Il me faut des lions dans les cages dorées: c’est affreux, après la chair humaine les lions aiment l’os, et on ne leur [le] donne jamais.*
He initialed these ‘O.W.’ to distinguish them from remarks he had heard from others, such as one from a waiter at the Hôtel Voltaire, ‘L’art, c’est le désordre,’ which contradicted all he had been saying about the subject in America. A concierge at the Louvre said to him, ‘Les maîtres anciens, c’est la momie, n’est-ce pas? [The old masters—just mummies, right?]’ Wilde did not accept this verdict, and told the assembled dinner guests how he often sat for hours before the statue of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. His friend Godwin had a cast of this statue in the center of his drawing room, with a censer smoking before it. At this rapturous point Sherard saw his opening, and interjected rudely, ‘I have never been to the Louvre. When that name is mentioned, I always think of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, where I can get the cheapest ties in Paris.’ To his surprise, Wilde took the remark with good grace: ‘I like that, that is very fine,’ he said, and after dinner sought Sherard out to invite him for dinner the next night. ‘When you bluntly disclaimed all artistic interests,’ he explained later, ‘I discovered that you had scientifically thought out a pose that interested me.’5 Vulgarities were tolerable when they issued from fair heads. And Wilde was testing out a cultural scene which he knew to be far different from what he had experienced in America.
When Sherard went to the Hôtel Voltaire the next night, in late February 1883, he found Wilde occupying a suite of rooms on the second floor overlooking the Seine. He began to praise the view, but Wilde stopped him, with a deflation even more final than Sherard’s of the Louvre the night before: ‘Oh, that is altogether immaterial, except to the innkeeper, who of course charges it in the bill. A gentleman never looks out of the window.’ (To avoid saying ‘I,’ Wilde had concocted his mythical gentleman who never made an expected gesture.) As for Sherard, prevented from looking out, he looked in. Wilde wore a white wool dressing gown—his writing costume, as Balzac had worn a monk’s cowl. Balzacian also was Wilde’s ivory cane, its head covered with turquoises.† His imitations did not stop there: he would later pose for Will Rothenstein in a red waistcoat, in imitation not of Balzac but of Gautier.
The interior displayed other flourishes. On a table were sheets of ornate paper on which Wilde was writing The Duchess of Padua. The mantelpiece was surmounted by a reproduction of Puvis de Chavannes’s painting of a slender nude girl sitting on a shroud in a village graveyard, her eyes full of wonder at her own resurrection. When Sherard admired it, Wilde at once presented it to him, writing on the mat an aesthetic motto, ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau.’ He told Sherard to have it framed in gray with a narrow line of vermilion, a word which—as both Sherard and Julia Ward Howe noticed—Wilde pronounced so slowly that a missing l could be heard.
Wilde was in funds, and with his accustomed generosity took Sherard to an elegant restaurant, Foyot’s in the rue de Tournon. He explained his affluence to his friend by saying, ‘We are dining with the Duchess,’ meaning that he was drawing on Mary Anderson’s advance for his play. In later meetings he would be equally free with his money, quoting Proudhon’s ‘La propriété, c’est le vol’ as his authority for spending not only on his guest and himself, but on various Left Bank hangers-on. (One of these was Petit Louis, who wanted to return to his native Brittany and enlist in the Navy. Wilde bought him a suit and gave him his fare.)7 The question of whether to order red or white wine led Sherard to remark that white wine should really be called yellow, an idea that Wilde liked and appropriated. In recompense, Sherard’s locks were no longer blond to him but ‘honey-coloured.’ Sherard at first stiffly addressed his host as ‘Wilde,’ but Wilde would not accept this: ‘You mustn’t call me Wilde. If I am your friend, my name to you is Oscar. If we are only strangers, I am Mr Wilde.’ Sherard gave in, and confessed that he had felt hostility when they first met. ‘That was very wrong of you, Robert,’ Wilde said, explaining that the freemasonry of writers took pleasure in one another’s works.8
