In December, the irrepressible Frank Harris appeared with the offer of three months in the fishing village of La Napoule near Cannes, enough time, he thought, for Wilde to produce “a work of art.” Harris had sold The Saturday Review and was going into the hotel business in Monaco.* “Frank insists on my being at high intellectual pressure,” Wilde told Ross, “it is most exhausting; but when we arrive at La Napoule I am going to break the news to him—now an open secret—that I have softening of the brain, and cannot always be a genius.” Wilde settled into the Hôtel des Bains on the Golfe Juan, but Harris, with whom he had expected to celebrate Christmas, did not appear for several weeks.
In the interim Wilde met Harold Mellor, the twenty-six-year-old son of a British industrialist who was staying at Cannes with his mother. Wilde learned that Mellor had been sent down from Harrow at fourteen for being loved by the captain of the cricket eleven. He was often accompanied by Eolo, a young Italian bought from his father for two hundred lire, a kind of slave. The incongruous threesome celebrated Boxing Day with plum pudding and Pommery-Greno, a champagne that brought Wilde back to “the exquisite taste of ancient life.” How Wilde celebrated the new year of 1899 was not recorded. He was with Mellor in Nice to see Sarah Bernhardt in La Tosca. Afterward he visited backstage; she embraced him, and there was weeping all around. Forgotten was her refusal to buy the rights to Salomé when he was bankrupt.
In mid-February, Wilde moved from La Napoule to the Hôtel Terminus in Nice. Since he was doing no writing, Harris wanted him to inspect villas to rent. Soon he was trapped in a typical financial muddle. At most hotels Wilde charged his room and meals until presented with the bill, when some payment was required. He found the German food at the Terminus loathsome; the English residents objected to his presence. Every day a bill was delivered with morning coffee. He wrote, “My dear Frank, you must come down and see me here for a few moments. You cannot, and you will not, abandon me. I won’t go to the Palace, because it would not be good for your hotel for me to be seen there.” An oblique threat and the bill was paid, and Wilde’s three months on the Riviera ended. Adrift, he went to stay at Mellor’s villa on Lake Geneva. “I hope to be happy there: at any rate there will be free meals,” he told Ross, “and champagne has been ordered, though the Nice doctor now absolutely forbids me to take any, on account of gout.”
On the way to Switzerland, Wilde made a detour to Genoa to say farewell to his wife. He left flowers on Constance’s grave, marked with a marble cross inlaid with dark ivy leaves, at the Protestant Cemetery. “It was very tragic,” he wrote Ross, “seeing her name carved on a tomb—her surname, my name not mentioned of course—just ‘Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, Q.C.’ and a verse from Revelations. I was deeply affected—with a sense, also, of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise, and Life is a very terrible thing.”*
There were others to mourn. A month before Constance’s death, Wilde learned that Aubrey Beardsley had died at Mentone at the age of twenty-five. “There is something macabre and tragic,” Wilde wrote Smithers, “in the fact that one who added another terror to life should have died at the age of a flower.” When he arrived in Switzerland, he learned that Willie had died on March 13, 1899, at the age of forty-six. Wilde regretted the “wide chasms” between them but saw his brother’s death as inevitable because of his excessive drinking. “One has always sad memories of what Willie might have been,” his widow wrote Wilde, “instead of dying practically unknown & leaving his child to be supported by my sister. She is in a country convent & I think will have a good share of the family brains.” Wilde’s niece, Dorothy, was nearly four years old.
Wilde found Switzerland’s natural beauty impressive but the young men disappointing. “Swiss people are carved out of wood with a rough knife, most of them; the others are carved out of turnips,” he wrote. With Mellor, as with others who offered hospitality, Wilde accepted his role as court jester. He took no offense about singing for his supper, as long as he was well-fed and champagne flowed. Soon his thirst for champagne was tempered by cheap Swiss wine and then beer. “Mellor carries out the traditions of the ancient misers,” Wilde observed. “If I ask him to lend me five francs he grows yellow and takes to his bed. Every day I discover some new fault in him.” He asked Smithers for five pounds to escape to Italy. “The chastity of Switzerland has got on my nerves,” he wrote.
