IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JAMES JOYCE PARIS

RICHARD EDER is chief of The Times Paris bureau. By RICHARD EDER

N o. 7, Rue Edmond Valentin. A six-story facade, heavy ornamental moldings, a wrought-iron grille door, the Eiffel Tower in sight down the street: the heartland of upper-bourgeois Paris. Poodleland. Beneath the city's winter overcast, these arrondissements - the 7th, the 8th, the 16th, the 17th -are an endless yellow-gray undercast: bland and impermeable. They are a chilly mask: and for the later James Joyce, who cloaked his turbulence with formality, they made an oddly appropriate residence.

Joyce spent 20 years in Paris - almost as long as in Dublin - but that is like counting the time we sleep. In 1922, two years after he arrived from Zurich, he immersed himself in the elusive dream that took him 16 years to finish: ''Finnegans Wake.''

In ''Ulysses,'' the tangible presence of Dublin is memorialized: paving-stone and brick wall, legend and grilled kidneys, gab and gossip. ''Finnegans Wake'' is a sleeping packrat dragging the world in, bit by bit. There are slivers of Paris in the pack but they are transmuted, as a dream transmutes the sound of a passing car into an army in flight.

So how is the pilgrim to find Joyce in Paris? There is, of course, his biographical presence, which will be attended to in a moment. But mostly what we look for in a literary pilgrimage is the cafe the characters drank in, not the one where the author did. Not, that is, unless the author is materially incorporated in the characters. We follow the characters Stephen and Bloom in and about Dublin; and we follow Joyce too, because he gave them his meanderings. In Paris, Joyce's work and his life diverge d. How do you follow the sleeping Hum- phrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose dream is ''Finnegans Wake''? Strictly speaking: by eating an indigestible dinner, falling asleep, and letting the toots and stirrings outside and an uneasy memory infiltrate your dreams.

By the time Joyce got to Paris he was approaching middle age and near-blindness. He was not inactive, but he did not throw himself into the life of the city in order to find himself or his subjects or his art. He had them already. He used Paris for its quiet, its elegance and the congenial atmosphere it offered a writer.

He had company and diversion. He had the material support of Harriet Weaver, who sent him astonishing sums from London, and of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, who got ''Ulysses'' into print when nobody else dared to. He had a reasonable amount of lionizing; but he also had the privacy and aloofness that Paris allows to its lions, because it possesses so many of them.

Mostly, except for brief visits in 1902 and 1903, Joyce's Paris geography is a series of respectable apartments, such as the one on Edmond Valentin, where he sat and wrote. They were havens of a sort, but invaded more and more by shadows. Literal ones: He had at least 10 eye operations, and at times could barely see to write. Correcting proofs, he would lay his head sideways on the page to achieve the only odd angle at which he still had some vision.

There were other troubles. The lion grew moth-eaten, as his Herculean labors on ''Finnegans Wake'' were rewarded by puzzlement and distress on the part of many of his admirers. Even the American poet Ezra Pound, not exactly a clear-running stream, wrote him: ''I will have another go at it, but up to present I make nothing of it whatever ... I don't see what which has to do with where ...''

Finally, his last years in France - he emigrated back to Zurich at the end of 1940 during the German occupation, only to die there a month later - were tormented by his fruitless efforts to shore up the sanity of his daughter, Lucia. The last photographs of Joyce in Paris show him wintry and sad and drained of words. ''Finnegans Wake'' was finished.

Long before this late-season Joyce, there was a brief Paris spring, as traditional as a tourist poster. He came over in 1902, thinking first to get into medical school, and later spending his time reading in the National Library.

He was poor, hungry, hung out in Latin Quarter cafes, and went to a brothel or two, as well as to the Opera, where he saw an early performance of ''Pelleas and Melisande.'' The brothels are no longer there, but the Cafe Polidor, with its old wooden front, still stands at 41 Rue Monsieur le Prince, a street behind the Ecole de Medecine.

Joyce stayed at the Hotel Corneille, small and cheap, across the river and a few blocks from the Library. At one point John Millington Synge spent an argumentative week there as well, with Joyce lecturing him about the Aristotelian deficiencies of ''Riders to the Sea.'' The hotel is at 4 Rue des Moulins, still cheap and fixed up a bit, but with a facade that doesn't seem to have been painted since Joyce stayed there.

It was Jo yc e's sardonic-romantic time, pinched hard for money and writing his m other cash-wringing accounts of his empty stomach. It produced a de scription of the city as ''that lamp for lovers hung in the wood of t he world.'' Despite his admiration for the clarity of French writin g, it produced a pointed remark about French inability to write real poetry ''because the Kingdom of Heaven is incompatible with the spir it of observation.''

Seventeen years later, with ''Dubliners'' and ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' published, most of ''Ulysses'' written, a growing reputation and Nora Barnacle and two children, Joyce arrived at the Gare de Lyons from Zurich by way of Dijon, and took a taxi to a private hotel on Rue de l'Universite. Today it is the Hotel Lenox, a trim white-shuttered establishment sanctioned by Michelin and charging up to $50 a day for a double room.

