 IV In the course of the trial of the unsuccessful libel action brought by Lord Alfred Douglas against Arthur Ransom and the Times' Book Club in April 1913, the plaintiff being in the witness-box, my name having arisen, Mr. Justice Darling asked, Who is Mr. Charade? Oh, he's a journalist, said Lord Alfred, and, pointing at me, where, as a witness, subpoenaed on behalf of the defendants, I was sitting, overwhelmingly bored and disgusted in the body of the court, he added, That's him. Seek. He's sitting there. I have lent him money. I have the greatest possible contempt for him. He writes books on Oscar Wilde. He is always writing books on Oscar Wilde. He does nothing else. It is, I believe, his sole source of income. This sally amused me, because already at that time I was projecting to write another book about my late friend, not indeed as a source of income, but prompted by some remarks of the Swedish professor, Dr. Ernest Benz, whose opinion of Oscar Wilde's place in English letters is quoted on the title page of this book, in the same treatise from which that opinion is taken, he refers to my writings on my late friend as follows. Dr. Sherard's books are universally known and need no further mention here, his great life of Oscar Wilde, Werner Laurie 1906, Italics, though it may not quite satisfy us on all points, end Italics. Still remains our chief source of information concerning the external facts of the poet's life. The Italics are mine, and all I have to say as to why, Patch A. Alfred Douglas, I am writing a second book on Oscar Wilde, is that I am prompted to do so by the criticism conveyed in the words Italicised, Robert H. Sherard. Footnote My life of Oscar Wilde, published in 1906 by Mr. Werner Laurie, had, it is true, been preceded in 1902 by a brochure entitled The Story of an Unhappy Friendship. But this book, which was privately printed, was in no sense of the word a biography. My subject was subjectively treated. It was a description of Wilde seen through a temperament, my own. The Werner Laurie book was my first book on Wilde. The present work is the second. Chapter 1 of The Real Oscar Wilde by Robert Sherard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. When, on 3 April 1895, at the trial of John Sholto Douglas, 8th Marquess of Queensbury, who was being prosecuted at the Old Bailey for an alleged criminal libel upon Mr. Oscar Wilde, the prosecutor's examination in chief had been concluded by a most emphatic denial of the truth of any one of the many allegations which had been made by the defence in justification of the libel. Mr. Edward Carson, as he then was, who was leading counsel for Lord Queensbury, rose to cross-examine, his first question bore on the date of Oscar Wilde's birth. He spoke as follows. You stated that your age was thirty-nine. I think that you are over forty. You were born on 16th October 1854? I had no wish to pose as being young, answered the prosecutor. I am thirty-nine or forty. You have my certificate and that settles the matter. To this he added an ironical, ah, very well. Then Mr. Carson pointed out that anyone born on 16th October 1854 would be more than forty on 3rd April 1895. The motive of the defending counsel, no doubt, was to cast Ab Initio a doubt on the prosecutor's truthfulness. At the same time it was well for the purposes of the defence that it should be possible to speak of him as a man of over forty, when the question of the disparity in the ages of himself and his friends, all very young men, was to be used as a weapon against him. Oscar Wilde told Mr. Carson that he had no wish to pose as being young. In that unworthy book of his, entitled Oscar Wilde and Myself, Lord Alfred Douglas declared that his former friend was always most keenly solicitous, lest his appearance should betray the loss of youth. He describes how careful he was about his toilet, how sedulously he used to brush his hair many times a day, and gives an amusing anecdote about Oscar Wilde's indignation, when he overheard an Algerian hotel porter speaking of him to Lord Douglas as Votre Papa. Douglas says that whenever, afterwards, he wished to quiz Wilde, he used to say Votre Papa. Now, I first met Oscar Wilde in the early part of 1883, when he had just passed his twenty-eighth birthday, and was frequently in his company during the seventeen years which elapsed, some trite and banal, a few splendid and opulent, and the rest squalid and unhappy, between our first rencontre and his mournful death on thirtieth of November 1900, and during the whole of that time I never once heard him say anything to make people believe him younger than he was, nor saw him ever posture as the beau-journain, as he was once described to me. It was shortly after we had first met, and he had called to see me at the secluded house, deep down in a garden in the Rue de la Tour in Passy, where I was living. I was out at the time of his call, and when I returned I was told that a beau-journain had been to see me. I hardly realised that it was my new friend, for Oscar Wilde had a repose and dignity, which one does not usually associate with youth. However, next morning I received a delightful letter from him, chiding me for my absence. I remember that I sent him a pneumatic telegram, in which, as Saul replied to his upradings, I wrote the French saying, Les obsences en toujours tour. He tried in his paradoxical way to establish that people who live in remote suburbs, and who have friends in the metropolis who are likely to come to see them, have no right, whatever, at any time, to absent themselves from their homes. With reference to his expedition itself, he said that Passy might best be described as a place, driving to which the cabman would get down every five minutes, to ask for something on account of his pour-brois. The letter, which was one of the first I received from him, and which I remember was addressed to the Citoyen Charade, was many years ago, with other papers of mine stolen from my house in Paris, at a time when, being frequently seen in attendance at General Boulanger's house, or in the company of his friends and adherents, such as Henri Rochefort, Sincol, and members of the Royalist Party, I had come under the suspicion of the French political police. There were other letters from Wilde in the bundle of papers which some zealous mouchard, no doubt, abstracted. I never ceased to regret their loss, for they were so characteristic of the man as he was in those days of his new incarnation, when, aestheticism jettisoned, he was sailing with a fair wind to a land of promise. Perhaps I regretted the most at the time when I came to write what Dr. Benz calls my great life of Oscar Wilde, because as documents they would have been most illuminative of the man's psychology at the period referred to. And then, by the irony of things, after the book had been published, I heard of my missing letters, just about twenty years after they had vanished. I was on the Riviera at the time, and one day received from the editor of an important review published in Berlin, a letter asking me if I had authorised a certain Baron X, residing in Paris, to traffic with several letters written to me in 1883, by Oscar Wilde. The editor said that in view of the colossal interest that was being taken at that time in Germany in Oscar Wilde, and in everything he had ever written, he would have only been too pleased to purchase this correspondence, even at the exorbitant price asked for the letters by the Baron. But that he thought it was his duty to ask me what I knew about the matter before concluding the bargain. A few days later I further received a letter from her ladyship herself. She informed me that she had found these letters at one of the bookshops on their cave altare. She had purchased them and was anxious, merely for the sake of Oscar Wilde's greater glory, as a specimen of his beau-style epistolaire, to give them to the world, par l'entremise, of a leading German periodical. My authorization, however, was necessary to enable her to accomplish this act of filial literary piety. As I had been forewarned as to her real motives, I vouchsaved no other answer to this letter than an exploit or notice from a huissier at Cannes, warning her that the letters were stolen property and that any use of them would bring down upon her all the terrors of the penal code. I remember that the name of the huissier, or process-server, was a sonorous one, Maître Tixador. He charged me a louis for the exploit, and promised me to draw it up in a proper fashion, quelque chose des soignets, he said. It must have been particularly soignets, for from that day to this I have never heard of the Baron again, nor have these letters ever been published. Possibly her ladyship concluded a deal with some merchant in autographs, and, if so, as the value of wild autographs goes nowadays, must have realised at least five times the sum which the Berlin editor looked upon as an exorbitant amount. If I never once heard, le beau jeune homme, as the writer of these letters was described by my porter at Passy, warned youthfulness for himself, in common with all who knew him, I was aware of his admiration of youth. His writings abound in allusions to his preference for young people, to those whom, in one of his plays, he spoke of as of the usual age. The homme d'un certain âge, as the middle-aged man is described in France, was, perhaps unfairly, censured by wild as necessarily tedious. I remember pointing out to him that one man d'un certain âge, and indeed beyond it, who used to speak of himself as, use youth, the immortal false staff, to wit, was anything but a very tedious personality, and all that wild could find to answer was, oh yes, false staff, false staff, but then he was a genius, and besides, he was a villain, and those whom the gods hate die old. His preference for young people would exact no such lengthy exposition as has been given to it here, if it had not been cast up against him for offence and suspicion, both before his trials and in their course. There is no doubt that the fact that he was rarely seen about town in other society, but that of very young men, was malevolently commented upon both in London and in Paris, and contributed to the volume of prejudice by which in 1895, far more than by anything which was satisfactorily proved against him, he was overwhelmed. In which connection I remember entering the Café Royal one evening with a somewhat priggish person, who, like many Englishmen of his class, was only too ready to condemn. Oh, I said, there's Oscar Wilde over