(363.17-365.15) After listening to the mocks and attacks of his patrons, HCE plays the better man, making a peace offering of sorts by shaking their hands and taking their leave before beginning his defense.
He immediately and clearly admits his guilt while asserting that it's both a happy (the "felix culpa") and common fault: "Guilty but fellows culpows!" He did see the two young women urinating in the park (terming their actions "trisspass through minxmingled hair"), and he acknowledges his ignoble origins ("I may have hawked it, said, and selled my how hot peas") and his questionable practices in the past ("I could have emptied a pan of backslop down drain by whiles of dodging a rere from the middenprivet appurenant thereof"). But he's not a bad man. He's just "[m]issaunderstaid."
HCE says that he dismisses those "who would bare whiteness against me" and that he has 22,000 supporters ready to mail "parchels' of presents for future branch offercings" on his behalf. He's a lustful man ("Want I put myself in their kirtlies I were ayearn to leap with them and show me too bisextine."), but as for his other faults, he has reformed himself according to ritual, righting himself in both the spiritual and civic senses: "I have abwaited me in a water of Elin and I have placed my reeds intectis before the Registower of the perception of tribute in the hall of the city of Analbe." And it's no big deal if ALP goes out cackling about HCE's faults "to abery ham in the Cutey Strict," because HCE will readily say "the warry warst against myself" and has "with gladdyst tone ahquickyessed" to his infidelities.
HCE is working himself into quite a lather, and his defense -- which comes in the form of a single paragraph that's more than three pages long -- will conclude tomorrow.
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