It’s now ten days since Joyce and Nora first arrived in Zurich and things aren’t going too well for them. Following the debacle with the non-existent teaching job in Zurich Joyce discovered that there was a vacancy in the Berlitz School in Trieste, Italy. The young couple headed off for Trieste and arrived there on October 20^th 1904. Nora was deposited on a park bench as Joyce looked for accommodation. However, he fell into conversation with some rowdy drunken English sailors and when the police arrived to arrest them they also arrested Joyce. Joyce was eventually released through the reluctant intervention of the local British Consul and returned to Nora, full of apologies. But it transpired that there was no vacancy at the school in Trieste and the couple found themselves once again penniless and without any prospects. They survived with Joyce exercising his ingenuity at extracting money from people. He told his brother Stanislaus in a letter that he borrowed money, ‘right, left and centre’. It’s highly unlikely that any of the lenders got their money back! However, the director of the Trieste school, Almidano Artifoni, vowed to help James and Nora in their predicament……….

Trieste, around 1904