Paul Leon was a friend of Joyce’s – as well as a sort of assistant in Paris. 4 months after Joyce’s death, Leon wrote to Jean Paulhan – publisher of the “Nouvelle Revue Francaise” – here’s a part of that letter.
I recall a day in late September 1930. I was leaving for a holiday and Joyce had insisted on walking with me part of the way towards the Gare de Lyon. I am a very poor walker, just the opposite of Joyce, and our strolls aroused in me only moderate enthusiasm. I believe, however, that he felt safer crossing the streets when I held his arm. But the two of us must have made a sorry pair in the streets of Paris and, in fact, Philippe Soupault had baptized us “the halt and the blind”. That day, as we walked quietly along the Boulevard Raspail, Joyce was suddenly stopped by a young girl who, somewhat awkwardly but charmingly, complimented him on his work. Joyce lifted his unfortunate eyes towards the still-sunny sky, then brought them back to the boxed trees growing along the Boulevard: “You would do better,” he said to the girl, “to admire the sky or even these poor trees.” Should that young girl chance to read these lines, she will perhaps recognize herself, but I should like [her] to know how great a truth lay behind this apparently banal suggestion. This was not false modesty, but a genuine admiration for the natural universe; for its colours which he could hardly distinguish, but which he appreciated all the more fully in consequence; for the constant mobility of its forms, whether pleasing or unshapely; for its sounds, to which only recently we listened together, stretched out on the grass in the Allier; for the human beings who people and quicken it with their thoughts, their passions, whether good or evil, noble or base, harmonious or discordant.
