7 January — or as it’s otherwise known, the anniversary of the time Samuel Beckett was stabbed by a pimp in the small hours on the streets of Paris, causing him to meet his soulmate and giving rise to the phrase (and recipe) ‘assassination custard’.
He was on his way back from dinner with two friends when “this pimp emerged and started to pester us to go with him”. Beckett pushed him to the ground, but the man jumped up clutching a knife, which he jammed into the Irishman’s chest.
Beckett woke up in a communal ward in the Hôpital Broussais to find that the knife had just missed his heart and left lung, but pierced the pleura, putting his life at serious risk. With the help of James Joyce and his doctor, Beckett got a private room.
This was intriguing, because he’d known the Joyces for years, but they hadn’t been close for some time, after Nora J accused him of toying with the affections of their troubled daughter, Lucia. Even so, James J paid for the private room.
Around the time of the attack, Beckett was involved with Peggy Guggenheim, who was one of his many visitors, but his ardour towards her was beginning to cool.
It seemed he was more pleased to see Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who he’d known before, but who was now single and offering to help him recuperate — causing the jilted lover to remark of her quieter rival:
Beckett’s complicated love life aside, during his convalescence Nora Joyce made him one or more egg custard puddings, as described in the FT by Séamas O’Reilly:
Something, anyway, revived Beckett, and he managed to face his attacker in court. He didn’t want to press charges, but the police brought him a book of mugshots, and he identified a man called Prudent.
They met on the way in…
![He met Prudent in the entraceway and asked him why he did it. “Je ne sais pas, Monsieur,” answered the pimp, adding a polite but incongruous “Je m’excuse” [“I don’t know why, sir. I’m sorry”]. “The desp[erado got off with two months,” wrote Beckett, “not bad for a 5th conviction. I am still without my clothes, taken away from me at the time as pieces de conviction and never produced. I have now to prove that they ever belonged to me.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*UdtZgGqd2XUy4ulObGqPQA.png)
These book excerpts are from Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson, and you can also read about the incident, and Beckett’s life in general in an Independent article from 2019.
Apparently, he never did get those clothes back.
More importantly, though, there is now a restaurant in Dublin called Assassination Custard — and they have a recipe for the dish itself:
(Pedantic note: I’ve said 85th anniversary, even though Séamas and the restaurant say this happened in 1939. Without wishing to cast aspersions on them, Knowlson says it was 1938, citing a letter Beckett wrote to a friend about it on 13/1/38. Further pedantic update (7 January 2025): apparently, the restaurant has now sadly closed.)