Sherard rebelled a little still. When Wilde talked of lecturing on beauty in America, and of insisting that beauty might be found in the commonest things, Sherard behaved like the New York reporter who had asked if beauty was in Hoboken. He dug his cigar butt into the coffee in his saucer and said, ‘Do you see any beauty in this?’ Wilde was not fazed—‘Oh, yes, it makes quite an effective brown’—but something in his look led Sherard to desist from further mockery. After dinner they walked past the place where the palace of the Tuileries had been burned down twelve years before, under the Commune. Wilde commented, ‘There is not there one little blackened stone which is not to me a chapter in the bible of democracy.’ The remark could hardly have pleased his friend more. Sherard had a passion for the French Revolution and dated all his letters according to the revolutionary calendar. On discovering this, Wilde always addressed letters to him as ‘Citoyen Robert Sherard.’ Challenged as to his own political views, he admitted to ‘an elegant Republicanism.’9
The two men met again next day, and almost every day thereafter during Wilde’s stay. A good deal of affectionate talk went on: Sherard fell into phrases like ‘My dearest Oscar,’ and they appear to have kissed each other’s lips in a social manner.10 Sherard was thinking of marrying, and found Wilde unsympathetic. (‘I have heard strange things about men’s wives,’ says Simone in A Florentine Tragedy.) The infidelity of wives, Wilde enlightened his friend, was almost universal. If Sherard should marry, his advice was, ‘Act dishonourably, Robert. It’s what sooner or later she’ll certainly do to you.’ (In Sherard’s case this proved true.) As they passed a statue of Henri IV, Wilde was ruminating about a subject he would later discuss with Louis Latourette: ‘Still another great Frenchman who was a cuckold! All the great men of France were cuckolds. Haven’t you observed this? All! In every period. By their wives or by their mistresses. Villon, Molière, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Musset, Balzac, kings, generals, poets! Those I mention, a thousand more that I could name, were all cuckolds. Do you know what that means? I will tell you. Great men, in France, have loved women too much. Women don’t like that. They take advantage of this weakness. In England, great men love nothing, neither art, nor wealth, nor glory … nor women. It’s an advantage, you can be sure.’11‡
The acolyte Sherard asked Wilde how a husband should behave if he discovered his wife was unfaithful, and Wilde sketched out a scene: ‘Pretend to ignore the liaison and delight in watching them. It will get interesting as the time draws near for his departure after you three have been spending the evening together. You should yourself be more and more marital and you close the séance by giving him his congé with some such remark as, “Well, goodbye. We young married folks, you know …,” and to the adulterous wife, “Aw lit, darling, au lit.” Then some minutes later you go in your pyjamas to the window of the nuptial thalamos and there of course Don Juan is standing on the other side of the road gazing at and sighing towards the place where Cressid lay that night. There you attract his attention and wave your hand towards him to imply that he must be on his way, while you hasten to the matrimonial delights that are awaiting you.’13 It was clear that Wilde was moving towards the unexpected domination of lover by husband which he would display in A Florentine Tragedy.
Yet, if he cynically opposed marriage, he did not display sangfroid over fornication. One evening he went to the Eden Music Hall and picked up a well-known prostitute, later to be murdered, called Marie Aguétant. The next day he commented, as lesser men might have done, ‘What animals we all are, Robert.’ ‘You wake in me each bestial sense, you make me what I would not be,’ was the way he put this in ‘The Sphinx.’ ‘The Harlot’s House,’ in which the dance of marketed love is also the dance of death, and is mitigated only by the approach, ‘like a frightened girl,’ of unsoiled dawn, was also a literary regurgitation of his disgust. It was, as he said of André Raffalovich’s verse, ‘Herrick after the French
Revolution.’14 Sherard was alarmed that Wilde might have been robbed, but Wilde replied impatiently, ‘One gives them all that one has in one’s pockets,’ as if the worst of the experience had not been financial.
