Wilde, though he arrived in Paris with no particular interest in the affair, found himself drawn unexpectedly close to its heart. Among his expatriate friends in the city was the journalist Rowland Strong, who acted as correspondent for the Observer, Morning Post and New York Times. Strong, a louche, red-haired alcoholic who claimed to be descended from Chateaubriand, was a vehement anti-Dreyfusard (and anti-Semite), and used his journalistic position to promote both prejudices. He had recently made the acquaintance of Esterhazy, electing himself his friend and champion. And at a bibulous gathering in a bar on the rue St Honoré he introduced Wilde to ‘Le Commandant’. Strong’s secretary, a young Irish ‘poet’ called Chris Healy, who was present, recalled that Wilde regaled the company ‘with a flow of his gayest witticisms’ in perfect French, both bemusing and impressing the bitter, duplicitous, black-moustachioed Esterhazy.27
On the other side of the divide stood Carlos Blacker, who had arrived in Paris only shortly before Wilde, together with his wife Carrie. Blacker had been greatly relieved to learn that Wilde had broken with Douglas, and – prompted by Constance – he sought out his old companion. At an emotional meeting in Wilde’s modest hotel room (at four o’clock on the afternoon of 13 March) they rekindled their friendship. During an afternoon of excited talk Blacker confided that since his arrival in Paris he had become obsessed with the Dreyfus affair, and convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence. He was, by chance, an old intimate of Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché in Paris, and from him had gained unique access to the full, and secret, details of the case. There were two arresting points: that Esterhazy was indeed the traitor who had sold sensitive material (some 200 documents) to the German military attaché, Colonel von Schwartzkoppen; and that, as part of a cover-up operation, a French intelligence officer (Lieutenant-Colonel Henry) had forged a letter, purporting to be from Panizzardi to Schwartzkoppen, and appearing to implicate Dreyfus. Blacker, carried away by the moment, revealed much of this to Wilde, along with the fact that Panizzardi had in his possession facsimiles of some of Esterhazy’s letters to Schwartzkoppen, which he was planning to send, anonymously, to the British press.
Wilde enjoyed the story. It added an additional frisson of excitement when he found himself dining in company with Esterhazy a few days later. ‘The Commandant was astonishing,’ Wilde reported to Blacker. ‘I will tell you all he said some day. Of course he talked of nothing but Dreyfus et Cie.’28 Wilde, however, always the soul of indiscretion, could not resist passing on the inside information he had gained from Blacker to his regular drinking companions, Strong and Healy. They were electrified by the news, and put it to use – albeit in very different ways. Healy, who was secretly sympathetic to the Dreyfusard cause, went straight to Emile Zola. He and his associates used the information as the basis for an unsigned article that appeared in Le Siècle on 4 April, re-affirming Esterhazy’s treachery and asserting that the military had forged documents in their efforts to confirm Dreyfus’s guilt. Strong, meanwhile, attempted to diffuse the power of Blacker’s revelations in advance, writing an article for the New York Times reporting that Esterhazy would denounce any supposedly compromising facsimiles as forgeries.29
In the fraught era of the Dreyfus affair no claims were ever uncontested, no victories were ever assured and nothing was ever achieved quickly, but the information that Wilde had blithely passed on (via Healy) to Zola came to be seen as marking a decisive shift. It gave the initiative to the Dreyfusards and set them on the way to ultimate victory.30 In the short term, though, it brought down a tide of anti-Dreyfusard anger upon poor Carlos Blacker. Strong, in his article, had named him as the source of the revelations; many supposed him to be the author of the article in Le Siècle. ‘Then commenced my troubles,’ Blacker recorded. He was attacked in the partisan press, and insulted in the street. He was even placed under police surveillance.31 Understandably he felt considerable irritation with Wilde who had put him in this uncomfortable position – as well as spoiling his and Panizzardi’s plans for breaking the story in a more controlled way.32
