Ossip Zadkine

And adventures he had in a city he called the “modern Athens”, where he was able to discuss the Irish literary movement with a small bookseller in the Place de l’Odéon “who knew far more about it than the majority of Irish people did”. Power arrived there at the beginning of 1920, having spent some time in strike-prone Italy. After a couple of days at the Hôtel Terminus beside the Gare Saint Lazare (9^th arrondissement), he booked into the much cheaper Hôtel Moderne on the Place de la Sorbonne (5^th arrondissement), opposite the Café Harcourt, frequented a few years before by John Millington Synge. Power knew nobody in the city and the loneliness soon got to him, but the prospect of returning home to run the family estate was even less appealing. “I would sooner die of loneliness and poverty in Paris…than parade around the countryside to tea parties and horse-jumping shows,”  he wrote.

Amedeo Modigliani

Le Bal Bullier

Power changed address a few times during the 1920s. In 1925, he was living in a room at the Hôtel de Béarn at 123, rue Saint Dominique (7th arrondissement). Described by Power as “an old-fashioned hotel” and “dilapidated” even though it suited his tastes “for it gave to me the flavour of the ancient regime”, the Hôtel de Béarn is now classed as a historic monument and houses the Rumanian embassy. Power describes that when he was living there, he received a visit from an Englishman called Crayshaw and his girlfriend, who were on their way to visit Aleister Crowley (“the so-called devil worshipper and master of black-magic”) in Sicily. The girlfriend insisted on organising “an astral journey” and entering into contact with the spirit world. In the presence of a sceptic like Power, the séance was not a success. But before leaving, the English pair insisted on covering the furniture “with protective signs in chalk to shield one against the evil influence of certain spirits”. However, the hotel owner quickly got wind of the aborted attempt at spiritualism and was so aghast that such “evil practices” had taken place there that he evicted Power, threatening to call the police if he did not leave at once. Power took this as par for the course, for, as he says so appositely, “the average French are very conservative and narrow-minded—concierges and hotel proprietors in particular.”

123, rue Saint Dominique

In 1981, Power published some relatively salacious extracts from his diary in the Irish Times.  In contrast to the impression of a man entirely devoted to art and literature purveyed in his memoirs, From the Old Waterford House, the diary extracts suggest that whoring and fleeting encounters with a variety of women took up much of Power’s time in Paris. Power describes in some detail his adventure with a girl freshly arrived from Dieppe to seek her fortune. Deep-chested and handsome, she was as ardent as I was,” he writes, but after a few love-making sessions in cheap hotels, Power decides that “she was stupid in a way and had no geist.” Power also mentions regular meetings at the Dôme on the Boulevard de Montparnasse with a man called Henshaw, who had been a journalist on the Irish Times.  Henshaw and Power compared their experience of brothels in the Monto in Dublin and the far more sophisticated equivalents in Paris.  Power mentions that when he was a 17-year-old virgin and on his way back from his studies in Germany, he visited a richly decorated maison close in a bourgeois district of Paris. “I cannot say that my first love-making, even though I still remember it as something of importance in my life, came up to my great expectations.” But it was the memory of the “golden-domed room” and the choice he had been presented with on entering the brothel between a “galaxy of naked beauty” that made him “disillusioned and even hostile to the sordid surroundings” that he came upon in the Monto back in Dublin.