Young Sherard was increasingly dazzled by his new friend. They talked a good deal about literature, especially—of English writers—Swinburne and Carlyle. Wilde could quote long passages from The French Revolution. But much of their conversation turned on a quartet more appropriate to the current Parisian scene: Gérard de Nerval, Poe, Chatterton, and Baudelaire. Their pervasive gloom suited the early 1880s. Wilde and Sherard retraced together Nerval’s routes in Paris, and Wilde would recite love-and-death lines such as ‘Les Cydalises’:
Où sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau.§
The same theme fascinated him in Baudelaire. He preferred ‘Une Charogne,’ with its brutal union of the dead carcass and the beloved,
—Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion!‖
Another favorite was ‘Le Vin de l’assassin,’ in which a murderer boasts of having killed his wife. For formal reasons, Wilde liked ‘La Musique,’ with its contrast of being riven by music like a ship in a storm, or of being becalmed in despair.15
Wilde wished to meet French writers and artists, and was invited to an evening reception at Victor Hugo’s house. There a Polish princess tried to awaken his interest, but he preferred to talk about Swinburne with Auguste Vacquerie, the radical editor of Le Rappel. Vacquerie had assumed, from the way that Swinburne, on a visit to Paris, had jumped about ‘like a carp,’ that he must be a drinker. Wilde was quick to explain that Swinburne was possessed of a temperament so delicate that merely to look at a glass of wine would put him into a Bacchanalian frenzy, and that he actually drank almost nothing. Some of his anecdotes about Swinburne so amused Vacquerie that he took Wilde over to meet Victor Hugo, but Hugo was taking his usual postprandial doze and even Wilde could not wake him up. On leaving, Wilde ebulliently quoted ‘Napoléon II from Hugo’s Chants du crépuscule (no. 5):
Il cria tout joyeux avec un air sublime:
—L’avenir! l’avenir! l’avenir est à moi!
He forgot the poet’s reply to the ill-fated Emperor,
Non, l’avenir n’est à personne!
Sire, l’avenir est à Dieu!a
Wilde could scarcely have been unaware of an element of doltishness in his young friend Sherard, but treated him with faultless consideration. One day he spent hours going about Paris in search of a copy of Delvau’s biography of Nerval on the ground that, furnished with this, Sherard could write a knowledgeable article for the English press and make a little money. Sherard never rose to this task, though Delvau’s book, an expensive one, was duly found and bought for him. His artistic interests were limited; he was doubtful, for example, about Impressionist painting. Wilde did his best to convert him to the painting of Degas, to whose garret studio in the rue Fontaine Saint-Georges he and Whistler had recently climbed by ladder. ‘Nothing is worth painting,’ he assured Sherard, ‘but what is not worth looking at.’16b Neither then nor later did Sherard show any sign of catching on. But Wilde was at last coming to admire the work of the Impressionists, especially Degas, Monet, and the Pissarros.c
Sherard did, however, observe Wilde closely, and one must be grateful for the pages in which he describes him. Wilde was now dressing like a Frenchman of the period, with certain variations. He wore the standard silk hat and redingote. But the cuffs turned up from the sleeves of his jacket were unusual, as was his fur-lined overcoat, veteran of his American lecture tour. When Sherard ventured to commend Wilde for having given up his American costume, Wilde found the remark ‘tedious,’ by which he always meant irritating. But he agreed in substance: ‘All that belonged to the Oscar of the first period. We are now concerned with the Oscar Wilde of the second period, who has nothing whatever in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly.’18 Punch also noted the change, and in the issue of 31 March 1883 carried a mock advertisement: ‘To be sold, the whole of the Stock-in-Trade, Appliances, and Inventions of a Successful Aesthete, who is retiring from business. This will include a large Stock of faded Lilies, dilapidated Sunflowers, and shabby Peacocks’ Feathers, several long-haired Wigs, a collection of incomprehensible Poems, and a number of impossible Pictures. Also, a valuable Manuscript Work, entitled Instruction to Aesthetes, containing a list of aesthetic catchwords, drawings of aesthetic attitudes, and many choice secrets of the craft. Also, a number of well-used Dadoes, sad-coloured Draperies, blue and white China, and brass Fenders … No reasonable offer refused.’
Wilde would later praise the forger Wainewright for having ‘intensified his personality’ by the wearing of disguises.19 For him too clothing was a way of carrying each phase to its apogee, whether it confounded and irritated the onlookers or not. He liked also the romantic notion that the soul could be perpetually reborn. He did not accept the suggestion that his present attire was more conventional—it was only more subtly unconventional. A new wardrobe was needed for each new country.