there, come over to his table, and I'll introduce you to him. Oh no, thank you, he said. I shouldn't mind so much if he were alone, but he has got a youth with him, and if there's anything in the world that bores me, it's the conversation of your cock-shore young man. Give me maturity, I say, at all times. A youth that, I cried. Why, that's Cotsford Dick. At that time Cotsford Dick, wit and poet, was considerably over forty years old. He certainly, under artificial light and at a distance, could be taken for twenty years younger. His fondness for young people was over and over again cast up against him during his three trials with tedious insistence. Such a question as, did you know so and so, would, on an affirmative reply having been given, immediately be followed by, how old was he? On one occasion, on 4 April, during the Queensbury trial, Mr. Carson asks him as to various of his acquaintances. Were all these young men about twenty? And he answers quite frankly. Yes, twenty or twenty-one. And he adds, I like the society of young men. A little later on, referring to a particular person, Mr. Carson asks again, how old was he? And Wilde, who was getting rather hip at this line of cross-examination, retorts, Really, I do not keep a census. Carson says, Never mind about a census. Tell me how old he was. The answer is, I should say he was about twenty. He was young, and that was one of his attractions. A few minutes later Wilde formulated his creed in the following words, I delight in the society of people much younger than myself. I like those who may be called idle and careless. I recognize no social distinctions at all of any kind. And to me, youth, the mere fact of youth, is so wonderful that I would sooner talk to a young man for half an hour, than be even, well, cross-examined in court. At the first trial, in answer to a question from Sir Frank Lockwood, previously one of his friends, he told Mr. Solicitor that he preferred the companionship of young people because, I like to be liked. I liked their society simply because I like to be lionized. An unprejudiced jury would have taken that answer as an all sufficient explanation, especially a jury with any understanding of that particular and almost pathetic vanity of the literary genre. Writers want praise, hunger for it, thirst for it, and the spectacle of Oscar Wilde pontifying before youth, not of his social standing, should injustice have suggested no more evil than that of Molière reading his manuscripts to his cook and delighting in her approbation. Indeed Mr. Justice Wills, whose summing up was a fairly impartial one, pointed out to the jury how unfair it would be to follow the suggestion of the prosecution and to find culpability in the fact of Wilde's fondness for youthful companions. He might have gone further and have pointed out that any man of the world would, as a matter of course, be aware of the unclean suspicions which such frequentations would arouse in London, and that no sane man, having evil intentions, would allow such frequentations to be a matter of public knowledge. People in London are so inclined to conceive evil that, as a Metropolitan Magistrate pointed out the other day, it is a matter of extreme danger for any paternally minded man to speak or offer a little present to a small girl in the streets or parks, and anybody whom the sight of a pretty child arouses to interest and benevolence must have realised this danger from the umbrageous glances which he has encountered and the rumour of suspicion which he has overheard. Oscar Fungal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 14th October 1854. I have always understood on his own authority that this event took place at number one Marion Square, the fine house at the corner of Lincoln's place, which was both the residence and the consulting place of his distinguished father, William Robert Wills Wilde, who was one of the most celebrated eye and ear doctors of his age, who enjoyed a European reputation, and who, for his great services to medical science as well as to literature, was in 1863, knighted by the viceroy Lord Carlisle. In his unworthy book, Oscar Wilde and Myself, Lord Alfred Douglas ridicules Wilde's observation in De Prefundis that he had inherited a noble name. He does much more. He points to this claim as a proof of the charge of snobbishness which he urges against his former friend. Now, albeit Wilde is a noble name, and belongs to a family in the peerage. It is obvious that it was not that kind of nobility to which the author of De Prefundis referred. He meant that the name he had inherited had been distinguished and ennobled by the father's fine work, industry, devotion, self-sacrifice, and great capacities. I can state this with all the more certainty because I very well remember asking him in the first days of our acquaintance whether he were connected with the barons of Troro who have the same family name as his. His answer was, No, I don't think so. I have never heard it. If there is any connection it is so remote as to be negligible. If the word snob may be defined as a man who adulates those of superior rank and wealth, and boasts about any attaché he may have, or pretend to have, with such persons, then I may say that throughout a long and extensive experience of the world, I have never met a man to whom that definition could with less justice be applied than Oscar Wilde. I have heard him boasting of his friendship with great writers. I have heard him speak with pride of notice taken of him and of his works, by men or women whom he considered great artists. But never once during all the years I knew him did I hear him endeavour to borrow social luster by boasting of acquaintanceship with noblemen or millionaires. They are little better than farmers en gros, was a comment he once made when I had made some remark about our great landowning nobility. On several occasions I have been in his company with noblemen of at least equal distinction and pedigrees as the descendants of the Duglas, or dark grey warrior, and noted with great pride, for I was immensely proud of my friend, that the deference and adulation came from them to him. It was he who was courted, who was listened to, whose words had authority. I remember being with Oscar Wilde that a supper given at the Garrick Club by Bearbone Tree. The occasion was the election of Lord Edward Cecil to the membership of the club. There was a duke there and one or two other noblemen, several actors and a few om de letra, including the elderly editor of a most important literary weekly. Wilde's woman of no importance was playing at the Haymarket at the time, and Wilde was certainly the hero of the night and morning. His conversation scintillated. His play, being assailed by a Lord somebody, he made a brilliant defence of his way of looking at things. It is a pity no record of that conversation exists. All I can remember is that the Lord something somebody kept repeating, You see, my dear fellow, if I seduce a woman, she becomes an outcast, while I remain Lord something somebody of blank hall. There was a vague relon of snobbishness in the air, but it seemed to me to emanate rather from the noblemen themselves. It was most interesting to me to watch the scene, for while the elderly editor, and one or two other vague literary men who were present, did certainly manifest their delight at being in company so, classy, the actors very rightly demeaned themselves as though to sup with earls and dukes was an everyday occurrence of no a special interest. Your actor has no conception of social differences. He has many characteristic faults, no doubt, but snobbishness is not one of them. The man who may be Julius Caesar tonight, just as yesterday he was Mark Antony, and tomorrow will be Louis the Fourteenth, is not going to fear or to show any sense of inferiority to a mere noblemen. I was sitting next to Corny Grain, whose main topic of conversation was gastronomical, and who told me to be cheerful because there was no room for pessimism in a world which produced such delicious things as plover's eggs, of which at that supper he consumed at least a dozen. If the actors appeared indifferent to their surroundings, I noticed, with little shame, that the century-old civility of the literary tribe to the possible patron was still manifesting itself. The elderly editor, whose name was known all over Europe, simply writhed with pleasurable emotion every time that the Duke or Earl addressed him. At one moment I heard him say to the Lord, something, somebody, I don't remember whether I ever had the pleasure of meeting your dear father, the late Marquess, which struck me as somewhat of a gocheri. I was much interested in my observations of the actors on the one hand, busy with dainties and geroboems, the literary folk on the other, snapping eagerly at crumbs of patronage, and of my friend, who seemed the incarnation of a fusion of all three classes represented there, high up above us all, as Petronius Arbiter may have been at any Roman banquet. However, I was not allowed long to enjoy the spectacle, and the pecanly cynical thoughts which it aroused, for I was beckoned to come out of the room by Algernon Borthwick, afterwards Lord Gleanesk. Come along, he said. I can't possibly stand it any longer, it makes one ashamed to be an editor to listen to old Blank. He'll be going on his knees next and licking the Duke's boots. There's to be a reception at Blank House, and I suppose he's angling for a card. But this toading sickens me. Come upstairs and I'll show you our pictures. We have a peg at Wuffington which is worth looking at. And as we were going home with the milk, I said to Oscar, I wonder if Blank will get his invitation to Blank House. He said, he has as much chance of getting there as to the moon. When the Duke gives a party, he takes the red book and draws a line across the table of precedence, and nobody under that line can have any hope of getting a card. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of The Real Oscar Wild by Robert Chirard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Lord Alfred Douglas says that Wilde was fond of boasting of his acquaintancehip with Douglas's late brother, Lord Drumlanrig. Lord Kelhead, who at one time was one of the Queen's lords-in-waiting. I never heard him mention his name until years after I first met him, and some time after Lord Drumlanrig's unfortunate and lamentable death. It was in Paris after Wilde's release from prison, and he said to me, I don't think that Bozy, Alfred Douglas, ever wrote anything better or more beautiful than his sonnet to Drumlanrig, his dead brother. It is tender, it is exquisite, it is a pure work of art. I had not read the sonnet at the time, and so Wilde repeated it to me, nor did the beautiful lines lose anything by his manner of saying them. Douglas also quotes Oscar Wilde's dedication of one of his works, to the dear memory of Robert Earl of Lytton, as a proof of his snobbishness, and states that he has it on the authority of one of Lord Lytton's sons, who was a small boy at the time of his death, that his late father had but the slightest acquaintance with him. Now I was in Paris during Lord Lytton's last illness, and Wilde was in Paris also, and I know that he was a frequent visitor to the Embassy during that period, and that he was one of the very few friends of the Ambassador who were admitted to his bed-chamber. Il est chez son excellence, et il est impossible de les déranger, was the answer given me on one occasion by the Embassy concierge, when I had called there, by appointment, to meet Wilde, with whom I was to go to dinner. I can also remember the day on which Lytton died. The news was given me by Oscar Wilde himself, and his distress was certainly genuine, for, for what earthly reason should he have feigned it to me? He told me that he had been with Owen Meredith, very shortly before he died, and that he had sat by his bedside holding his hand. Indeed I am not certain that he did not say that Lytton had died holding his hand. I know further from English friends of mine who were residents in Paris and on the Embassy list, that Lord Lytton had a liking as well as a great admiration for Oscar Wilde, and frequently spoke of the cleverness and charm of his conversation. Lady Dorothy Neville's memoirs may also be consulted on this. In 1887 Lord Lytton presents Oscar Wilde with a copy of his book, The Paradise, cordially inscribed. Oscar Wilde had a detestation for anything like self-aggrandizement, and never practising it himself, I have heard him rebuke people who, in his presence, said anything which seemed to have been mentioned for this purpose. I believe, indeed I know, that he was perfectly sincere in the statements he made in court, during the three trials which he underwent, as to his disregard of social distinctions. He told Mr. Carson, who had asked him if he had been aware of the social standing of two guests whom he had entertained to dinner, that he had not known it, and added, if I had known it, I should not have cared. I don't care toughens what they were. I liked them. I have a passion to civilise the community. But again when Mr. Carson asked him if any young boy he might pick up in the street would be a pleasing companion, he answered, I would talk to a street Arab with pleasure. You talk to a street Arab? cried Mr. Carson with simulated horror. If he would talk to me, answered Wilde smiling, yes, with pleasure. It was noticed in Paris that Oscar Wilde did not at all mind being seen speaking to social outcasts. I have frequently watched him in amused conversation with that immortal amongst Parisian thieves and beggars, André Salise, commonly known as Biby-la-Piorée, a weird, mysterious survival of the corps de Miracle, a beggar-student of thirty years standing, a stealer of clocks and umbrellas, partly a poet, partly a police spy, a noctambulous product of Montmartre and of the Latin Quarter, who was kind to the great poet Verlaine, and stole for him, when poor Lelyanne lay dying in want. Biby-la-Piorée, about whose death at the Hôtel d'Hur hospital I wrote at the time. He died as Gervais died of exposure and want and probation. Tuberculosis was the direct cause, and his last days in the Hôtel d'Hur hospital were easy. He remained a buffoon to the last, and the very evening of the night on which he died he was masquerading up and down the ward, bringing smiles to lips as blanched as his own. Dying, he, the beggar, enacted for these beggars on their deathbeds the many trickeries which had been their trade in life. In the penumbra of the long room he mimicked for men who had reached their last infirmity, the mock infirmities by which they had wrung compassion and largesse from the world which they were leaving. He turned back his eyelids and parodied the blind. He doubled back his hand and showed a polished stump. He feigned the man who is palsy stricken, and amidst the coughing cacinations of his audience of experts, he played the canting beggar who dupes the pious at the doors of churches. He went out of a world which had not been kind to him, triumphant and mocking to his last breath. He died with the vos plaudite of the Roman clown expressed in the grin of his lantern jaws. The papers recorded his death as a matter of public interest, told the story of his life, and spoke gently of his foibles. The Parisian boulevardier, seeing the elegant Oscar Wilde engaged at some boulevard café in an animated conversation with Bibi Lapuré, would have no surprise nor harbour any evil suspicions. In the same way, Bibi Lapuré's friend, the poet Vallain, might often have been seen in the company of that most distinguished of French nobleman and dilettante, Count Robert de Montesquieu Fesensac. Count Robert was kind for years to the outcast Vallain, whose reputation in the matter of morality was appalling, who had been in prison in Belgium, who used to boast of having beaten his mother and who was rarely otherwise than what the French call entre deux vins, or rather, in his case, entre deux absences. In this connection I remember also how one night, at Boulière, Oscar Wilde fell into conversation with a young Latin-quarter soutenir, who was known as Le Petit Louis, and who had attracted our attention by the grace and vigour with which he had danced the cancan, having as vis-à-vis a young woman, queen of the high kick and empress of the Grand Écce, or Great Divide, who years later developed into a ballerina of European, nay of cosmopolitan celebrity. No lesser person, indeed, than the famous Grail Degout. I had offered Petit Louis, who was exhausted after his quadril performance, a bock of the nasty Balboulière beer, and Oscar Wilde began to talk to him. He learned from Petit Louis that he was heartily sick of the shameful life he was leading in Paris, and wanted to get back to Brittany, there to enlist in the navy. But he had no money for the journey, and it was impossible for him to go to the recruiting office de la Marine, in the clothes the only suit he possessed, which he was wearing. Clothes which, at a glance, betrayed his method of living. Oscar Wilde listened to his story with deep interest, and then asked him several questions. In the end he said, Come to the Hotel Voltaire, K. Voltaire, tomorrow at half-past twelve, and I will see if I can do anything for you. And you, Robert, come to. As we were driving back, I said, Don't you remember, Oscar, that you have Maurice Rollinat, the poet, coming to lunch at one o'clock to-morrow at your rooms in the Hotel Voltaire? What will he think if he finds a Latin quarter soutenure there talking to you? I don't care what he thinks, said Oscar Wilde. Petit Louis is for me a human document, and a very interesting one at that. I'll say more. I intend to ask him to join us at lunch. Yes, I shall have a fourth couvert-laid. I shall introduce my two guests to each other, as Maurice Rollinat, poet. Petit Louis. No, I cried. You would better not do that. He would never forgive you. And though he did not carry out his proposal and ask the lad to lunch, he sent him out to buy a decent suit at La Belle Jardinière over the bridge, and when the transformed Petit Louis returned, he gave him sufficient money and above to take him to breast, and to keep him until he had been taken into the navy. And there in the sitting-room of Wilde's suite in the Hotel Voltaire, for the joy of his emancipation from the horrors of his life in the depths of Parisian vise, did Petit Louis, former souteneur and Marsouine, Marine, to be, execute in the fullness of his heart, and for the delectation of Oscar Wilde and Maurice Rollinat, poets, and of myself, a passure, or pas de cavalier, of amazing grace and agility. It was I who brought it to an abrupt close by suggesting that a ready-made suit from La Belle Jardinière, a complete at forty-nine francs ninety-five cents, could hardly be expected to stand such usage. Petit Louis shortly afterwards departed and left for Brittany the same afternoon. I heard some weeks later in the Latin Quarter that he had Julie enlisted into the navy. I heard and saw nothing more of him until twelve years later, when a fine, sturdy, bronze, and bearded boatswain of the French navy called to see me at my apartment on the Boulevard Magenta. I could not place him at all. I see your embarrassment, monsieur. You don't know me as Louis Carradec. You would remember me by a name which I am ashamed to repeat, as it reminds me of horrors of long ago which seemed to be a dreadful nightmare. But if I mention the Balblier, the Hotel Voltaire, and a noble stranger, you may— Oh, Petit Louis! I cried. Yes. I am ashamed to say that I was he, but God be praised all that is dead and buried. Dead and buried long ago, dead and buried like Malbrook. And now, as to the noble stranger, my benefactor, the man who saved me, I want to see him to give him my thanks, to show him what I have become. Where is he? Is he well? And—oh, tell me his name! Just think how thankless of me I have forgotten his very name! You see, I hardly heard it more than once. What is his name, and where can I find him? Do you know Monsieur Louis Carradec? I said. I am very sorry, I am just like you. I too have forgotten his name. That was in June 1895, just a few days after Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison for two years with hard labour, and I saw no reason for making Petit Louis privy to his downfall. But I could not help thinking, after Monsieur Louis Carradec and I had drunk together the absinthe de la amitié, and the boson had taken his departure, what a good witness he might have made for my poor friend's defence. He was a youth, an outcast, with whom Wilde had been in company at Balboulier, whom he had invited to his hotel, whom he had proposed to invite to lunch with him and two other individuals, for whom he had bought a suit of clothes, and to whom he had given a handsome present of money. Why, as bad a case as that of the boy Alphonse Conway of Worthing, to whom he gave a surge suit and a straw hat, because the boy was shabby, and because he took an interest in him. Sir Edward Clark