Wilde, however, was unconcerned by Blacker’s travails. He also declined an invitation from Zola to talk over the case – now dismissing the writer as ‘a third-rate Flaubert’ who ‘is never artistic, and often disgusting’ (he was perhaps aware that Zola had refused to sign the petition circulated among French writers at the time of his imprisonment).33 Over the following weeks Wilde did, though, continue to meet with the increasingly harassed and paranoid Esterhazy. He took a certain relish in the company of the damned. At one of their dinners Esterhazy had declared, ‘We are the two greatest martyrs in all humanity,’ before adding, after a pause, ‘but I have suffered more.’34 Wilde rejoined, without hesitation, ‘No, I have.’35 When Henry Davray remonstrated with Wilde for keeping such company, he replied that since coming out of prison he was obliged to make his society among ‘thieves and assassins.’ Besides, the guilty were more interesting than the innocent: innocence required only being wronged; it needed imagination and courage to be a criminal. If Esterhazy were innocent, Wilde claimed, ‘I should have had nothing to do with him.’36
Although Wilde (according to Sherard) was essentially sympathetic to Dreyfus, with the great injustice at the heart of the affaire he simply refused to engage. When quizzed about his understanding of the case he retreated into glibness, declaring, ‘Zola wrote the bordereau at the dictation of Dreyfus, and Esterhazy took it round to the German Embassy, and sold it for fifteen francs.’37 Uninterested in politics, his own thoughts, when not touching on literature, were directed more towards the eternal questions of sex, love, money and death.
For the disappointments of the moment ‘Love, or Passion with the mask of Love’ became his ‘only consolation’. Wilde returned to the French capital as a proselytizing advocate of ‘Uranian love’. The notion that he might have been ‘cured’ of a ‘madness’ by his time in prison had been set aside in Naples, and was not taken up again. He now defiantly proclaimed – and indulged – his homosexual tastes. His line was that ‘A patriot put into prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys.’ To have altered his life, he told Ross, ‘would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – more noble than other forms.’ He aligned himself with George Ives’s vision of the ‘Cause’: ‘I have no doubt we shall win,’ he assured Ives, ‘but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms.’ 38
Wilde’s sexual preferences, however, were rather different from the exalted intellectual ideal held up by Ives and the ‘Order of Chaeronea’. The sort of ‘Uranian love’ that he wanted was casual – and commercial – sex with young working-class men. ‘How evil it is to buy Love,’ he exclaimed, ‘and how evil to sell it! And yet what purple hours one can snatch from that grey slow-moving thing we call Time!’39 For Wilde ‘change’ had become ‘the essence of passion’.40 And in a Paris unburdened by the intrusive writ of the Criminal Law Amendment Act the opportunities for change were many. The names of young pick-ups dot Wilde’s correspondence with Ross and Turner: Leon, whom he encountered ‘wandering in the moonlit chasm of my little street’; Marius (who was susceptible to colds) or Giorgio, ‘a most passionate faun’ who worked at the Restaurant Jouffroy.41
Wilde developed, though, a particular tendresse for a young marine infantryman called Maurice Gilbert, whom he picked up in the street having been struck by his beautiful eyes, and his fine profile (‘He looked like Napoleon when he was first Consul, only less imperious, more beautiful’). Their friendship was sealed by the gift of a bicycle. It was what he ‘desired most in the world’, Wilde told Frank Harris; ‘he talked of nickel-plated handle bars, and chains’.42 Much time was passed in playing bezique. Wilde lost his heart at the card table. ‘Maurice has won twenty-five games… and I twenty-four,’ he reported to Smithers; ‘however, as he has youth, and I have only genius, it is only natural that he should beat me.’ Although driven, initially, by passio
n, the relationship had its intellectual aspect. Wilde was soon lending books to Maurice, delighting to see how his mind ‘opened from week to week like a flower’.43
