How does it feel to be a genius, Sir?

TiL made my day with the following:

On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who "worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him," might do so. In her Shakespeare and Company memoir Beach delicately avoids describing what happened, although she perhaps suggests an explanation: "Poor Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it." According to Herbert Gorman, another guest and Joyce's first biographer, Fitzgerald sank down on one knee before Joyce, kissed his hand, and declared: "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep." As the evening progressed, Fitzgerald "enlarged upon Nora Joyce's beauty, and, finally, darted through an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped on to the eighteen-inch-wide parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below unless Nora declared that she loved him."

... Joyce was alarmed at [Fitzgerald's] falling-angel side -- "That young man must be mad," he later told Beach. "I'm afraid he'll do himself an injury some day" -- but he handled the American exuberance with Old World charm. When Fitzgerald sent him a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a few days later, asking for a dedication, Joyce sent back this note: "Herewith is the book you gave me, signed, and I am adding a portrait of the artist as a once young man with the thought of your much obliged but most pusillanimous guest."

I have just spent several pleasing minutes drinking coffee and contemplating which limb (or, possibly, two) I would forgo to possess a copy of Portrait inscribed by Joyce to FSF. And happy belated Bloomsday. I have clearly been too busy.