could have rebutted with Louis Carradec, quite a number of the witnesses for the crown. And indeed I had had his story in my mind, as illustrating the innocence of Wilde's eccentric, even, quicksotic benevolence, when I tended myself to Sir Edward Clark to give evidence on my friend's behalf. I was indeed sorry that the defence found no use for such evidence, because I could have enlightened the jury on other habits of his, in which the prosecution found, or pretended to find, grave reasons for suspicion. And be it noted, en passant, how even the most innocent practices of his were made weapons against him. For instance, the burning of perfumes in his wombs and those of his friends. Of this much was made. It was a habit he had no doubt contracted at Oxford. I remember very well that when I was at the university a number of undergraduates used to burn that scented ribbon which one pulls out of a little round, red, cardboard box, which is made, I fancy, by the House of Rimmel, and which is supposed to counteract the unpleasant odour of stale tobacco smoke. His insidious practice of allowing red shades to remain on the candles, with which the tables at different London restaurants at which he dined his friends, need neither explanation nor paliation. Yet the jury were asked to see in these red shades the dye of blood-red turpitude. Sir Frank Lockwood and Mr. C. Gill before him, with all the broad-mindedness of men of the world and men about town, could not and would not, pass over in silence, the flagrant immorality of letting a restaurant maître de hôtel put red shades on the candles of one's dinner tables. I could not have excused this, either. But amongst other things which I wanted to tell the jury, was that as long ago was twelve years previously, Oscar Wilde had been in the habit of writing extravagant letters, which those who received them took for exactly what they were, effusions partly humorous, partly pathetic, but obviously insincere and written as literary essays in epistolary style. Of those first letters which he wrote me, only one escaped the mouchard, the second-hand bookseller and the baron. It certainly is not the sort of letter that one man writes to another after an acquaintanceship of only a few weeks, but when I received it I was aware that my correspondent was not an ordinary man, and I conceived that his object in writing to me in that way was to impress me with that fact, besides showing me what agreeable things he could say to a friend in the most agreeable prose possible. With reference to his habit of calling even his most recent friends by their Christian names, and of insisting on being addressed by them in a similar fashion, of which habit also a great use was made against him by the prosecution, I had intended to tell the jury that just three days after I had first met him, at a dinner-party at the house of a Greek lady artist, he said to me, and these are his ipsissima werber. I don't want you to call me wild, and I certainly don't intend to call you charade. We are going to be friends. I think we are friends already. Now, if we are friends, we ought to call each other by our Christian names. If we are not, then I am Mr. Wilde, and you are Mr. charade. Now, though I have lived most of my life abroad, and have found foreigners, even the most casual strangers, inclined to address me by my Christian name, as Don Roberta, or Mr. Robert, or in Slavonic countries as Robert Tukor, I confess I did not readily fall in with his suggestion, which I admit, went contrary to my British instincts, and it was only after some time, and even then with a recurrent effort, that I was able to exceed to it. But I certainly saw nothing in the suggestion to arouse suspicion. At the worst, it was silly, better, the French would say. And with regard to his un-English habit of embracing his friends, of which I heard but never witnessed, the jury were perhaps unaware that it is, especially amongst the Latin races, accustomed all over the continent. I remember my indignation when calling at Naples, on a former Dresden schoolmate of mine, who had since those early days blossomed into a portly and prosperous hotel-keeper. My friend, Coram Populo, on the landing stage at Sorrento, threw his arms round my neck, and embraced me on either cheek. It was un-English and repellent to me, but no harm whatever was meant. And I don't believe that Oscar Wilde meant any harm either, when he followed this effusive continental method of salutation. That it was unusual, and un-English, was perhaps what chiefly induced him to adopt it. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of the Real Oscar Wilde. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Everything I write is extraordinary, cried Oscar Wilde, in answer to the question put by Mr. Carson, whether he considered one of his letters to Lord Alfred Douglas, which had just been read out, an ordinary letter. I do not pose as being ordinary. Great heavens! I think that reply gives an explanation, and the true one, not only of his epistolary style, but of his general conduct. What his friends set down to eccentricity, and his enemies attributed to the promptings of a mind diseased and unclean, was in truth merely a well-calculated pose. Why do you act like that? asked a prefect of police in Paris of the poet Bolaire, author of Le Fleur du Mal, and the translator into French of posed tales. Pour épater les bourgeois. To astound the public, answered the poet. Most literary men pose as extraordinary, at least until their success, social and financial, is assured. As a young man, Lord Beaconsfield had an eccentric coiffure, and wore extravagant waistcoats and jewellery. Barbide Aurevillee used to walk about Montmartre in a cloak of red velvet. Cateaule Mendes, was to be seen every afternoon sitting on the terrace of the Café Tortoni in Paris, with his blonde hair falling down in ringlets over his shoulders. Balzac had a monkish cow, and turned night into day. Victor Hugo, dressed as a bluff sea-captain, tried to look the part. In England today, in the twentieth century, we have men of letters of universal fame, who in dress and demeanor are most obviously seeking, à la Bolaire, to astound the public. I supposed that it was in pursuance of this scheme of his, to pose as extraordinary, that Oscar Wilde used to talk in the very freest fashion about his father and mother. I remember that it struck me as peculiar that, only a few days after I had made his acquaintance, he should relate to me the gallantries of his late father, Sir William Wilde. It is true that the subject was broached as an illustration of the broad-mindedness of Speranza, Lady Wilde, the mother whom he worshipped. She was a wonderful woman, he said, and such a feeling as vulgar jealousy could take no hold on her. She was well aware of my father's constant infidelities, but simply ignored them. Before my father died, in 1876, he lay ill in bed for many days, and every morning a woman dressed in black and closely veiled used to come to our house in Merlion Square, and unhindered, either by my mother or anyone else, used to walk straight upstairs to Sir William's bedroom, and sit down at the head of his bed, and so sit there all day, without ever speaking a word or once raising her veil. She took no notice of anybody in the room, and nobody paid any attention to her. Not one woman in a thousand would have tolerated her presence, but my mother allowed it because she knew that my father loved this woman, and felt that it must be a joy and a comfort to have her there by his dying bed. And I am sure that she did right not to grudge that last happiness to the man who was about to die. And I am sure that my father understood her apparent indifference, understood that it was not because she did not love him that she permitted her rival's presence, but because she loved him very much, and died with his heart full of gratitude and affection for her. Footnote No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me. But I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I have disgraced that name eternally. I have made it a low byword among low people. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, travelled ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable a loss. Oscar Wilde in Day Profundis End Footnote In a recent book about Wilde, it is remarked by the author, who was formerly one of his intimate friends, that while everybody knew who his father was, God alone could say who was his grandfather. Now this is as inaccurate as it is unkind. In writing my Life of Oscar Wilde, I was at particular pains to trace the lineage of my subject both on his father's and on his mother's side. William Wills Wilde, afterwards Sir William Wilde, was the son of Dr. Thomas Wilde, a surgeon in Dublin, by his marriage with Miss Finn, a woman of very distinguished connections, including the families of Surridge and Ousley of Dunmore. Thomas Wilde was one of the sons of Ralph Wilde, who came over from Durham in the middle of the eighteenth century, established himself in Ross Common as land agent to the Sandford family, and married a Miss O'Flynn, the daughter of a very ancient Irish family. Ralph Wilde was the son of a Durham businessman, whose humble pedigree could be carried back many generations. It is equally inaccurate and unkind of the writer referred to, to allege that at one time in his career Sir William Wilde kept a small chemist's shop in Dublin, a clumsy invention in the career of a man about whose life, owing to the distinction he acquired, the fullest records exist. The foundation of this story may be the fact that Dr. Thomas Wilde, William Wilde's father, had a dispensary connected with his surgery, exactly as most country doctors have today. William Wilde was born at Castle Ray in eighteen fifteen, and was educated at the Royal School, Bannerhur. Already in his youth his taste for antiquarian research was exhibited. He commenced his professional studies in eighteen thirty-two in Dublin, and at an early age distinguished himself not only by medical science, but by initiative and resourcefulness. While still a medical student, he wrote a very successful book describing a cruise in the Mediterranean and the East, on board the yacht Crusader. He continued his studies in London, Berlin, and Vienna, and started in medical practice in eighteen forty-one, specializing as an eye and ear doctor. He earned four hundred pounds in his first year, and gave the whole sum towards founding the institution originally known as St. Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital. This hospital, which was started in a disused stable in Frederick Lane, developed in course of time into that fine institution, the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital. In eighteen forty-eight, he published his book, The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life. In eighteen fifty-one, he married Miss Jane Francesca Elgie, Speranza, and in eighteen fifty-three, he was appointed Surgeon Occulist in Ordinary. In eighteen fifty-seven, he was created Chevalier of the Kingdom of Sweden, and in eighteen sixty-four, he was appointed by Lord Carlisle. It is certainly untrue to say that either his widow or his sons attached any social importance to this distinction, such as it is, and particularly with regard to Oscar Wilde, is the charge of snobbishness and toughed haunting of false one. He nowhere in day profundus declares that he had inherited a noble name in the sense of aristocratic descent. What he does say is that his mother and his father had bequeathed him a name which they had made noble and honoured by their labours and achievements, which is quite a different thing. I knew Oscar Wilde very well for a great number of years, and I never heard him once boasting of his aristocratic acquaintances. As a matter of fact, he was somewhat inclined to socialism. One remembers his lines saying how in some things he is with those who die upon the barricades. When I first met him in Paris, he did actually profess an elegant republicanism. We were both at that time somewhat under the influence of Victor Hugo and Les Misérabes. I took him to one of Hugo's receptions, and as we walked home he repeated some of the passages from the descriptions in Les Misérabes of the fighting in the streets of Paris. C'est on y'a. Lui de sé en j'auras, ma mère, c'est la République. Was a line he repeated more than once. On our way to the Cévoltaire, we passed in front of the Toulérée, the blackened ruins of which were still standing in 1883, and pointing to them he said, There is not there one little blackened stone which is not to me a chapter in the Bible of democracy. At Victor Hugo's that night there was present a Polish princess of royal affinities who made a dead set upon the young Irish poet, but who, as I noticed, made little headway with him. She was one of the most distinguished women in the smart set of the day in Paris, and when I afterwards mentioned this to him, he replied that that might be so, but that she struck him as being particularly tedious. He seemed vastly to prefer speaking with Auguste Vacquerie, the radical editor of L'Hérapel, to whom perhaps that description might with greater justice have been applied. It is true that Wilde and Vacquerie had a topic in which both were specially interested, namely the character and literary standing of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne had been staying in Paris on a visit to Victor Hugo some short time previously, and Vacquerie, who had been very frequently in his company, was full of questions about him. He did not seem quite to understand the English poet, or to be able to place him, and he listened with great interest to the anecdotes which Wilde had to tell about him. He wanted Victor Hugo to listen too, but the master, as usual after dinner, had fallen asleep. Oscar Wilde's remarks on Swinburne were a tribute to the poet, and in view of a decided soup-son of hostility amongst his listeners, to some extent a defence also. I remember his emphatic repudiation of the suggestion that he was in the habit of taking too much to drink. We all thought, said Vacquerie, that that must be the explanation of his extraordinary excitability while he was here. His language was torrential. He jumped about, common carp. There was no holding him. He made the master feel quite nervous, and I don't think any of us were very sorry when he left. Wilde said of him that he was of so excitable a temperament, that the mere contemplation of a glass of wine was sufficient to throw him into a bacchanalian frenzy, and he implied that any derogation of him would be keenly resented by any lover of English literature. I remembered Wilde's defence of Swinburne when, several years later, I had reason to understand, from a personal experience, with what horror Swinburne regarded him after his disgrace and downfall. Yet in his youth Swinburne himself had been stigmatised as a corrupter of morals, a stigma from which he never lived to clear himself. It was on account of this old prejudice against him that the Nobel Prize for Literature was never awarded to him. In France this omission, by the way, was considered so gross an injustice that a number of French poets, headed by Pierre-Louise, the author of Aphrodite, had decided, by way of protest, to publish a volume of poems to be entitled, Their Or Fair à Monsieur Swinburne. And, so wrote Pierre-Louise to me, just as the first contributions were coming in, Swinburne died. There was another passage in this letter which, contrasting as it does with the remarks I heard that evening at Victor Hugo's house, I want to quote, You have had an immense loss in England this year. Swinburne wrote, Louis. He was the greatest living poet. When I think that he used to write to me when I was nineteen years old, that he contributed to my first review, and that during twenty years I have been allowing him to die without going to see him, I cannot console myself. This Pierre-Louise is the gentleman whose name came up at the Old Bailey during the Queensbury trial with reference to his translation into French verse of a letter from Oscar Wilde to one of his friends, a letter, by the way, produced by Wilde himself. This letter had come, with others, into the hands of a gang of London blackmailers, who had attempted to extort a large sum of money in exchange for it from its author. Oscar Wilde used to relate with great gusto how he faced them, defeated their object, and recovered the document with little or no expense. I heard him telling this story several times before the matter came into court, and it certainly did not appear that he was in any way ashamed of this letter, or had had any suspicion that it might be used against him as a presumption of culpability. His version of its recovery was given in court as follows. Asked by Sir Edward Clark to relate what happened, he said that a man called at his house in Tide Street to inform him that this letter, a copy of which had been sent to Mr. Bearburne Tree, was not in his possession. His name was Alan, continued the prosecutor. I felt that this was the man who wanted money from me. I said, I suppose you have come about my beautiful letter. If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr. Bearburne Tree, I would gladly have paid you a very large sum of money for the letter, as I consider it to be a work of art. He said, a very curious construction can be put on that letter. I said in reply, art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes. He said, a man has offered me sixty pounds for it. I said to him, if you take my advice you will go to that man and sell my letter to him for sixty pounds. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that length, but I am glad to find that there is someone in England who considers a letter of mine worth sixty pounds. He was somewhat taken aback by my manner, perhaps, and said, the man is out of town. I had applied. He is sure to come back, and I advised him to get the sixty pounds. He then changed his manner a little, saying that he had not a single penny, and that he had been on many occasions trying to find me. I said that I could not guarantee his cab expenses, but that I would gladly give him half a sovereign. He took the money and went away. "'Was only thing said about a sonnet?' asked Sir Edward. "'Yes,' replied Oscar Wilde. I said, the letter which is a prose poem will shortly be published in sonnet form and a delightful magazine, and I will send you a copy of it. As a matter of fact the letter was the basis of a French poem that was published in the spirit lamp. "'Yes.' "'It is signed Pierre-Louis. Is that the nom de plume of a friend of yours?' "'Yes, a young French poet of great distinction, a friend of mine, who has lived in England. At that time Oscar Wilde could no longer call Pierre-Louis a friend of his, because at least a year previously the two had quarrelled and had agreed not to know each other any more. I am not sure what the quarrel was about, but at that time Wilde had a good many enemies in Paris, his eccentricities were being malevolently commented upon, and I fancy that Pierre-Louis, whose brother occupied a very high post in the Diplomatic Service, was recommended by him to cease an acquaintance which might injure his social prospects. Poor Wilde had for years seen himself abandoned by his friends, and I remember that just before I first met him a very old Oxford friend of his, who had come to great public honours since, had written to him to say he wished to have no more to do with him. Referring to this, L'Achage, he said to me apropos of the letter in which his Willem-friend closed their relationship, "'What he says is like a poor little linnet's cry by the roadside along which my mesulous ambition is sweeping forward.' He took Pierre-Louis congé in a much less philosophical spirit, and indeed was very angry about it. I remember his telling another friend and myself what had happened, and saying, "'I really regret now that I never learned the use of alms, so that I could call people out who write me letters like that to sting me, and punish them for their timidity.'" CHAPTER IV OF THE REAL OSCAR WILDE by Robert Chirard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Oscar Wilde incited people in Paris to talk about him unfavourably by certain mannerisms and eccentricities of dress which irritated the literary men. For instance, he used to wear gorgeous fur-lined overcoats, which gentlemen do not wear in Paris. And then there was that custom of his of having his hair curled. This is common enough amongst the French proletariat. Indeed, no French workman would think of going to his wedding without first paying a visit to a coiffure frissure, hairdresser. But it is not usual Don's Le Monde. He had acquired this custom after his return from America and a visit to the Louvre Museum, where the coiffure of the Emperor Nero, in a bust, had attracted his attention, at a time when, having discarded the long hair of the aesthetic period, he was considering in what style to have his really beautiful