[Joan Mitchell’s] relationship with Beckett was a revealing one. Beckett had taken up residence in Paris in 1937 and, seeking exile within exile, preferred the out-of-the-way café’s and bistros of the fifteenth arrondissement to the more artistic places of the Left Bank. Here he liked to drink Irish whiskey, which he introduced to what then was an eminently quartier ouvrier, and would not see any of his friends unless fortified with alcohol. In these cafés he would meet the young Joan, and they would talk or sit in silence for hours on end. Beckett liked her vast capacity for drink, her refusal to explain her art, ‘her relentless quest for the void.’ …Michelle’s companion, the Québécois artist Jean-Paul Riopelle … found their reunions exceptionally depressing and would often become exasperated with their long brooding sessions. One night, when the three were sitting in gloomy silence at the Dômé café in Montparnasse with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, the exasperated Riopelle got up and stormed out through the revolving doors. Mitchell went after him and Beckett tried to follow her, but he was so drunk that he could not extricate himself from the door. ‘Round and round he whirled, while Giacometti, like a giant brooding toad with brooding eyes, sat and watched and said nothing, and while the tourists pointed at the poet of nothingness and despair.’

Alberto Manguel, Reading Pictures, p. 30, quote from Deirdre Blair, Beckett: A Biography