Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  Oscar made a low, grumbling sound and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. As he wiped his fingers, I continued: ‘There is a third tap — if you’d like to see it.’

  He looked at me and nodded. ‘We must see everything, Robert. The eye is the notebook of the poet — and the detective.’

  ‘It’s by the stage door, and just as grimy.’

  ‘I’ll bring my bag,’ he said, returning to the dressing room to collect his suitcase.

  I waited in the doorway, watching him. When he spoke Oscar had a precision of statement that was all his own. His way of using his hands was equally unique. He had a trick of illustrating his meaning with a gesture: a twist of his wrist or the turn of his fingers. As he stood alone in La Grange’s dressing room contemplating the scene, he lifted his right hand and laid his index finger against his temple. He looked about him and murmured beneath his breath, ‘I am a dreamer, I admit it.’ He walked across the room and looked once more into the dresser’s darkened cubicle. He raised his voice a little. ‘A dreamer, Robert, is one who can only find his way by moonlight. His punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.’ He turned back into the dressing room and came to join me, pausing briefly by La Grange’s dressing table. He inspected the tips of his fingers and then, very carefully, with his thumb and forefinger pulled open the dressing-table drawer. He peered inside it. ‘The gun,’ he said, ‘the Colt revolver — it’s no longer here.’ He closed the drawer and looked up at me. ‘Where did you say we were going?’ he asked.

  ‘To the stage door.’

  I led the way around the edge of the dimly lit wings, pointing, as we went, to the narrow gas pipe that, just above floor level, ran along the length of the theatre wall. ‘The gas pipe ends up here,’ I explained, as we stood together in the tiny vestibule that faced the stage doorkeeper’s lodge. I pointed once more towards the ground. ‘This is the other key that stops and starts the flow of gas that eventually reaches the gas burner in the dresser’s room. As you will see, it is as stiff as the one by the dressing room.

  ‘I do not doubt you, Robert,’ said Oscar, but he held onto me once more as, sighing, he crouched down to inspect the gas pipe and key. He had just, with difficulty, settled onto his knees, when the stage door swung open admitting a gust of icy wind and the presiding genius of the Compagnie La Grange. He saw Oscar and bellowed cheerfully, ‘Rise, sir, from that semi-recumbent posture! It is most indecorous and quite unnecessary.

  Oscar looked up at Edmond La Grange and laughed. As the disciple of beauty and self-styled professor of aesthetics struggled inelegantly to his feet, France’s most celebrated actor continued in his mocking vein: ‘A simple genuflection will suffice, Oscar. In fact, before a performance, I’m quite ready to settle for a half-bow and a mere salaam.’ La Grange took Oscar by the hand. ‘Where have you been, cher collaborateur? We’ve missed you! We’ve needed you!’ Oscar made to speak, but La Grange was in full flight: ‘Our production is making wonderful progress — this will be a Hamlet to reckon with — but, of course, we open a week on Monday so nerves are getting frayed. There’s much we still need to achieve, and you ye returned, I trust, to help us to achieve it.’

  ‘Yes,’ began Oscar, but before he could continue, La Grange had turned away from him to pull open the stage door and admit Agnès La Grange and Gabrielle de la Tourbillon. The ladies came in laughing, the fur collars of their coats turned up against the cold. From beneath their charming feathered hats, they looked out at us with wide, expectant eyes.

  ‘Oh, Oscar!’ cried Gabrielle. ‘You’re back! I’m so glad.’

  ‘Monsieur Wilde,’ said Agnès, dropping a playful curtsy. ‘Act four, scene five — all those strange English flowers. I need your guidance.’ She came towards him, smiling, and offered him her hand.

  He took it and kissed it and murmured to me as she stepped away, ‘If this be madness …

  ‘Oscar,’ boomed La Grange, ‘I have a favour to ask. Mademoiselle de la Tourbillon, Mademoiselle La Grange and I are about to give our public more than they deserve — our all! We’re offering them Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme tonight. Uncut. When it’s over, the ladies will need supper. They have had a long week — they deserve a treat. I cannot entertain them: it’s Saturday night and I must see to the bookkeeping with Monsieur Marais. Would you be so kind?’

  Oscar bowed towards the ladies. ‘Mesdemoiselles, Robert and I would be honoured to entertain you. We will be at your service the moment the curtain falls.’

