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JAMES JOYCE’S HUGUENOTS

Sir,—Martin Green’s ‘James Joyce’s Huguenots’ (HI 31.3, May/June 2023) should have directed readers to Marie M. Léoutre’s thorough investigation of the Earl of Galway’s career, Serving France, Ireland and England: Ruvigny, Earl of Galway, 1648–1720 (Routledge, in paperback since 2020). Also, of all the tantalising allusions to the Huguenots in James Joyce, unfortunately the one to the singer ‘Marie Dubedat’ seems linked to a late nineteenth-century scandalous episode in Dublin, and nothing cultural or historical in the lofty sense. Joyce was, of course, a talented singer who naturally knew of this ‘Irish Nightingale’, but she was certainly born into one of the oldest, most prominent and easily tracked Huguenot families. ‘Du Bedat’ is engraved on the stone plaque put up after the restoration of the Merrion Row Huguenot cemetery. Bloom mused that ‘A miss dubedat lived in Killiney, I remember’. A family of that name certainly did, as Maria Wootton and others have investigated. It is impossible that Joyce (and indeed his father, also a fine singer) would not have been aware of the infamous Francis E. Dubedat, of Killiney, whose practices earned him a place in the DIB. Declared a bankrupt in 1890, weeks after having been elected president of the Dublin Stock Exchange, he was outed as a fraudster and embezzler who had disgraced not only his family’s name and business but also the descendants of Irish Huguenots. He had also been treasurer of their Dublin-based charitable fund and had helped himself to nearly £4,000 of its assets. Trustees saved the fund, which was then administered under a scheme approved by the High Court, in a process starting in 1902. Joyce specialists point to the character of Mrs Dubedat in George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), and, according to John Simpson’s exploration of Marie Dubedat (James Joyce Online Notes), she was fraudster Frank’s first cousin.—Yours etc.,

SYLVIE KLEINMAN