DENISE PHELAN: With the sudden and untimely passing last November of Denise Phelan, the Irish community in Paris has lost another of its colourful characters; and the Trinity College Dublin diaspora has lost a passionate standard-bearer.
I first had the pleasure of knowing Denise during a posting to our Paris Embassy in the 1990s. 0ur friendship was immediate. Erudition, wit and quirkiness can be a joyful combination; so it was with Denise.
Unfettered as she was by the routine of regular working hours, she was able to engage more fully than most in her many interests, as well as to follow her own instincts in those spontaneous moments which life can proffer. In this sense she lived life to the full.
An engaging dinner guest - both a sensitive listener and a witty, irreverent raconteur - she would likely remain for days, long after guests had gone home. Hence the amicable parting phrase, as she gently urged other guests homewards: "Here's your hat and where's your hurry?" Or: "Have you a light for your bicycle?"
Paris can have a strange, proselytising influence upon its adopted children. In order to "adapt and survive", people often try to become more Parisian than the Parisians themselves. Not so with Denise Phelan. If anything, her years in Paris made her more resolutely Irish.
She sang at St Patrick's Chapel in the Irish College (now the Irish Cultural Centre); was a member of the Irish Women in France Association; regularly attended gatherings of the Franco-Irish Chamber of Commerce; and, generally, was a figure you expected to see in Paris at any event that was Irish. On a humorous note, the lengthy trilingual recorded message on her telephone sorely tried the patience of her many devoted friends!
Denise did more than attend Irish events, however. She championed causes. With her infectious enthusiasm, any cause or project she embraced would be publicised to all and sundry. Her friends will know that there was simply no escaping her mail-shots. Her flurry of brown envelopes - and later, e-mails - was legendary. Generous with her time and energies, she was a contributor to the publication Irish Eyes from its inception.
Denise's love of literature was best exemplified by her championing of Wilde and Joyce; alongside them, she had a great grá for the poet Francis Ledwidge.
I can't help wondering who will read Molly Bloom's soliloquy in W.H. Smith's on the Rue de Rivoli this coming Bloomsday. Denise, in boater and 1904 costume, has held Joyce fans enthralled at that venue over the years. Who will lead the pilgrimage to Père Lachaise and to l'Hotel on the Left Bank for Wilde in November?
Denise loved Paris and her chosen 9th arrondissement and was a committed Francophile. A cultural ecumenist, she was an enthusiast of fine French wines and aged Jameson!
At her 40th birthday "coupe" in Harry's Bar, almost six years ago, one sensed that she belonged to a different era; Hemingway's Paris of the 1920s springs most easily to mind.
It is our wretched human habit that we try to assess our life's achievements when we reach our middle years. Denise was wont to do this and to be self-critical in her inventory of her 20 years in Paris. How very differently might she have perceived her life's fruit had she been able to witness the genuine, heartfelt grief at her passing, expressed by hundreds of her friends, at the Memorial to her in Paris last month in the rue des Irlandais, where she had sung in the choir.
The sense of loss was palpable, as was the real sense of affection for her parents Dan and Rita, who were bravely present to celebrate the wonderful, eclectic, generous life of their beloved only child.
As Dan said, she was a "gem".
P.C.