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their conversations in Paris in 1905, claiming that they had taken place six years earlier, whereas they had taken place nine years before, shortly after Yeats’s own first visit to the Aran Islands. Declan Kiberd in Synge and the Irish Language and Roy Foster, however, have pointed out more essential inaccuracies in what became, for many years, the standard account of Synge’s impulse to go to the Islands. Synge, through his study of the Breton language and his meeting with the Celtic scholar Richard Best, had been taking an intense interest in Celtic Studies in Paris in any case, as Declan Kiberd has emphasized. He knew about the Islands because his uncle had been a minister there. ‘Doubtless,’ Kiberd has written,
the advice from Yeats was an important factor in Synge’s decision; but the passionate studies in Breton culture must have awakened his enthusiasm for the Gaelic lore of his own country, to which he already held the key in his knowledge of the Irish language. It would be naïve to follow Greene and Stephens [Synge’s biographers] in asserting that he went to Aran at Yeats’s suggestion. He was heading in that direction from the very beginning.
    He wrote to his mother in Dublin about his new friends in Paris who included Yeats and Maud Gonne. (One of his friends later reported that ‘Synge gently hated Miss Gonne.’) He explained that he had become interested in socialism, which his mother thought ‘utter folly’. He became a member of the committee of Maud Gonne’s Irish League, but politics did not interest him as much as culture, and he resigned after a few months. In the summer of 1897, despite his cosmopolitanism and his new friends, he returned to Ireland so he could go to Wicklow on holidays with his mother. That summer, as he became ill, his hair falling out and a lump developing on his neck, some of his family put it down to unrequited love. But it was the beginning of the Hodgkin’s disease that would kill him twelve years later. His mother wrote:
Johnnie is at home still. He has to get those large glands taken out of his neck, poor fellow. It is very unpleasant … Since his hair fell out he got cold in the glands, and they became so large they were, or rather are, quite disfiguring to him. He has been very anxious to go away to Paris. He has been advised by his friend Yeats, the Irish poet, to go in for reviewing French literature so John is working away with that end in view. His general health is very good and he is strong and able to walk, so I trust he may get over this time well, please God, and Oh I do ask Him to reveal Himself to my dear boy.
    It is interesting that there is no mention here of the Aran Islands. The operation took place in December 1897. The doctors must have known that the symptoms could recur, but they told Synge and his mother, who both seemed to have believed them, that it was a success. His mother watched over him. On 3 January 1898 she noted in her diary: ‘John not well – made me anxious.’ Two days later she wrote to her son Robert:
Johnnie looks much better, but he is not strong, and I am anxious lest he should go to Paris too soon and be laid up again in some way, as the Hotel life is anything but comfortable or healthy. He is very silent, poor fellow, and spends all his time over his books except when he goes out for a walk.
    When he went back to Paris, writing fragmentary beginnings to a novel and attending lectures by a French professor on the connections between Irish and Greek literature, his mother wrote: ‘I heard from Johnnie; troubled by bugs.’
    On 23 April 1898 he came home. The difference between his life in Paris, where he spoke fluent French, lived alone and was deeply respected by his many associates, and his life in his mother’s house, must have made him wonder. At least three times a day for meals in Ireland he had to listen to Mrs Synge and her friends and other members of the family on the subject of religion and domestic life and