  La Grange beamed at Oscar and then turned towards me and prodded me in the chest. ‘And you, mon petit, will be at my service in two minutes’ time, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Everything’s laid out in your room. I was just seeing Oscar to the door.’

  Edmond La Grange, with a flourish of his raised right hand, led his leading ladies into the theatre. Agnès bobbed another curtsy; Gabrielle stroked my cheek as she passed by.

  In the alley outside the theatre, Oscar asked me: ‘Are you still in love with the beautiful Mademoiselle de la Tourbillon?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘More than ever.’

  ‘And does she love you?’

  ‘I don’t know. She might — but I think she’s confused.’

  ‘She is thirty, Robert. She is too old for confusion. ‘‘What I mean is that she might love me, but for Eddie Garstrang.’

  ‘Eddie Garstrang?’ exclaimed Oscar, stopping in his tracks.

  ‘He is pestering her,’ I said.

  Oscar looked at me in amazement and put a hand on each of my shoulders. ‘Garstrang is in love with Gabrielle?’ he asked.

  ‘He is making himself a nuisance, certainly.’

  ‘Oh, Robert, let him have her. He’s the right age, and he’s a man who gets what he wants, as a rule.’

  ‘Not in this case,’ I said. ‘I have challenged him to a duel!’

  ‘A duel?’ Oscar began to laugh. ‘Don’t be absurd, Robert. You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I don’t believe this, Robert.’

  ‘It’s true. I’ll explain later. I must go now, Oscar. La Grange will be waiting. I must go.

  ‘You are out of your mind, my friend.’ As I ran back into the theatre, Oscar called after me, ‘If anyone’s mad, Robert, it’s you!’

  13

  Le Chat Noir

  I was not mad. I was in love. Gabrielle had enraptured me. I was twenty-one, gauche, naïve, impetuous, overwhelmed by desire and wholly inexperienced in the ways of women. Now I can look back and smile at my own absurdity. At the time, I had never known a passion so disturbing or profound.

  The Saturday evening performance of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme rattled by. I watched it from my usual station in the wings. As La Grange had promised, he and his troupe gave their all. Energy, like lightning, filled the stage and laughter, like thunder, filled the auditorium. The moment it was done and I had undressed and sponged and towelled the great man, and he had admired himself in his cheval mirror and donned his dressing gown, Richard Marais shuffled into the dressing room with his ink and pen and ledgers.

  ‘Work,’ La Grange sighed, smiling wearily, ‘that is what my life has been about.’ He nodded to dismiss me. ‘Amuses-toi bien, mon petit,’ he murmured, pinching my cheek. ‘Look after the ladies and take care of yourself. Tomorrow is another day.’

  I found the ladies already ensconced with Oscar in an elegant four-wheeler at the end of the alley leading to the stage door. They were as gay and playful as they had been before the performance.

  ‘What kept you?’ asked Gabrielle, taking my hand as I climbed aboard the carriage. ‘We’ve been waiting.’

  ‘I had to undress Monsieur,’ I explained. As I took my place at her side, she held onto my hand and kissed my cheek. Her face was covered in theatrical make-up. It was dark in the carriage, but I could see that her cheeks were rouged and that she wore an artificial beauty spot at the side of her mouth.

  ‘We haven�
�t changed,’ giggled Agnès La Grange. ‘We’ve come in costume.’

  ‘Tout décolleté.’ Gabrielle smiled, taking my hand and slipping it inside her cloak so that, briefly, it rested between her breasts.

  ‘Monsieur Wilde says that where we’re going we’ll blend in perfectly.’ Agnès’s golden skin was hidden behind a mask of white powder, so that her huge eyes looked larger than ever. She fluttered her eyelashes at Oscar coquettishly.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘To Montmartre,’ said Oscar. He called up to the driver: ‘Boulevard de Rochechouart, monsieur.’

  As the four-wheeler lurched forward, Oscar surveyed our party with an air of proprietorial contentment. I sensed that my friend had spent the evening with a bottle of absinthe rather than a box of aniseed bonbons. ‘We are going to Le Chat Noir,’ he announced. ‘It is a bar and a restaurant and a cabaret room — and a way of life. Or so they say. It’s notorious. It’s not been open long. I’ve not been, but Sarah Bernhardt recommends it. Sarah claims it’s the devil’s idea of heaven on earth: full of mad poets and sad actors. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, she says that we will adore it and that she’ll be there to make sure we’re properly looked after.’