Wooing Maurice Gilbert was an additional call of Wilde’s resources. Although it is hard to believe that he had already spent all of the £200 received from Lady Queensberry, he seems to have arrived in Paris in want of money. Despite the relative success of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, there was no immediate rush of royalties. He was, after all, only due ‘3d a copy’, according to his own estimate, and had already received a £30 advance.44 He turned instead to his friends. No sooner had they reconnected than he began requesting small loans from Carlos Blacker, to meet pressing necessities.45
Wilde, though, as Blacker soon found out, was not as bereft as he claimed. Constance, on hearing that he had separated from Douglas, had restored his allowance, sending the money via Ross so that it might be passed on at the modest rate of £10 a month. ‘If [Oscar] had plenty of money,’ she explained to the Blackers, ‘he would drink himself to death and do no work.’46 Wilde complained bitterly both at the reduced monthly amount, and at the fact that Constance was not intending to pay ‘the arrears’ due for the three months when his allowance had been stopped. In an effort at economy he moved from the Hôtel de Nice into the neighbouring Hôtel d’Alsace – ‘Much better, and half the price.’ 47 To Ross he lamented, ‘I must try and invent some scheme of poverty, and have found a restaurant where for 80 francs a month one can get nothing fit to eat – two chances a day – so shall abonner myself there.’48 Constance, however, was not impressed by such demonstrations. She warned Blacker against having anything more to do with Wilde’s financial affairs, remarking tartly, ‘Oscar is so pathetic and such a born actor.’49 What he really needed, she suggested, was ‘a person of strong will to live with him and look after him’.50
It was one of her last comments upon her husband. On 7 April, at a Genoese clinic, five days after undergoing a further operation to address her creeping paralysis, Constance died. Medical opinion was divided upon the exact cause of death; her son Vyvyan always believed she died of a broken heart.51 Wilde, when he heard the news, was distraught. Although he claimed to have been troubled by unsettling dreams of Constance on the night of her death, the information arrived as a shock.52 He fired off telegrams to Ross and Blacker proclaiming his ‘great grief’ and begging to see them. Blacker came at once. And Ross hastened over from England, although, by the time he arrived, Wilde seemed to have recovered his equanimity. ‘He is in very good spirits and does not consume too many,’ Ross reported to Smithers. Although Wilde might enjoy the grief of the bereavement (and even return to it in his thoughts) he remained quite incapable of understanding how ‘cruel’ he had been to wife. His immediate anxiety seemed to be that his allowance might cease with Constance’s death. But on this point he was soon reassured.53
Her death closed a chapter in his life. It removed all possibility of him seeing his children for the foreseeable future. They were now under the guardianship of Constance’s cousin Adrian Hope. Wilde felt the deprivation keenly, at least in certain moods and moments. When a young French boy who dined, together with his mother, at the same modest restaurant where Wilde ate, asked him whether he had any sons of his own, tears sprang to his eyes. ‘I have two,’ he replied, in French, but ‘they don’t come here with me because they are too far away’. Then drawing the child towards him, he kissed him on both cheeks, murmuring (in English), ‘Oh, my poor dear boys.’54
Constance’s death was not the only intimation of mortality that spring. Three weeks earlier Beardsley had died at Menton, aged just twenty-five. Despite their very different characters, Wilde had been greatly impressed by the young artist. As he wrote to Smithers, ‘There were great possibilities always in the cavern of his soul, and there is something macabre and tragic in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower.’55 Wilde’s own health had been causing him concern. At the beginning of May he had a minor operation on his throat for quinsy (peritonsillar abscess): the operation itself was ‘all right’, as he was ‘drenched with cocaine’, but afterwards his throat was ‘very painful’.56
Paris in the springtime had, however, its distractions. English visitors were numerous. Wilde dined frequently with the Harlands, and Frank Harris entertained him handsomely.57 He made no attempt to hide himself. Either from ‘bravado or genuine inclination’, he would chose – whenever he had the chance – to be entertained in ‘expensive and much-frequented places’. Stares were to be outfaced, and rebuffs ignored.58 He remained an ‘imposing’ figure, conspicuous in any setting; and although his wardrobe was sadly reduced, he was always ‘well dressed’ and ‘well shaved’.59
