"the premier terror of Errorland"

(60.22-62.25)  Today we pick up with the entertaining "man on the street" accounts of HCE.  As in yesterday's passage, the reports cover a wide range of opinions, and sometimes individuals are completely ambivalent (or "antipodal," in the case of Mr Danl Magrath, aka "Caligula").  Take, for example, Missioner Ida Wombwell, who characterizes Earwicker as "a brut!" before adding, "But a magnificent brut!"

I liked the lisping account of Sylvia Silence, "the girl detective," who gives her account while sitting in "a truly easy chair" in her "cozy-dozy bachelure's flat."  "Bachelure" in one sense indicates that her home is a bachelor pad, but in another sense it's a lair from which she lures bachelors.  In her lisping voice, she addresses the narrator, now referred to as a reporter:  "Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew gweatness was his twadgedy?"  Even though she speculates that HCE may have been Great, she still feels he's liable for his actions, and says that he should be prosecuted pursuant to subsection 32 of section 11 of the C.L.A. act of 1885.  In the Annotations, McHugh points out that this is the law under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted, suggesting another parallel between the two Deviant but Great sinners, HCE and Wilde.

The accounts end with a Navy man, Meagher, who sits with two women, Questa and Puella, with which he may or may not have just had sex (he's "seated . . . for the usual aireating after the ever popular act," and one of the women tells him, "saddle up your pance").  I've gone back and forth here as to whether Meagher or Questa is speaking at the end of the paragraph on page 61 (sometimes the gender pronouns are slippery in the Wake).  I'm pretty sure it's Meagher, but not completely sure because the speaker addresses "fiancee Meagher."  I'm guessing Joyce inserted this phrase of address to add some confusion to the book, but McHugh helpfully notes that "mea" is Latin for "mine," so I'm reading this as Meagher addressing "my fiance."  Anyway, assuming that it's Meagher speaking, he says that HCE bears the blame for his fall, but, "I also think, Puellywally [Puella must be the "fiancee Meagher"], by the siege of his trousers there was someone else behind it -- you bet your boughtem blarneys -- about their three drummers down Keysars Lane."  So, add Meagher to the list of people who suspect the three soldiers were more than just witnesses to HCE's crime.

The narrator shifts gears in the next paragraph, asking whether these stories are all just "meer marchant taylor's fablings" and adding, "Is now all seenheard then forgotten?"  We don't really know who to trust, and despite (or perhaps because of) the unreliability of our sources, the narrator says "we, on this side ought to sorrow for their pricking pens on that account" ("pricking pens" -- obvious phallic joke alert!).

We're told that HCE fled Dublin and traveled "beyond the outraved gales of Atreeatic."  McHugh notes that across the Adriatic from Dublin is Trieste, the city where Joyce and his wife, Nora, settled after leaving Dublin.  So there's a connection between Joyce and HCE.  Another connection is suggested when we learn that HCE changed "clues with a baggermalster," further emphasizing HCE as a descendant of Finnegan (two pages into the book, Finnegan is "Bygmester Finnegan").  Across the sea, HCE marries ALP ("a papishee").

Today's reading ends with a great passage that portrays the Dubliners as forsaking, condemning, and convicting the Christ-like "Humpheres Cheops Exarchas."  The paragraph winds up with the narrator saying that HCE tried live a just and honorable life, "but for all that he or his or his care were subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland."  Of course, though, this is Finnegans Wake, so we can't be sure whether this synopsis of HCE is accurate or not.  After all, the final word in this paragraph is, "(perorhaps!)."