![]() He remarried, fathered other children and never saw Patrick again. Forsaken by her, Hearn was soon abandoned by his father, too, who returned to Dublin briefly before serving in the Crimean War and then moved to India. In 1852 Rosa and her son were shipped off to Charles's aunt in Dublin two years later, Rosa returned to Greece alone. Only four months after his son's birth, Charles disappeared, without his Greek wife, to a new assignment in the West Indies. ![]() ![]() Known until adulthood as "Paddy", Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was the product of a short-lived, messy marriage between a surgeon in the British army, Charles Hearn, and a beautiful Greek woman called Rosa Cassimati on the Ionian island of Lefkada, famous as the place of the poet Sappho's suicide and then a British protectorate. In the film version, Donald Pleasence appeared as Blofeld with a scarred eye-a curious echo of Hearn himself, who was blind and disfigured in one eye. It was no throwaway line by Ian Fleming, who spends the entire novel channelling his own inner Lafcadio Hearn by explaining, at great length, the nuances of Japanese culture to Western readers. Bond hisses, "Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld". In the penultimate James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice (1964), just before 007 slays his nemesis Blofeld in a "Castle of Death" in Japan, the criminal mastermind explains to Bond the term "kirisute gomen": the samurai right to peremptorily lop off the heads of lower orders for perceived insults. ![]()
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