He spent April on the Ligurian coast, using Santa Margherita as a base to explore Rapallo and Portofino. He begged Ross to join him: “Whatever I do is wrong: because my life is not on a right basis. In Paris I am bad: here I am bored: the last state is the worse.” Ross did visit and brought Wilde back to Paris in late May. Before returning to the Alsace, Wilde exhausted his credit at several small Right Bank hotels. The Hôtel de la Néva on the rue Monsigny let him stay only a few weeks; then he moved to the nearby Hôtel Marsollier on the rue Marsollier, where he spent June and July, until presented with a bill. “Life is rather dust now, and water-wells are rare in the desert,” he wrote Harris, asking for a “tenner.” Wilde likened himself to St. Francis of Assisi, wedded to poverty but in an unsuccessful marriage, living on echoes with no music of his own.
Friends marveled at how Wilde kept on begging, using different words, although sometimes the same excuses, in each letter. Typically he wrote Ross that he had subsisted on only breakfast served at the hotel. “I have had a very bad time lately, and for two days had not a penny in my pocket, so had to wander about, filled with a wild longing for bock and cigarettes: it was really like journeying through Hell.” There was no moral disgrace in begging; his genius had brought him to this point, and genius should be fed. Wilde stood by his words in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” that artists should be freed from financial worries. He was educating the public and believed that the Frank Harrises of the world should share with those less fortunate, as he had done when successful. Invoking Balzac in one letter, he observed that “it is always a bore to find oneself without pocket-money. Balzac’s héros métallique still dominates our age, as do indeed all Balzac’s heroes; and the French have not yet realised that the basis of all civilisation is unlimited credit. Empires only fall when they have to pay their bills: at the moment the Barbarians arrive.”
Georges Ives visited and skulked about Paris trying to be invisible. Here was the so-called voice of the movement—his second volume of Uranian verse, Book of Chains, was published in 1897—afraid to compromise himself by being seen with Wilde. He would call the Hôtel d’Alsace and leave a message without giving his address. “Don’t have with me the silly mania for secrecy that makes you miss the value of things,” Wilde told him, “to you it is of more importance to conceal your address from a friend than to see your friend.… On the whole, George, you are a great baby. One can’t help being angry with you.” Since Wilde’s hearing was getting worse, Ives preferred to talk privately at his hotel, where he could raise his voice without eavesdroppers. Wilde wanted to be seen on the boulevards. The cafés did not tempt Ives, who was still drinking hot milk to protest Wilde’s imprisonment.
When they talked of “the movement” and how long acceptance of homosexuality would take, Wilde said, “I have no doubt we shall win—but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good. That is essential. It is not so much public opinion, as public officials that need educating.” “Oscar meant well, to all,” Ives wrote in his diary. “He had not the gift of responsibility, he could not estimate consequence, he was all Art, and all Emotion, and I looked up to him as to a superman, and do still, while utterly disagreeing with his written philosophy, and even with his life, on many sides.”
During the sixteen months that Wilde lived intermittently at the Alsace, he stayed in different rooms depending on his finances. He lived first in two rooms on the third floor, moved to the fourth floor, and died on the second floor. “It is a poor little Bohemian hotel, only suited for those S
ybarites who are exiled from Sybaris,” he said. Comfortable but not squalid, as sometimes reported, the Alsace was no different from other small hotels where Wilde established credit during his exile in Paris. The difference was the kindness of the proprietor, Jean Dupoirier, who liked Wilde and did not press him to pay. Dupoirier paid his bill of twenty pounds at the Hôtel Marsollier and rescued his confiscated possessions. That Dupoirier, a hotelier trying to make ends meet, with no knowledge of Wilde’s works, became Wilde’s guardian angel during his last days can only be explained by Wilde’s ability to charm.