  ‘I love Madame Bernhardt,’ said Agnès eagerly. ‘I’ve known her all my life. I never knew my mother — she died as I was born — but I like to pretend that my mother must have been like Madame Bernhardt. Do you think that I look like her? My brother says that I do.’

  Oscar laughed. ‘You look nothing like Madame Bernhardt. Your brother is teasing you.’ He leant across the carriage and took Agnès’s hand in his. ‘You have a beauty that is all your own,’ he said. ‘You look like a porcelain doll tonight.’

  ‘I am very happy tonight, Mr Wilde,’ she replied. ‘I am in love.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Oscar, sitting back and reaching for a cigarette. ‘Tell us more.’

  ‘I cannot,’ answered Agnès, turning to look out of the carriage window, ‘not yet. It is a secret.’

  A silence fell among us. We each looked out of the carriage window. It was late — gone eleven o’clock — yet the foothills of Montmartre were filled with people and traffic: drunken revellers were jostling one another, weaving their way between carriages and handcarts; dogs were rummaging in the gutters; at the street corners flower-selling gypsies, organ-grinders and ladies of the night were plying their trade.

  ‘Will Sarah’s husband be there?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘Or her lover?’

  ‘Neither,’ answered Oscar, flicking his lighted cigarette out of the carriage window. It spun through the night air like a tiny firework and, as it landed on the cobbles, disappeared at once beneath a horse’s hoof. ‘Le Chat Noir is for actors and artists, poets and painters, not brutes and bores. She has promised to bring Jacques-Emile Blanche.’

  ‘I know him!’ cried Agnès excitedly. ‘He is painting my picture. He is lovely.’

  ‘I know his father,’ said Gabrielle. ‘At least, I’ve met him. Edmond knows him. He’s a doctor, isn’t he? At Passy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Agnès. ‘At Passy. He runs the lunatic asylum there.’

  Le Chat Noir was not as I had expected. To call it a bar and a restaurant and a cabaret was absurd. The whole establishment consisted of two small rooms containing, at most, a dozen tables. From the outside it looked like an unpretentious provincial café, the windows hung with red cotton curtains trimmed with lace. To gain an impression of the interior décor was difficult: the rooms were lit entirely by candle, filled with smoke and so crowded that everybody present — whether standing or seated, whether willingly or not — was in physical contact with the person or persons next to them.

  Given the extraordinary appearance of our party —with Gabrielle and Agnès in their eighteenth-century finery and Oscar looking like the Emperor Nero dressed as a Regency fop — at any other address our entrance would have caused a stir. At 84 boulevard Rochechouart our arrival went unnoticed. With difficulty, Oscar leading the way, we pushed and squeezed ourselves through the throng. Eventually we found Madame Bernhardt, at the far end of the second room, perched on a marble-topped table, dressed in a gold and green sarong, wearing diamonds in her russet hair and holding a pewter tankard of red wine between her hands. ‘Mes enfants!’ she cried, embracing each of us in turn. ‘Welcome to the Salon des Arts Incohérents. You know the boys, don’t you?’

  Two young men were seated on either side of the great actress. One, pale-faced and round-eyed, was the artist, Jacques-Emile Blanche. He got to his feet at once and, acknowledging our arrival with a shy smile, kissed Agnès lightly on the lips. The other man — older, heavier, thicker set, with wild black hair and a walrus moustache — was the grey-lipped poet, Maurice Rollinat. As we greeted him, he simply closed his eyes and let his heavy head loll back. ‘Maurice is exhausted,’ explained Madame Bernhardt, shouting to make herself heard above the hubbub. ‘He has been tonight’s cabaret.’

  ‘Does he sing?’ I asked.

  ‘He does,’ she said, ‘but tonight he recited a poem for us. It was extraordinary — shocking. It told of …’ She hesitated.

  Rollinat opened his eyes. ‘Copulation,’ he thundered.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sarah, laughing. ‘The poem told of a boy and a girl who walk in the woods together and see a bull and a cow mating—

  ‘La Vache au Taureau,’ said Oscar. ‘I know the poem. It is a masterpiece. There is a true breath of nature in it. Not since Lucretius has the world read its like.’