chevalure arranged. He wrote me from London. Society must be amazed, and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it. Nobody recognises me, and everybody tells me I look young. That is delightful, of course. The papers commented on this change in the Eastie's appearance, and in one of its numbers for 1883, Punch had the following paragraphs on the matter. A Wild Guess A society's sixpenny states that it was while Mr. Oscar Wilde stood before the bust of Nero in the Louvre that he decided to crisp his flowing locks after the fashion of the Imperial Fiddler. The motive for this particular change is not far to seek, perhaps. Oscar probably found his influence in the boudoirs waning, and determined to get himself up, alla the Roman Emperor, in order that he might once again be the centre of a Nero worshipping circle of damsels. Another reference is made in Punch under the heading, Wild Waggery. Mr. Oscar Wilde, having come back from Paris with a highly frizzled chevalier, the world is moved as follows. Our Oscar is with us again, but oh, he is changed who was once so fair. Has the iron gone into his soul? Oh no, it has only gone over his hair. A recollection of the influence the eminent Eastie used apparently to exercise over the sayings and the doings of the Curle Society emboldens us to humbly cap our contemporary's epigram to this extent. The Curle was once, as you're aware, to Oscar's tune reduced to twirl, but he who gave the Curle an air now gives instead his hair a Curle. It will be seen from these somewhat laboured pleasantries that poor Wilde's little freak of fashion evoked in London nothing graver than amusement. Yet ten years later this same fashion of his was to excite such malevolent comment as to induce a sincere friend and admirer of his to refuse him his further acquaintance, and still later, at the time of his trial, to be used against him by the Treasury Council as directly suggestive of immoral tendencies. I do not know if Pierre-Louis' translation of the letter, which has since been described as an idiot letter, by the person to whom it was addressed, has been reprinted anywhere, so as a literary curiosity it is appended. Sonnet A letter written in prose poetry by Mr. Oscar Wilde to a friend, translated into rhymed poetry by a poet of no importance. Iassante En mon coeur Je ne dieu deux et blanc T'aille son la lumière de la mer T'abouche les sons rouges de soie au mensolet ses couches Je t'aime en font calat Chez au bras d'Apollon Tous chantés Et ma lira et moi douce Les lunders rammous suspendus que la brise effarouche À frémir Que te voir achanter Quand je touche de chevaux coronés d'un camp et de houblon Mais tu pars Tu m'effuis pour la porte d'un cule Va rafraîcher tes mains dans le clair crépuscule Des choses ou des sons l'âme entire L'âme antique Et reviens Iassante adorée Iassante Iassante Qu'à je veux voir toujours dans les bras serriants T'en beau corps étendu sur la rose et l'absence Considerable importance was attached by the prosecution at all the trials to this letter, which Oscar Wilde described as a beautiful letter, a poem, something like one of Shakespeare's sonnets, and on which the person who received it has recently expressed a very caustic opinion. Mr. Justice Will's view of it, and of other letters that were read at the trial, was, he preferred, not to express any opinion, as to whether the prosecution was justified in the use it endeavoured to make of them. He added that he himself might be dull, but could not see the extreme beauty of the language. To return to Wilde's account of how he regained possession of this letter, he related that after the departure of Alan, with his half-sovereign, a man giving the name of Clyburn came to his house. He used dramatically to describe the panther-like gliding of the blackmailer's entrance. I went out to him and said, I cannot bother any more about this matter. He produced the letter out of his pocket, saying, Alan has asked me to give it back to you. I did not take it immediately, but asked, Why does Alan give me back this letter? He said, Well, he says that you are kind to him, and that there is no use in trying to rent you. Blackmail you? As you only laugh at us. I took the letter and said, I will accept it back, and you can thank Alan for giving me for all the anxiety he has shown about it. I looked at the letter and saw that it was extremely soiled. I said to him, I think it is quite unpardonable that better care was not taken of this original manuscript of mine. He said he was very sorry, but it had been in so many hands. I gave him half a sovereign for his trouble and then said, I am afraid that you are leading a wonderfully wicked life. He said, There is good and bad in every one of us. I told him he was a born philosopher, and he then left. In cross-examination Wilde said that the reason why he gave the Blackmail as ten shillings each was to show his contempt for them. It is quite obvious from his conduct throughout with regard to this letter that he considered it an entirely innocent composition. Sir William Wilde lived long enough to see both his sons, William and Oscar, give promise of brilliant careers. He died on 19th April 1876, universally lamented. His sons had every reason and right to be proud of their father, who indeed did bequeath to them a name made noble. I can only remember one occasion on which I met Lady Wilde, Oscar's mother, for though she was living at Willie Wilde's house in Oakley Street, during all those dreadful days in May 1895, when I was a constant visitor to my friend, who had been released on bail, she was confined to her room, indeed, to her bed. I had been introduced to her at her house in Park Street, Grovener Square, where she lived with her son William in 1883, and it was Oscar who took me there. I recall with what pride he said to me, Robert, my mother! She was unfashionably dressed, in a mid-Victorian style of costume, made of black silk, and she wore several large pieces of cameo jewellery. Her hair was dark and in ringlets, and her broad face, with its massive features, was illuminated by her magnificent eyes. I forget what she said to me at the moment of my presentation, but, some minutes later, as I was standing talking to Dr. Anna Kingsford, I saw her crossing the drawing-room towards me, walking in a stately and, fedra-like fashion. She was holding out a posy of Narcissi, and kept saying, Flowers for the poet, flowers for the poet. It appears that it was for me that they were intended, Oscar having told her that I was bringing out a volume of verse. The said volume of verse, by the way, was deservedly slated by Willie Wilde in Vanity Fair. He said, in Teralia, that I had done right to call it whispers, for that it would make no noise in the world. It has been my unfortunate experience, however, to see such survival in that wretched book, as is indicated by its frequent appearance in catalogues of second-hand books, and for no other reason that it was affectionately and admiringly dedicated to Oscar Wilde, poet and friend. Oscar himself made a little jest of it in his reviewing days, when noticing a book of mine in one of his paragraphs in the Palmal Gazette, he mentioned that the author had come through early poems, a three-volume novel, and other complaints common to his time of life. Perhaps he thought I deserved little punishment for associating his name with such very poor verse. I could not, however, foresee, when I wrote that dedication, that thirty years later, simply on account of it, people would be asking for the book. Oscar Wilde always told me that he disliked reviewing, and especially the work of that nature which he did for the lady's world. It was most tedious, he said, nor did he care to condemn. I never write reviews now of contemporary literature. He writes in a letter to a lady who had offered to send him a copy of one of her books. Or indeed reviews of any kind. For a time reviewing interested me a little, but I tired of it very soon, and I don't think I shall ever return to it. A very interesting book on Oscar Wilde and his mother, by Anna Countess de Bremont, should be read by anybody who wishes to form an opinion on Lady Wilde. Madame de Bremont visited her first at the Park Street House, about three years after my visit there, and great changes must have taken place in the house as well as in its mistress, if one is to judge from the following first impressions which Madame de Bremont recorded. What matters the old-fashioned purple brocade gown, the towering headdress of velvet, the long gold earrings, or the yellow lace fissue crossed on her breast and fastened with innumerable enormous brooches, the huge bracelets of turquoise and gold, the rings on every finger. Her faded splendour was more striking than the most fashionable attire, for she wore that ancient finery with a grace and dignity that robbed it of its grotesqueness. I certainly saw nothing grotesque in Lady Wilde's attire. She was not, it is true, fashionably dressed, but she certainly presented no such appearance as described by Madame de Bremont. Doubtless during the three years between 1883 and 1886, Lady Wilde's eccentricities in the manner of dress had developed, while from Madame de Bremont's description of her home, so different from the impression of comfort and elegance which it produced on me, it would appear that during this period also her financial position had grown very much worse. As a matter of fact, those were very bad years for the Wildes. Oscar, who was now married, had alone an aptness in Belle Lettre as a breadwinner. Willie had only the precarious resources of the freelance journalist, while Lady Wilde's income from her estate in Ireland had shared the fate of all incomes derived from such sources at that period of Irish agricultural depression. Madame de Bremont continues. She posed in that dim, dingy room like the grand dam that she was by right of intellect, nay genius, and noble Irish blood. She appeared absolutely unconscious of the incongruities around her, the dowdy maid, the poorly furnished room, the badly served tea, the dust and dinginess, the flickering candles, all were evidently matters of small importance in the light of her majestic presence and brilliant conversation. She gave me from the first the impression that it was she who made the room, and not the room that made her. Or in other words, a grand dam is ever a grand dam whether she dwells in a palace or a hovel. Not that the old house in Park Street was a hovel by any means. At that time, Lady Wilde, who could no longer afford