The hotel’s distinguishing feature was a courtyard dominated by a fig tree. Wilde had his own table placed under the tree and each morning awoke there with coffee. At other hours, he sat staring into the middle distance, drinking absinthe, accumulating saucers. His rent ranged from forty to sixty-five francs a month. He ate the same food every day: a breakfast of coffee and a roll with butter at eleven and a lunch of two chops and two soft-boiled eggs at two. At five he walked across the Pont Royal to the Café de la Régence for an aperitif and then to the Café de Paris for dinner, ending the evening at what he called the “literary resort of myself and my friends,” the Calisaya. Dupoirier went to the avenue de l’Opéra to replenish Wilde’s weekly supply of Courvoisier—four bottles at twenty-eight francs, more than his room. Drinking was the only way Wilde could sleep.
One day at the Café Vieille Rose, near the place de l’Opéra, Wilde was dining on ortolans with Ross and Laurence Housman when the name of Robert Burns changed the conversation. “God saved the genius of Burns to poetry by driving him through drink to failure,” Wilde told Housman. “Riotous living and dying saved him from that last degradation of smug prosperity which threatened him.” As much as Wilde wanted his dining companions to see the parallels between his life and Burns’s, the name under discussion should have been that of the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who also challenged English hypocrisy and was generous to the point of prodigality; both sought fame and ended life in poverty, drunkenness, and apparent failure.
Wilde’s farewell to the eighteen hundreds was uneventful—a “very pleasant Christmas,” he wrote Ross. Across the channel on New Year’s Eve, fires were lit on every hilltop from the South Downs to the Scottish border, and bells rang from every church with a belfry. In Westminster Abbey, a future bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, declared: “Our present-day literature is singularly without inspiration. There is no Carlyle to whom all men naturally turn to find some answer to their chaotic yearnings; there is no Tennyson … there is no prophet of the people.” Once there had been Wilde, a self-proclaimed prophet who taught that art and life are interchangeable.
In February, Wilde was bedridden with a throat infection that the doctor appeared unable to treat. “My throat is a lime kiln, my brain a furnace and my nerves a coil of angry adders,” he complained as he continued to smoke harsh French cigarettes. He ate some bad mussels, which gave him an itchy rash. “Poisoning by mussels,” he told Ross, “is very painful and when one has one’s bath one looks like a leopard.” But an itchy rash—as Ellmann notes—is not a symptom of syphilis. This rash became the only noticeable evidence that Wilde was syphilitic, even though a rash is characteristic of secondary syphilis and by this time Wilde would have been in the tertiary stage, with such classic symptoms as mental deterioration or an unsteady gait called “ataxia.” He exhibited none of these. In March, Wilde described “a sort of blood poisoning,” blaming the “insanitary state” of the hotel, and spent ten days in a hospital.
Admittedly neurasthenic—a Victorian term for listlessness more mental than physical—Wilde did not like lolling in bed. It took a great deal of energy to be charming “when one is cooped up in a wretched hotel,” he said. The sudden death of Ernest Dowson on February 23 at the age of thirty-two saddened him; he called Dowson “a sweet singer, with a note all the lovelier because it reminds us of how thrushes sang in Shakespeare’s day.” Also deceased was the Marquess of Queensberry, who died on January 31, leaving Bosie twenty thousand pounds. Bosie again refused to settle his debt of honor.
To the rescue once more, this time driving a motorcar, came Mellor, who offered Wilde a modest stipend of fifty pounds to accompany him to Italy. Wilde asked Ross to meet him in Rome. “It will be delightful to be together again, and this time I really must become a Catholic.” Wilde arrived in Rome on Good Friday; through a “miracle” he obtained a ticket for St. Peter’s on Easter Sunday and received Pope Leo XIII’s blessing. During recent visits to Europe, Ross had avoided seeing Wilde in Paris. This time, although as close as Milan, he did not come to Rome, even when taunted by Wilde’s imminent conversion. Ross was a Papist snob. He felt his brand of faith and confession superior to Wilde’s love of pageantry and ritual.
