Cad with a pipe

"This Cad with a pipe asks HCE for the time, and is surprised when the great personage exhibits uneasiness and launches into an elaborate self-defense." (Campbell, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake)

In Phoenix Park, This cad smoking a tobacco pipe innocently asks what time it is. HCE gives a strange, defensive response ("there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications", Page 36) which incurs the suspicion of the cad. He then goes home, and discusses the encounter to his wife. She shares the gossip with her priest ("her particular reverend" Page 38), who despite assuring her of his discretion ("the gossiple so delivered in his epistolear . . . would go no further than his jesuit's cloth", Page 38) spreads the rumor, until the chapter closes with the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly, a tissue of the snippets of rumor random gossipers have heard and transmitted.

The pipe -- or rather, this literary representation of a pipe -- may be a reference to René Magritte's 1929 painting, La trahison des images, in which the image of a tobacco pipe appears above a caption: Ceci n'est pas une pipe, "This is not a pipe."

• pipe: penile connotation
• tailler une pipe: French slang, for "to fellate" (literally, "to carve a pipe")
• cap a pie: echoes a phrase from Hamlet – "head to foot" - Horatio’s description of the ghost. A second Shakespeare reference connecting to the previous line

• cad with a bike (based on an anecdote of Joyce's father meeting a "cad with a bicycle" in Phoenix Park, who had asked him for a match to light his pipe with)