to live in Mayfair, was moving to the house in Oakley Street, Chelsea, where about ten years later she died during her son's imprisonment. It was a poor house of the kind usually let out in furnished apartments, with a basement, an area, a plot of waste at the back, and a front and back room, communicating by means of folding doors on each floor. Here Lady Wilde resumed her receptions with Grand Décla, says Madame Débremont, who describes her first visit there with some picturesqueness. I found myself finally at the door of the reception room, which seemed to my eyes, filled with the sunlight of the outer air, shrouded in darkness, pierced here and there by a dimly gleaming red light. As my eyes gradually became accustomed to the twilight of the rooms before me, I could discern faces that stood out with Rembrandt-esque distinctness. It gave me a strange feeling of recovery from an attack of blindness to see those shadowy faces, while the uproar from those voices of the unseen produced on me quite an uncanny sensation. This, with a close atmosphere of the rooms, was making me decidedly nervous, when the sound of Lady Wilde's voice broke the unpleasant spell. In the semi-darkness she loomed up a majestic figure, her headdress with its long white streamers and glittering jewels giving her quite a queenly air. Here is a description of Oscar Wilde as he showed himself at one of his mother's Oakley Street receptions. As he bowed over his mother's hand I noted the up-to-date elegance of his attire, the short crisp locks of hair, with just a suspicion of the old-time wave, brushed back from the high brow, the indefinable air of the dandy that hung around him. He was no longer the aesthetic posier, but a resplendent dandy from the pale pink carnation in the lapel of his frockcoat to the exquisite tint of the gloves and the cut of the low shoes of the latest mode. Oscar Wilde always wore button-hole flowers. It will be remembered that he introduced from Paris that invention of some decadent horticulturalist with a penchant for chemical experiments, the green carnation. Footnote. The green carnation was evolved by fumigating a white pink over burning sulfur. End footnote. Which became the vogue amongst the June in London and supplied Mr Robert Hitchens with a taking title for the Romana Clef which made his reputation. In his heyday of brief financial prosperity Oscar Wilde had a standing arrangement with a florist in the Burlington arcade to supply him with two boutonniers daily, one at half guinea for himself and one at half a crown for the driver of his handsome cab for that day. At his mother's receptions Oscar Wilde spoke little, but seemed to face himself that his mother might display her brilliant wit and hold everyone by the charm of her conversation. But his voice in the few words of greeting he exchanged with friends had a triumphant note that was absent when I last heard him speak. His smile was as gracious but more kindly. The covert sneer in it had vanished. Now I protest I never once in all my life saw anything even vaguely resembling a sneer on my friend's lips. This en passant. I do not believe he could have sneered even if he had tried ever so hard. With regard to his dress as described above, it appears that in 1886 he had already begun to abandon all eccentricities of costume and was endeavouring to dress à la mode. After his return from America he had given up the aesthetic masquerade in which he had first attracted attention to himself. Here is a description of him as he appeared in 1882 in New York in the costume referred to. His splendid youth and manly bearing lent a certain charm to the strange costume in which he masqueraded. He shone to far greater and better advantage amid the surroundings than he did on the lecture platform. There was a dignity and graciousness in his manner that blinded one to his eccentric appearance. The long locks of rich brown hair that waved across his forehead and undulated to his shoulders gave his fine head an almost feminine beauty. It might have been the head of a splendid girl were it not for the muscular throat fully displayed by the rolling collar and fantastic green silk necktie, knotted after the fashion of the etudial of the Parisian studios. The broad somewhat heavy shoulders encased in the well-fitting velvet coat with its broad lapels, the left of which bore the ubiquitous emblem, a huge and magnificent specimen of the sunflower. With the velvet coat he wore knee-britches, black silk hose and buckled shoes. When I first met him in Paris he was dressing, apart from his use of fur coats and rather showy jewellery, like an ordinary French gentleman, silk hat, reddingote and so on. At home when he was at work he donned a white woollen dressing gown which somewhat resembled a monk's robe, a costume de travail, the idea of which he had borrowed from that gigantic worker Honore de Balzac, the author of the comedy Humane. Balzac used to explain his use of this dress by saying that it suggested to him the seclusion of a monastic cell, where he could fancy himself immured in the person of some medieval fray, laboriously engaged, year in, year out, the live-long day and most of the night, pen in hand at work over some gorgeous and illuminated manuscript. And it will be remembered that one of Balzac's tenets was Le travail constant est la loi de l'art comme celle de la vie qu'à la c'est la création idéalisée. To remind himself further of the giant worker, Balzac, Wild had had a walking-stick made after the model of one which the French novelist had created, and which had been so much talked about in the Paris of his day, that Delphine Gay had written a book entitled Monsieur de Balzac's Walking-Stick. It was an ivory-stick with a blue pommel, turquoise's or lapis lazuli. He was not, however, long content to remain in the current fashion. He desired to be distinctive and noticeable, and during the first weeks of our acquaintance he was debating what style of dress to adopt. He hesitated between the mode of 1848, Paris, and that made fashionable by Beau Brummel. In the meanwhile he revived the fashion of shirt cuffs which turned back over the cuffs of the coat, a revival for which the laundress of the Hotel Voltaire was heard to bless him. In the end, and on his return to London in 1883, as was Julie announced in The World by his friend Edmund Yates, he adopted the costume of Beau Brummel. A contemporary number of punch has an illustrated skit on this departure, as well as an impromptu running Oscar's Latest Fashion. Oscar, as Brummel dresses now, to show his Beau Idiel is a real Beau. After he had made his great successes on the stage, and was consequently prosperous, he definitely abandoned all eccentricities of costume. He could now afford a fashionable tailor. He could now afford to dispense with the publicity of notoriety. Lord Alfred Douglas, who knew him at this period, and elaborately describes his various get-ups, gives us the picture of a Maudish man about town. A full description of his wardrobe during his lifetime would have to include a hideous costume of brown, spangled with a black device, which he had to wear during a period which will be dealt with lower down. Towards the end of his life he abandoned all phoppery and contented himself with the cheap clothes of the middle-class tailors. Amongst pathetic documents left behind him, none, I think, was more moving to one who had watched his career in which dress had played so great a part, than an unpaid bill from a cheap tailor for, do complete, at three pounds each, two business suits, for one whose only business, en-ass, was to suffer. End of chapter 4 Chapter 5 of The Real Oscar Wild by Robert Chirard This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Lady Wilde seems to have been a woman who spoke out what she thought, without minding what people might think of her views or of her manner of enunciating them. Those who make public opinion, and Sparanza was certainly one of those, do not heed it. There is no woman living who would not give the lid off the milk-jug to some man if she came across the right one. It was a cynical saying of hers, which is still remembered in Dublin. Oscar Wilde, who, though he had the highest respect for his mother, seemed rather proud of her eccentricities of manner, speech, and thought, was once heard to invite a fellow collegian to come home with him to his mother's, where we have founded a society for the suppression of virtue. She told Miss Hamilton how she disliked some forms of communalism. I can't write, she said, about such things as Mrs. Green looked very well in black, and Mrs. Black looked very well in green. The following characteristic anecdote, illustrating her way of talking, is related by a lady. When I was at Oakley Street, one day, I asked what time it was that I wanted to catch a train. Does anyone here, asked Lady Wilde with one of her lofty glances, know what time it is? We never know in this house about time. Arthur Ransom, whose famous book on Oscar Wilde is described in a quotation from The Times on its cover as, the first book on Wilde with a good excuse for existence, disposes of Speranza in the following lines. His mother, whose maiden name was LG, was a clever woman, who, when very young, writing as Speranza in a revolutionary paper, had tried to rouse Irishman to the storming of Dublin Castle. She read Latin and Greek, but was ready to suffer fools for the sake of social adulation. She was clever enough to enjoy astonishing the bourgeois, but her cleverness seldom carried her further. When Wilde was born, she was twenty-eight and her husband thirty-nine. They were people of consideration in Dublin. His school fellow did not have to ask Wilde who his father was. This last remark excites the sarcasm of Alfred Douglas. An illustration of how she enjoyed astonishing the bourgeois is given in the following anecdote about one of her receptions, at which, in Arthur Ransom's words, she suffered fools for the sake of social adulation. The scoffers, alas, were not few who met at those Saturdays. Some openly laughed in the face of Lady Wilde. Whether she was conscious of that ill-bred ridicule is all to say, as she comported herself with the same stately dignity and hospitality to all. She possessed the supreme tact of appearing to ignore any Gauchari on the part of her guests, and she had the admirable faculty of appearing not to understand that which did not please her. She rarely corrected anyone, although on occasion, when I introduced a well-known American singer, as remarkable for