While on holidays in 1936 Joyce stayed at the Villa Connemara in Beaugency and, a couple of days later, he wrote a letter to his four-and-a-half year old grandson Stephen in which he told a story about how Beaugency got its famous bridge. The story involves a deal made with the devil by the town’s mayor, who Joyce named Alfie Byrne, after a famous Dublin mayor of the time. The story was published for the first time in 1957 as part of the letters of James Joyce, and was then published in 1964 as a children’s book with illustrations by Richard Erdoes. Joyce didn’t give the story a title but when it was published as a children’s book it was called The Cat and the Devil.