Agreeing with Byron that it is “the only city of the soul,” Wilde fell in love all over again with Rome. He had a better time alone, not being bothered by Ross’s autocratic notions. He culled boys on the Corso and in the Borghese Gardens and collected blessings—seven in all—from the Pope: “I do nothing but see the Pope: I have already been blessed many times, once in the private Chapel of the Vatican.” It delighted Wilde’s childish side that the Pope wore a different chasuble and maniple every time he received a blessing. “I really must become a Catholic,” he told Ross, “though I fear that if I went before the Holy Father with a blossoming rod it would turn at once into an umbrella or something dreadful of that kind.” He bought a Kodak camera and was so pleased with the results that he considered becoming a photographer.
Back in Paris for the April opening of the Exhibition of 1900, in its opulent crystal-domed building, Wilde attended almost daily until his health began to fail, enchanted by the exhibits, particularly Rodin’s daunting statue of Balzac. Ernest La Jeunesse said that Wilde loved the fanfare and “built again his own palace of fame, riches and immortality.”
• • •
ON OCTOBER 10, Wilde had an unspecified operation on his right ear, the one injured from the fall in prison, which was performed in his hotel room by a French surgeon, Paul Cleiss. The next day he telegraphed Ross: TERRIBLY WEAK. PLEASE COME. The doctor from the British embassy, Maurice à’Court Tucker, made frequent visits, a total of sixty-eight. With the onset of meningitis, Wilde had a round-the-clock nurse and a brain specialist. Food arrived from a restaurant. Dupoirier moved him to the second floor to avoid too many steps. Number 8 was a suite of two rooms with a heavy, round mahogany table and chairs, an old gilt clock on the mantelpiece, and fading flowers on the wallpaper. A thick velvet curtain enclosed the bed. Books were everywhere, the table littered with papers, and a bowl filled with crumbling cigarette ashes of the cheap French variety, since Wilde could not afford his favorite gold-tipped Russians. A bottle of absinthe was on the washstand and an open copy of Gautier’s Émaux et Camées.
Ross arrived on October 17, the day after Wilde’s forty-sixth birthday. Wilde had celebrated in bed, drinking champagne, which the doctors allowed him throughout his illness. “Ah! Robbie,” he said, “when we are dead and buried in our porphyry tombs, and the trumpet of the Last Judgment is sounded, I shall turn and whisper to you, ‘Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.’ ” By the twenty-ninth, he felt well enough to get out of bed for the first time. He and Ross dined in the Latin Quarter, and Wilde drank absinthe. The next afternoon they went for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne and stopped at nearly every café for an absinthe. Ross warned Wilde that he would kill himself if he kept on drinking. “And what have I to live for, Robbie?” he asked and talked constantly of paying off his debts before he died.
He could not complain of being alone. Dupoirier fussed over him, popping in whenever he finished a task around the hotel. Turner was there; Wilde’s sister-in-law, Lily, and her new husband visited. “I will never outlive the century,” he told them. “The English people would not stand for it.” Despite Wilde’s protestations and tears, Ross left to join his mother in Nice on November 12, a trip t
hat could have been postponed. Ross convinced himself that Wilde was not that ill, but his finicky nature was incompatible with the unpleasantness of the sickroom.
It became Turner’s responsibility to monitor the drinking. “You are qualifying for a doctor,” said Wilde. “When you can refuse bread to the hungry and drink to the thirsty, you may apply for your diploma.” One morning he awoke and said, “I have had a dreadful dream. I dreamt that I was dining with the dead.” Turner remarked, “My dear Oscar, I am sure you were the life and soul of the party.”
When delirious, Wilde talked in French and English and recited lines in Greek and Latin; at other times he was capable of lucid conversation. Turner sent Ross daily reports: “He has not once hinted he thinks he is in danger nor did he before the delirium began. He was only anxious to be out of pain.… He is very difficult & rude.” Turner tricked Wilde into taking some nourishment by turning out the lights and substituting milk for water. He held an ice pack on his head for forty-five minutes to lower his temperature until Wilde snapped, “You dear little Jew, don’t you think this is enough.” He refused to have mustard plasters applied to his feet. The doctors wanted to have his hair cut, but Turner told Ross he doubted that “Oscar will allow it.”
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