He also changed his hairstyle. Instead of wearing it long, he resolved to wear it in a Roman fashion, and took his hairdresser from the rue Scribe to the Louvre to show him a marble bust. (He later said it was a bust of Nero, but Louise Jopling heard him say ‘Antinous.’20) The hairdresser obliged, and Wilde kept this imperial style for a few more months.d (‘Curly hair to match the curly teeth,’ someone jeered.22) ‘I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?’ asks Cecily of Algernon, who replies, ‘Yes, darling, with a little help from others.’ He did not, however, make any effort to disguise his face, and in seeming defiance of his theories refused to wear a mask at a masked ball at Alma Tadema’s. He was complacent about his own features, and later vaunted them to his intimates.
Wilde always spoke of his stay in Paris as one during which he had worked well. When he was simply enjoying himself, he would call himself to order: ‘I ought not to be doing this. I ought to be putting black upon white, black upon white.’ When he did write, he pretended to outdo Pater in fastidiousness. ‘I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning,’ he said to Sherard, ‘and took out a comma.’ ‘And in the afternoon?’ ‘In the afternoon? Well, I put it back again.’23 Finding himself among writers to whom nature poetry was meaningless, he took up the old manuscript of ‘The Sphinx’ (he spelt it ‘Sphynx’), which he had begun in 1874, with new enthusiasm. He would be the Robinson Crusoe of decadence. Instead of researching in botany books for names of flowers, he looked in dictionaries for bizarre words with which to rhyme his exotic subject. Sherard was taxed to provide one with ar and, when this was not at once forthcoming, was asked reproachfully, ‘Why have you brought me no rhymes from Passy?’ ‘Lupanar’ Wilde had already used, but Sherard came up with ‘nenuphar,’ which was promptly adopted.
Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and lay before your feet Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured nenuphar?
A trisyllabic rhyme for catafalque proved harder, but Wilde settled for Amenalk:
And did you mark the Cyprian kiss white Adon on his catafalque?
And did you follow Amenalk, the God of Heliopolis?
There was no doubt that Paris, Poe-ridden since Baudelaire and Mallarmé, was the proper atmosphere for invoking and exorcising this spirit of evil. ‘It [‘The Sphinx’] will destroy domesticity in England,’ he remarked. The rhymes were sought as deliberately as Poe advised in ‘The Philosophy of Composition.’ A rhyming dictionary was a great help to the lyre, he said. Although the stanza form is that of In Memoriam but made into two lines instead of four, the effect of the long lines is to suggest the unfolding of a ceaseless sinister scroll.24 Even the stanza form seems part of the overripeness of the monstrous image that dominates the poem. But the decadence is not p
rimitive. ‘It is not in the desert that his Sphinx proposes her riddles,’ says Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘but in a room—a room in an hotel.’25 Wilde was indifferent to all life that was not social life.
The Fate of The Duchess
I have no store
Of gryphon-guarded gold.
Most of his energy went into The Duchess of Padua. He did not finish it by 1 March as the contract with Griffin had stipulated, but by 15 March 1883. After sending it off, he wrote to Mary Anderson on 23 March to overcome any doubts she might have. ‘I have no hesitation in saying that it is the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef d’oeuvre of my youth.’ In this out-and-out romantic play, young Guido Ferranti, son of the former Duke of Padua, has sworn to kill his father’s murderer, all unaware that this is the present Duke. The Duke is no simple villain, Wilde said to Miss Anderson, but a cynic and a philosopher, a type first used in Vera and to appear again in later plays. Guido is like Vera in oscillation between desire and revulsion: when the moment for assassination comes, he cannot bring himself to carry it out. Like most of Wilde’s protagonists, he is ingenuous and merciful. The new turn in this play is that the hapless Duchess, in love with Guido, imagines that he wishes the Duke dead for the sake of their love. She therefore kills her husband, not from hatred of him but from love of Guido. The surprise is that Guido is shocked by her having committed the crime which he barely avoided. When he tells her he hates her, she betrays him to the guards as the murderer. His supreme moment comes as he magnificently takes the guilt upon himself, and like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel awaits execution. Remorseful, the Duchess comes to help him escape, but he has decided to die for her. When she protests, ‘I am a guilty woman,’ he defends her with eloquence:
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