Wilde did not attempt to be anything but idle. As he had said to Laurence Housman in Paris, ‘I told you that I was going to write something: I tell everybody that.… It is a thing one can repeat each day, meaning to do it the next. But in my heart—that chamber of leaden echoes—I know that I never shall. It is enough that the stories have been invented, that they actually exist, that I have been able, in my own mind, to give them the form which they demand.’51 There were two memorable meetings. One was with Sarah Bernhardt at Cannes; she was playing in La Tosca, and Wilde and Mellor went backstage to see her. She threw her arms around Wilde and wept, and he wept, ‘and’—as he said—‘the whole evening was wonderful.’ The second meeting was less pleasant: Wilde was walking near the sea when George Alexander appeared on a bicycle. ‘He gave me a crooked, sickly smile, and hurried on without stopping. How absurd and mean of him!’52
Wilde lolled about with young men. As he wrote to Smithers, ‘Yes: even at Napoule there is romance: it comes in boats, and takes the form of fisherlads, who draw great nets, and are bare-limbed: they are strangely perfect: I was at Nice lately: romance there is a profession plied beneath the moon.’ When Harris urged Wilde to write something, he replied that he had in mind a counterstatement to The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he planned to call ‘The Ballad of the Fisher-Boy.’ He would celebrate liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, kissing instead of hanging. The three stanzas he quoted from the unwritten poem were not unpromising, and Harris urged him to write them down. Wilde refused. He could write no more. He told Rothenstein, ‘The intense energy of creation has been kicked out of me.’53 Harris retorted abruptly that he could not go on indefinitely holding up an empty sack. Wilde was afraid that this meant an immediate withdrawal of financial support, but Harris promised to see his three-month commitment through to the end.
When it was over, Mellor invited Wilde to come as his guest to Gland in Switzerland. On the way Wilde stopped briefly in Nice, and then went out of his way to spend a day in Genoa. He wanted to bring flowers to Constance’s grave, in a cemetery at the foot of hills that become mountains around the city. The inscription on the stone seemed to him altogether ‘tragic’: ‘Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, Q.C.’ Wilde was not mentioned. It was as if he had never existed.a ‘I was deeply affected—’ he wrote to Ross—‘with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.’54
With this memory he went on to Mellor, who as a host had none of Harris’s openhandedness. Rather than let his hospitality be abused by Wilde, he constantly lowered its level. Inexpensive Swiss wines were served, then, probably in response to Wilde’s rate of consumption, beer. No loans of money were forthcoming. ‘If I ask him to lend me 5 francs, he grows yellow and takes to his bed.’ At last Wilde could bear no more indignities, and said goodbye. Mellor recognized his guest’s displeasure, and apologized to him; but Wilde went off down the Ligurian coast, settling on 1 April 1899 at Santa Margharita; he wrote to Ross, ‘In Paris I am bad: here I am bored: the last state is the worse.’ He remained in acute boredom till Ross came over in May, paid his debts, and brought him back to Paris.55 By 7 May 1899 he was installed at the Hôtel de Néva, then at the Hôtel Marsollier. Ross succeeded in frightening him out of drinking for six months.
This was a season when Douglas, again in Paris, was happy. Late in May 1899 he made his official claim to be a poet, though he could not put his name on the title page, with The City of the Soul, published by Grant Richards in London. It included twenty-five poems from the 1896 Paris volume, thirteen being omitted, and eighteen new poems. An equally anonymous review in Outlook greeted his work as that of a poet among poetasters. It was by his cousin Lionel Johnson, though Douglas did not know that at the time. James Douglas wrote an anonymous eulogy in the Star. Bosie took Wilde out to a lavish dinner to celebrate. Not all the response was favorable: the President of Magdalen College, Herbert Warren, wrote to him, ‘I regret I cannot accept this book from you.’56 The second edition, in which Douglas was named as author, did not sell at all.