It was expensive for Joyce too, and he moved. He moved, in fact, some 13 times in his years here. The prettiest place he lived, perhaps, was Valery Larbaud's apartment in a kind of mews at 73 Rue Cardinal Lemoine, on the Contrescarpe behind the Pantheon and with curving view of Paris.

Larbaud was a crucial link in the chain of patrons from which Joyce hung his formidable but frail acrobacy. Pound brought Joyce to Paris and introduced him, among others, to Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Company. Monnier intro- duced him to Larbaud, whose weight in French letters was such that when he declared the manuscript of ''Ulysses'' to be a masterpiece, Joyce's lionhood was confirmed. It was like Sartre announcing you were bright. Beach's Shakespeare and Company, which published ''Ulysses,'' stoodat 12 Rue de l'Odeon. It has been gone since she was interned by the Ge rmans during the war; in its place stands a Chinese gift shop. Nextto it is a bookstore that specializes in books on physical fitness.

The literary pilgrim can still visit a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, but it has no direct connection. It is an engaging, untidy place next to St. Julien le Pauvre, on the left bank of the Seine. George Whitman, a Taunton, Mass., bookseller, started it after the war and, in a crumpled green velvet suit and plaid shirt, presides over it still, putting up indigent writers free in the rooms above. Sylvia Beach, retired from bookselling, used to visit it after the war; but it seems too assertively Bohemian to have appealed to Joyce in his Paris stage.

Joyce and Nora moved and moved, from borrowed apartments to hotels to short-term rentals. But their two main Paris residences, within a few blocks of each other, were on the dull side of the Invalides in the 7th arrondissement. From 1925 to 1931 they occupied a flat at 2 Square Robiac, just off the Rue de Grenelle. Later they moved to Edmond Valentin and stayed for four years. There is nothing much for pilgrims at either place, except a concierge who will peer out at them peering in, and disclaim any knowledge of the one-time tenant.

There are few people left who do remember Joyce in Paris. One of them is Maria Jolas who, with her late husband Eugene, became a close friend and patron of Joyce in the 1930's. Admiring ''Finnegans Wake'' when others had dropped away, they published portions of it in their magazine, transition. She is in her late 80's now, lives in an apartment on the Rue de Rennes, writes her memoirs and is a kind of shrine to the Joyce industry.

Some shrine. She takes her visitor firmly in hand, serves him a glass of ratafia, and booms and glows as she talks about Joyce and the world of letters.

''He is the geniale writer of the century,'' she said. ''I know people are very jealous. I have a daughter; she says to me: 'Le cas Joyce. We have Proust.' Well, Proust. But Proust is like this'' - she cups her hands tightly - ''and Joyce wrote of the world.''

She recalls the restaurants they used to go to. He avoided the artists' hangouts and liked to be as stately as possible. Early on, he would go to Les Trianons - it no longer exists - on the Boulevard Montparnasse. Later he went to Chez Francis - a handsome, expensive brasserie now, but cheaper then - on the Place de l'Alma. Still later, he patronized the stylish and expensive Fouquet's, on the Champs Elysees.

''He was poor as Job's turkey when he got here,'' Mrs. Jolas said. ''Then as his pockets began to fill, he moved around. He would call us up after working all day, and we'd meet at Fouquet's.''

Joyce would order a meal but hardly touch it. He drank white wine, steadily. Sometimes he would order a clove of garlic and chew on it. At home, or at friends' houses, he would sing and sometimes dance. After one dinner, Albert Schweitzer, on a visit from Lambarene, played the piano to accompany him.

Music dissolved some of the pressures of his writing and his life. He went frequently to the Opera. During a performance of ''William Tell'' by an Irish tenor who was his protege, he put on enough of a one-man ovati on -dramatized by the front-row spectacle he made with his cape and white cane - to get two encores.

He walked miles; almost always, because of his faltering vision, with a companion. It was a triumph for him when, after one operation, he could make out the lights of the Place de la Concorde. Otherwise, leafy in the summer and damp gray in the winter, all his walks were in the fog. He would walk up the Champs Elysees, in the Bois de Boulogne, through the Champs de Mars and the Invalides, and above all, along the Seine.

He was joining all the rivers of the world in his 16 years on ''Finnegans Wake,'' and of all the frail geography the Joyce pilgrim encounters in Paris, the most substantial and evocative thing is the ''sequan-strewn'' river. From the Pont d'Alma - he used to stand there with his secretary, Paul Leon - the Seine was as powerful to him, and as barely visible, as time passing.

These winter days, it is yellow and swollen with rain. Upstream, past the American Cathedral, the gold-tipped Pont Alexandre III and the distant tops of the Louvre, the gray scroll of the city shows hardly a change. It is the same embossed and aloof passage through which Joyce's own river ran.