  Rollinat sat forward and grinned at Oscar. His teeth were brown, but his smile was generous. ‘Monsieur, if you are not drunk you deserve to be. May I buy you a drink?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ cried Agnès in a mock wail. ‘I need food!’

  ‘And you shall have it,’ declared Jacques-Emile Blanche, ‘at once!’ As he spoke, he caressed her cheeks with his cupped hands and then, suddenly, like a boy on a rock diving into the sea, he turned and plunged into the crowd.

  Sarah Bernhardt looked at Agnès with anxious eyes. ‘And how are you, my child? Has the role of Ophelia driven you mad? It can, you know. I have played the part.’

  ‘I am well, Madame Bernhardt,’ replied Agnès. ‘I am happy because I am in love. And free, at last.’

  As she spoke, Jacques-Emile Blanche returned to the table. He held two stools above his head. Behind him came a waiter with two more. Within minutes, all seven of us — three actresses, three poets and a painter — were seated in a tight circle, like fairies in a ring, eating bread and cheese and cold sausage and sweet tomatoes, drinking rough Rhône wine and apple cider, smoking Turkish cigarettes and French cigars, and talking of life and love and death and madness. And copulation.

  That night in the smoke-filled back room at Le Chat Noir I knew that I was destined to be Gabrielle’s lover — and perhaps, one day, her husband. For two hours, as together we ate and drank and laughed and sighed, hidden beneath the tiny marble-topped café table her left hand rested on my right thigh. Occasionally, when Rollinat talked of carnality, of bodily appetites and lust that runs beyond desire, her fingers strayed and pressed themselves against my line of life. I had never known a sensation so intoxicating.

  Rollinat was fearless: he said things that other men dare not even think. He spoke of murder, rape, theft and parricide, not as crimes to be deplored, but as phenomena to be understood — and experienced. Oscar listened to him with rapt attention, now and again taking out a pencil to make a note of one of the French poet’s turns of phrase. It was Rollinat and Oscar who dominated the conversation. Oscar shared Rollinat’s fascination with perversity and delighted in his open contempt for conventional morality. ‘To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is quite easy,’ Oscar declared. ‘It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.’

  ‘Can we do as we please in this world?’ asked Agnès, looking up at Oscar with wide enquiring
eyes. ‘Does morality not matter?’

  ‘Kindness matters,’ said Oscar. ‘Courtesy matters.’ He raised his glass in the girl’s direction. ‘Beauty matters a great deal.’

  ‘But morality?’ Agnès persisted. ‘What about morality? My grandmother says that of all our senses our “moral sense” is the most important.’

  Oscar drew on his cigarette and said, slowly and deliberately: ‘I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid and entirely lacking in the smallest degree of humanity. No disrespect to your grandmother, who I gather was a fine actress in her day, but I would rather have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue.’

  ‘Oscar,’ cried Sarah Bernhardt, waving an admonishing finger at him, ‘sometimes you go too far!’

  ‘On the contrary, Sarah, I never go far enough!’

  As the laughter ricocheted around our tiny table, the marble top was suddenly awash with red wine. Agnès’s glass had slipped from her hand and tumbled onto the table. The glass’s stem had snapped, the bowl had cracked in two. The wine was everywhere. Agnès broke into a flood of tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed.

  Instinctively, as the glass crashed and the girl cried out, we all drew away from the table. Gabrielle took her hand from my thigh. Rollinat pushed back his stool. Sarah Bernhardt jumped to her feet and went to put her arm around Agnès’s heaving shoulders. Jacques-Emile Blanche leapt up and, grabbing a cloth from a nearby waiter, began to mop up the purple liquid that was now running over the table’s edge. ‘Who would have thought a small glass to have so much wine in it?’ muttered Oscar.

  ‘I must go home,’ breathed Agnès between her sobs.

  ‘You can stay here at my studio,’ said Sarah Bernhardt.

  ‘Come back to Passy,’ said Jacques-Emile Blanche.

  The girl looked up at the young artist with anguished, red-rimmed eyes. ‘I am lost,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You’re exhausted, that’s all,’ said Sarah soothingly. ‘I have played the part. I know.’