Wilde’s life continued at much the same tempo as before. He occasionally indulged himself in little trips, and one of them brought him to Fontainebleau. He sat down at a café near the palace gates and was observed by a scientist he had known in London, Peter Chalmers Mitchell. Mitchell told the two English friends he was drinking coffee with that it was Wilde, and they left. But Mitchell went over to Wilde and said, ‘Mr Wilde, I don’t suppose you remember me, but a long time ago Ian Thynne introduced me to you at the Café Royal.’ ‘Ian Thynne. Yes! Isn’t he dead?’ ‘I think so. It is years since I’ve heard anything from him. Robbie Ross is a friend of mine.’ At this Wilde said, ‘Ah! Robbie, with the face of Puck and the heart of an angel. Would you care to sit with me?’ When Mitchell had sat down, Wilde said, ‘Of course I remember you. We talked and talked and I asked you how to get rid of the body. I used you in Dorian Gray, but I don’t think you would be easy to blackmail. Ian! In the days when I made phrases I called Ian “exquisitely corrupt.” ’ They talked of poetry and prisons, and Wilde impressed Mitchell as he had before. At last Mitchell rose and asked Wilde to dine with him, but he refused, saying, ‘Your friends would not stand it. I am going back to my little inn where they don’t know me. Goodbye. Thank you.’57
Between such excursions were moments when he could go nowhere. The opera singer Nellie Melba, who had known him in London, was walking along the streets of Paris one morning. A tall, shabby man lurched around the corner, his collar turned up to his neck. ‘Madame Melba,’ said a voice, ‘you don’t know who I am? I’m Oscar Wilde, and I’m going to do a terrible thing. I’m going to ask you for money.’ She took all she had in her purse and gave it to him; he muttered his thanks and went. She remembered their first meeting long ago, when he had said, ‘Ah, Madame Melba, I am the Lord of Language and you are the Queen of Song, and so I suppose I shall have to write you a sonnet.’ Ellen Terry and Aimée Lowther also saw him in Paris, looking into the window of a pastry shop, biting his fingers. They invited him to a meal. He talked splendidly, as of old, but they never saw him again.58
A letter from the journalist Morton Fullerton, a friend of Henry James, suggests the kind of nastiness to which Wilde exposed himself by his importunities:
35 Bld des Capucines
23 June 1899
My dear Melmoth
I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the patrie of Stendhal, and had cognizance of your gêne only yesterday.
You do me too much honour in asking me to come to the rescue of an artist such as you. And if I could have known of the situation 3 weeks ago when I had money in my pocket I should not have hesitated for a moment, especially as I had just received your play [Earnest] and was in the state of mind of one who says of a thing without thinking: ‘it is worth its weight in gold.’ But at present, after an expensive journey, I am unable, with the best good-will in the world, to seize the event and to accept the role in this particular comedy—I use the word in its Hellenic and Gallic sense, bien entendu, in the sole sense in which it exists for the admirers of Lady Windermere’s Fan and of The Importance of Being Earnest. The maker of those masterpieces has too much delicacy and esprit not to sympathize sincerely with the regret of a man obliged to reply thus to an appeal which certainly he could not have expected and for which it was impossible for him to prepare, but which is none the less precious for that. I grope at the hope that meanwhile the stress has passed, and that you will not have occasion to put, malgré vous, either me or any one else again into such a position of positive literal chagrin.
Yours sincerely
W. M. FULLERTON
Replying, Wilde only observed, ‘In so slight a matter, my dear Fullerton, sentiment need not borrow stilts.’59
In T. P.’s Weekly, T. P. O’Connor says his friend John O’Connor, once a prominent Irish M.P., recognized W
ilde at a restaurant and was moved to speak to him by the sight of his front teeth gone and no plate to replace them. Wilde replied, ‘You don’t know me, sir,’ meaning that he was not a man to be recognized by his countrymen. His Oxford friend Bodley came by, and Wilde pretended not to recognize him. Bodley persisted and invited him to his house. But on learning that Bodley’s family was there, Wilde hesitated, then fled. He said to Max de Morès, ‘I am a vagabond. The century will have had two vagabonds, Paul Verlaine and me.’60
One day, on the boulevard des Italiens, Wilde was passed by Edouard de Max, whom he had known long ago. ‘So, Monsieur de Max, you too fail to recognize me here.’ ‘Oh, maître, mon cher maître,’ said de Max as he stopped and was on the verge of tears, ‘I swear I didn’t recognize you.’ In full view of the boulevard, he took the poet’s hands and kissed them.
Louis Latourette met Wilde coming out of the bar Calisaya after his throat operation. Wilde said, ‘I want to show you Dorian Gray’s photograph,’ and he took out a photograph of a young Englishman he had met in Rome. ‘That’s the way I imagine Dorian. I didn’t find or see him until after I described him in my book. You see, my idea is right, that art inspires and directs nature. This young man would never have existed if I hadn’t described Dorian.’ Latourette says they passed over the Pont Neuf, and saw a woman throw herself into the water. A sailor rescued her. Wilde watched anxiously. ‘I could have rescued that woman. But this act was forbidden me. Yes, it’s so. It’s horrible. I would have seemed to be seeking attention for myself. Heroism would just have made for scandal. Since my trial, heroism and genius are forbidden me. You’ve heard how I made a feeble effort to enter a monastery. That would have been the best end. But I would have created a scandal. Pity me. And remember that I could have rescued that woman.’61
A happier occasion was a night at the theatre when Emma Calvé in the audience recognized the back of the man in front of her. She waited until the interval to say ‘Mr Wilde.’ Wilde wheeled round. He remembered that he had met her at the great party in London when he had approached the hostess to know whether he might bring in a French poet who had been in prison—and where, when the hostess agreed, he had presented Paul Verlaine and had read one of his prison poems. Now he took Calvé’s two hands in his and said, in a way she found heartbreaking, ‘Oh Calvé! Calvé!’62
Ghosts
To be spoken of, and not to be spoken to, is delightful.