He attended the vernissage of the New Salon (‘Rodin’s statue of Balzac is superb – just what a romancier is, or should be’).60 He went to the Folies-Bergères with the poet Robert Scheffer, and to a ‘Miracle Play’ with Stuart Merrill: they supped afterwards with the student cast, ‘and the whole Quartier Latin was bright with beauty and wine’.61 He met the wild-haired young playwright Alfred Jarry, author of Ubu Roi.62 Out for dinner with the Thaulows, on another evening, he came face to face with Whistler. They did not speak. ‘How old and weird he looks!’ Wilde reported gaily to Ross. ‘Like Meg Merrilies.’63 More distressing were the encounters with Sherard. He had returned to Paris to cover the Dreyfus affair, but his anti-Dreyfusard monomania, as well as his drunkenness, made him a tedious companion. And Wilde continued to nurse a resentment over his comments about Naples and Bosie. They did meet occasionally but, as Sherard later recalled, Wilde ‘became more and more distant’; encountering each other on the boulevards, they would often pass ‘in silence, with only a faint wave of the hand’.64
Bosie, too, was back in Paris, installed in a small but ‘charming flat’ on the avenue Kléber. And although the shadow of Naples now lay between them, he and Wilde met as friends, and as the spring advanced they saw each other with gradually increasing regularity. Wilde helped Douglas choose the furniture for his flat, and dined there regularly.65 But the all-consuming intimacy of the past was not recovered. And without the distorting lens of love, Bosie’s selfishness became all too apparent. As Ross reported to Smithers, after a visit to Paris, Douglas ‘is less interested in other people than ever before, especially Oscar, so I really think that alliance will die a natural death’.66 He was spending most of his time and all of his money at the races. ‘He has a faculty for spotting a loser,’ Wilde declared; ‘which considering he knows nothing at all about horses, is perfectly astounding.’67 It was really their shared and enduring interest in having sex with the gamin ‘renters’ of the quartier that drew them together. Bosie was obsessed with a ‘dreadful little ruffian aged fourteen’ dubbed ‘Florifer’ because, Wilde explained, ‘in the scanty intervals he can steal from an arduous criminal profession, he sells bunches of purple violets in front of the Café de la Paix’. The fact that the Florifer regularly attempted to blackmail Bosie only seems to have increased his attractiveness.68
Douglas – along with Ross and Reggie Turner – also developed a passion for Wilde’s friend Maurice Gilbert. Indeed the beautiful young man rapidly became the shared darling of the group. That May Ross confessed to having spent a whole quarter’s allowance on a single Parisian week of ‘selfish and notorious living with Maurice’ (he was, as Ross explained to Smithers, ‘a costly courtesan for those who adore him’).69 In due course the ‘golden Maurice’ also took on an additional role as Rowland Strong’s not very efficient ‘secretary’.70
Over the summer he was often part of the shifting group – together with Wilde, Douglas, Strong and Strong’s dog Snatcher – that escaped periodically to L’Idée, a quaint country inn at Nogent-sur-Marne, just outside Paris. It was a charmed spot. ‘Oh, the joys of the little riverside pavilion, or cottage,’ Strong enthused, ‘with its big garden filled with flowers and vegetables and fruit-trees, en plein rapport, with laden branc
hes. It was but a cab drive to get there! No need for railways. Boating, fishing, and bathing, were the day-long amusements.’71 Perhaps even more importantly, the landlord offered credit. Wilde found a nostalgic solace in the surroundings. Taking one visitor for a stroll along the river, he declared, ‘Might not this be a bit of the Thames?’ Then, peering through the iron gate of one of the large villas that stood along the bank, he remarked: ‘This is what I like, just to stand and peep through the bars. It would be better than being in paradise to stand like this, catch a glimpse as now, and want to go in. The reality would sure to be disappointing.’72
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