Aristotelian”, but later admired it enough to translate it into Italian. As for what Synge thought of Joyce, here is an extract from a letter he wrote to Lady Gregory on March 26, 1903:

Synge died in Dublin in 1909. The Hôtel Corneille no longer exists. The apartment house at 90, rue Assas was pulled down some years ago and replaced by a modern 9-storey block of flats.

J.M. Synge

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