There were other meetings, other nonmeetings. It was all déjà vu, like a bad play. Sir Edward Carson had almost pushed a large man into the gutter when, about to apologize, he recognized him as Wilde. Oscar Browning, driving in a cab, passed Wilde, then realized too late who he was. ‘The sudden pain in Wilde’s eyes was unforgettable.’ Stuart Merrill, Mendès, and Barrès, ‘those Parisians who licked my conqueror’s boots only ten years ago,’ pretended not to see him.63 Whistler and Wilde met as they were both entering a restaurant, and in the audible silence Wilde remarked to himself how old and weird the painter looked. ‘My sentence and imprisonment raised Jimmy’s opinion of England, and the English. Nothing else would have done so,’ he commented later. Whistler said, with more nastiness than wit, ‘Wilde is working on The Bugger’s Opera.’64 The palmist Cheiro saw him one night at a restaurant and came over to him. ‘How good of you, my dear friend,’ said Wilde; ‘everyone cuts me now.’ He had often thought of Cheiro’s prophecy of five years before. Will Rothenstein and his wife took Wilde out to dinner, only to have him choose a restaurant where he was clearly making up to one of the musicians. The next time they came to Paris they decided to avoid him, but he was unavoidable on the grands boulevards, and he looked hurt as he realized that they would have liked to elude him.65
Wilde was as infamous as he had been famous in the early nineties. In America a set of photographs in a scarlet cover entitled The Sins of Oscar Wilde was hawked about American colleges. Young men were being warned of the peril he represented. A college freshman named Armstrong was sitting with a bottle of white wine in the Café de la Régence when a voice asked, ‘Have you a match?’ He looked up, to see a large man with powder or ointment on his face (Wilde had a skin rash). Wilde called for a glass; Armstrong ordered another bottle. Then a friendly onlooker dropped a card saying, ‘That is Oscar Wilde.’ Armstrong blushed. Wilde looked at a silver watch, rose, and said, ‘I remove the embarrassment.’ By chance, however, they met again. Armstrong was on the Pont de la Tournelle painting the river when Wilde strolled up. He launched into a defense of formal art. Water, he declared, could not be painted; Greek and medieval painters were right in showing water as mere jags and curves of line. Then he spoke of historic scenes in Paris, of St Bartholomew, Catherine de Médicis, King Henry III. Hearing that Armstrong was from Arkansas, he asked if there were springs there. ‘Yes, Hot Springs,’ said Armstrong. ‘I would like to flee like a wounded hart into Arkansas,’ Wilde told him. Then he went silent, suddenly swayed a little, and said, ‘Thank you for listening. I am much alone.’ When Armstrong wrote to his mother that he had seen Oscar Wilde, he was ordered home by the next boat.66
The gloom was occasionally lightened by acts of kindness. Wilde contracted debts at the Hôtel Marsollier, and the proprietor refused to let him have his belongings until the bill was paid. Jean Dupoirier, who ran the Hôtel d’Alsace, liked Wilde and advanced the money. From August 1899 to 2 April 1900 he stayed at Dupoirier’s hotel. Then, in April 1900, Harold Mellor persuaded Wilde to go with him to Palermo and Rome, saying he would stake him to an upper limit of £50. In spite of the stinginess of the invitation, Wilde accepted. They went first to Palermo and stayed there eight days before going to Naples for three days. They arrived at Rome on Holy Thursday, and Wilde could recall his visit twenty-three years before when he had had his interview with Pius IX. He was amused to see Grissell, Hunter Blair’s friend, still a papal chamberlain, and on Easter Day—Grissell looking on in dismay—Wilde stood in the front ranks of the pilgrims and received the Pope’s blessing. ‘My walking stick showed signs of budding,’ he wrote mockingly to Robert Ross, and explained that he had got a ticket to the occasion through a miracle, for which he had paid thirty pieces of silver. He claimed that the skin rash from which he had been suffering for some months had been cured by the Pope’s blessing. He managed to be blessed by the Pope six times more during his stay in Rome, but the miraculous cure did not last. Wilde was amused also to see his old disciple, John Gray, now a seminarist in Rome at the expense of André Raffalovich. As Edith Cooper heard the story, Gray was walking with his fellow seminarists when he passed ‘a large form planted as if to waylay him. There was complete silence—but mockery dangled it.’67 They did not meet again.
After ten days at Gland with Mellor, Wilde returned to Paris, and to the Hôtel d’Alsace. The hotel was officially tenth category, but the proprietor Dupoirier thought it entitled to be fifth category. Dupoirier made Wilde as comfortable as he could: he brought him breakfast (coffee, bread, and butter) at eleven, and at two in the afternoon a cutlet and two hardboiled eggs. He also provided four or five bottles a week of an excellent Courvoisier, at 25 and then 28 francs. At five o’clock Wilde went to the Café de la Régence, then dined at the Café de Paris, usually until two or three in the morning.68 He was often at the Calisaya too, where Ernest La Jeunesse, Jean Moréas, and others joined him.
He remained determinedly extravagant. Renaud says that one evening he called for cigarettes. A waiter brought him a pack of Marylands, which he rejected. ‘No, blonde ones.’ Nazirs were brought. ‘No, with gold tips.’ A groom brought some from the desk of the Grand Hôtel. Wilde gave him a louis, which the groom took to get changed. Meanwhile, Wilde lit one up and said, ‘Peuh!’ When the groom returned with the money, he said, ‘No, keep it. That way I’ll delude myself into thinking these cigarettes are good.’69
There was news about the Queensberrys. The Marquess was dying in January 1900, and wished to see only his first wife, telling her he had always loved her. His son Percy, heir to t
he title, came to see his father, who gathered himself to spit at him. Bosie did not risk the same treatment. Before his death on 31 January, Queensberry was said to have renounced his agnostic views, professed his love for Christ, ‘to whom I have confessed all my sins,’ and received conditional absolution by a Catholic priest. Soon after, Douglas and Percy, now the tenth Marquess, came to Paris in deepest mourning and the highest spirits. Queensberry’s will freed his heirs to spend everything that was left without entail, as if he had decided that his profligate sons should be allowed to destroy themselves.b They did. But Douglas now had a fortune of almost £20,000. Ross urged Wilde by letter to ask Douglas to settle money on him so he could have an assured income in addition to his wife’s bequest of £150 a year. He broached the matter at the Café de la Paix, but Bosie was furious and indignant. ‘I can’t afford to spend anything except on myself,’ he announced, and when Wilde mildly persisted, he accused him of wheedling ‘like an old whore.’ Wilde said, ‘If you do not recognise my claim there is nothing more to be said.’ He confided to Harris, ‘He has left me bleeding.’70 Douglas was spending so lavishly on a racing stable in Chantilly and on high living that his inheritance was running through his fingers. He was confident that at any moment he could pick an American heiress from the many waiting for his proposal. Douglas felt that Wilde had no claim upon him, and while he was glad to give the odd handout, he detested the idea that he had anything to be remorseful over.
It was only one more bitter moment for Wilde. He was a man waiting for something, perhaps a miracle, only to find that it is death. During the summer of 1900 he had a new consolation, the International Exhibition. With Maurice Gilbert he visited Rodin’s studio, and the great sculptor himself showed Wilde his ‘dreams in marble,’ The Gates of Hell. With Paul Fort, whom Louÿs had introduced to him in 1891, Wilde walked to the wrestling matches, following especially the fortunes of one Raoul le Boucher.71 He also patronized all the cafés of different nationalities, and took a childish pleasure in everything. ‘The Cloister or the Café—there is my future. I tried the Hearth, but it was a failure.’ At the Calisaya one night in August, he ran through all his stories like a last display of fireworks, as his friend Ernest La Jeunesse remarked. One night at the Spanish café, his mother’s friend Anna de Brémont was sitting with friends when she saw Wilde coming towards her. She feared his effect upon her friends, and put up her fan. Yet one friend said to her after Wilde had gone, ‘I should have liked to meet him and find out what sort of monster he is.’ The Comtesse was staggered by this comment, and passed a sleepless night. In the morning she rose early and walked along the Champs-Elysées to the Pont de la Concorde, where on impulse she embarked on one of the bateaux-mouches which took passengers to Saint-Cloud. On the way she heard a voice: ‘Good morning, are you surprised to see me? Surely not. You are not the only restless spirit in this great Paris.’ He had seen her the night before but had not wished to speak to her before strangers. ‘Life held to my lips a full flavoured cup, and I drank it to the dregs,’ he said to her as to Maeterlinck, ‘the bitter and the sweet. I found the sweet bitter and the bitter sweet.’ ‘Why do you not write now?’ she asked. ‘Because I have written all there was to write. I wrote when I did not know life, now that I know the meaning of life, I have no more to write.’ Then, less penitently, he said, ‘I have found my soul. I was happy in prison because I found my soul.’ Anna de Brémont felt close to tears, but they had reached the pier, and he said, ‘Contessa, don’t sorrow for me,’ and left her.72
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