her vulgarity, as she was famous for her wonderful voice, who had the temerity to say, Lady Wilde, you remind me of my dear old grandmother. I was gently admonished not to bring her again. But, dear Lady Wilde, I stammered in confusion. She is a most respectable woman. Respectable, repeated Lady Wilde. Never use that word here. It is only tradespeople who are respectable. We are above respectability. I did not argue with my friend, but took her strange lesson on social distinctions in all seriousness, and never attempted to introduce another respectable woman at her at-homes. Lady Wilde was no doubt right in her use of the word, but it was just such observations that gained her many enemies in the guise of pretended friends, one or two of whom have most unjustly ridiculed her memory by absurd stories. One such story was to the effect that she was in the habit of putting on three gowns, one over the other, very possibly for warmth's sake, when the weather was cold and the supply of coal and gas had been cut off in Oakley Street because there was no money to pay for them, and Oscar, the generous second son, was either away or in similar financial straits. For when Oscar had money his mother was never allowed to want for anything. In the downstairs front room in Oakley Street opposite the door was the fireplace, and above the right-hand corner of the mantelpiece hung a small lacquer rack in which were stuck the unpaid bills of Lady Wilde's menage. Whenever Oscar called on his mother, before going upstairs to her private suite, in her later years she rarely if ever came downstairs, he invariably used to enter this front room, cross over rapidly to the fireplace, and examine the unpaid bills. He had sufficient experience of financial emergencies to be able to decide which of Lady Wilde's liabilities it was urgent to discharge, and then and there on the marble mantelpiece the necessary check would be written. In money matters, as will here afterwards be detailed, Oscar Wilde was indeed munificent, and with regard to his own possessions at least, he had no sense of property whatever. La propriété c'est l'avent, he would sometimes say, quoting from Proudhon. Friends always share, was another of his sayings, when forcing a loan or a gift upon some reluctant friend. The first time I heard him say it was just before I left Paris in 1883, when he obliged me to take fifteen pounds from him as a loan, because without it I should have been unable to proceed. I had entered my name as a candidate for an appointment in the East, and through some mistake on the part of my bank, no funds arrived on the very day on which I had to start, no money for the journey, and, what was even more serious, no money with which to pay the fees for the examination. Oscar Wilde had from the first dissuaded me from going in for this appointment. You will find it more than tedious, he said. What you have to do is stay in Paris and write fine things. But when he heard that I was being prevented from going to London and entering the examination because my bank had disappointed me, he insisted on lending me fifteen pounds, so that I was able to get away to London the same night as I had intended to do. Friends always share, he said then. I think that poor Weeder always remembered his kindness to her when she was in great financial straits in London. That was in the days of her temporary eclipse, and before the Massarenes. She had been fated in London, but had been unable to renew her contract with her publishers, her books being then entirely out of vogue. Her funds ran out, and having been forced to leave the Langham Hotel, foot de paix-mol, she was next ejected from her lodgings in Margaret Street. She then remembered the grand folk who had lionized her and applied to them for assistance. But, as Oscar Wilde said to me, rich people never lend money. And things would have gone very hard with Mademoiselle de la Rame, had not Oscar come to the rescue. He furnished her with sufficient money to pay the Margaret Street people and rescue her luggage, and then to return to Florence. Of course, he never said a word to me. I find among some papers, by the way, a letter from Ouida to him, which I reproduce. And while ready to help others, he did not, until absolute necessity forced him, ever offer his friends the opportunity of sharing with him. Even in his distress in Naples and in Paris after his release from prison, it was to business acquaintances rather than to friends that he addressed himself. During his stress in Naples, I was in London and fairly prosperous, and could, and would, have helped him greatly, if I had had any inkling of the real state of his affairs. But he never allowed friends to share with him then, at least not his oldest friend. I have numerous copies of letters written by Oscar Wilde from the Villa Giudice to the late Leonard Smithers, the publisher, and in order to illustrate the distress at Naples, to which I have referred, I will quote here from some of these letters some eloquent passages. On a certain Friday, it would be some time in October 1897, he writes, My dear Smithers, the five pounds, like manner from heaven, arrived safe. Many thanks for your endless kindness. I prepare with five pounds, only a very few months previously, in fact just before he left Reading Jail, his financial position was a source of great anxiety to him, and a friend, as a matter of fact, one of the prison warders, to whom he confided his trouble, said to him, Well, I have got five pounds put by. You can have them when you get out if you'll give me an address where to send them to. Oscar Wilde refused the profit loan. The man then said, You'll miss my five pounds if you don't take them when you wake up one morning and find yourself without a breakfast. I hope that it will never come to that, said Wilde, but if it does, I promise to write to you for your five pounds, and I will buy a sandwich with it. And a cigar, said the man with a laugh. The amount, said Wilde, would scarcely run to that, but should there be anything over, I'll buy a postage stamp and write an acknowledgment. At the time when the five pounds from Smithers came, like Manor, Ernest Dawson, the poet, was in debt to Oscar Wilde for money which he advanced him in the spring of that year, shortly after his release from prison, and while he was living at Bernival. Ernest Dawson was at Arclebatay on the side of Dieppe, and Moree Ernesti was in difficulties with his landlord. His publisher, Smithers, was unwilling to make any further advances on the hack work to which the poor power to us constrained. It was at a time when he was in great difficulty that Oscar Wilde went over to Ark, paid his bill, or part of it, and invited him to come to Bernival, where he kept him until his affairs improved. It was a kind act, because already at that time Oscar Wilde was in financial straits once more. Of the considerable sum which had been given by a lady to be handed to him on his release, only a portion had come into his hands. His mode of life at Bernival had been large and generous, and at the time of which I'm speaking he was so little in a position to entertain friends, still less to finance them, that those who visited him there used to take their meals at their own charges at the neighbouring hotel. No doubt Ernest Dawson, who was an honourable man, hearing, not from Oscar Wilde himself, but from their mutual friend Smithers, of the former's embarrassments, and mortally anxious to repay what had been lent him at Ark, wrote some letters to Oscar Wilde full of self-reproach on the subject, for in a post-script to a letter to Smithers, dated 8 October, Wilde writes, Ernest Dawson is really too tedious over his debt to me. It is a very small thing, but necessary for me. On 22 October, Wilde writes to Smithers, In the desert of my life you raised up the lovely mirage of the great sum of twenty pounds. You said that its conversion into a reality was a matter of days. On the faith of this I took a lovely villa on the bay of Naples, which I cannot inhabit, as I have to take all my meals at the hotel. This is the simple truth. After writing the above he adds much lower down, Your letter received today is dated Monday last, and Dawson wrote to me that he had given you ten pounds for me on Saturday. What does this mean? Will you write to him and ask an explanation? It seems a disgraceful thing of him to have said. I will write to him about it myself. As a matter of fact, poor, honest Ernest had only told the truth, and as the following pathetic document, sold as an autograph with all Smithers other autograph letters, shows he had eight days previously given Smithers the ten pounds for wild. Smithers may have wanted the use of it himself, proposing to forward it to Naples in due course. This is Dawson's letter, or memorandum. To L. Smithers. October 14th, 97. Dear Smithers, I today deposit with you forty-five pounds, no shillings, no pence. Please send Oscar Wilde ten pounds, no shillings, no pence, on account of what I owe him. Take one pound, eight shillings, three pence, on account of interest paid by you for me, and send me the balance at three pounds every Monday to any address I may send you. Do not send me more than three pounds each week. Yours truly, Ernest Dawson. I call this a pathetic document because of its mixture of formal commercialism, the two aughts in the shillings and pence column, for instance, where the deposit of forty-five pounds is mentioned, and lax bohemianism, quotes, one pound, eight shillings, three pence, and ten pounds, no shillings, no pence. Then the mistrust of self. He knows he cannot keep money. Smithers must keep it for him, and, sure as he is, that he will not be satisfied with the moderate allowance of three pounds a week, which he has fixed for himself, he formally instructs Smithers to disregard the wild appeals, the alcoholic telegrams, which he can foresee himself making and sending. Another document came into the autograph market, when the papers Smithers were disposed of, which shows how Dawson's money was paid out. It is the balance sheet of the transaction, and the fact that a document apparently so trivial should have found a purchaser, shows, what has been known to his friends for some time, namely, that there is a great public interest in poor Ernest Dawson, who is by many connoisseurs and dilettante in letters, considered as a poet greatly superior to Oscar Wilde. On this position I have nothing whatever to say, because comparisons of this kind are doubly odious, and I thought it in Alfred Douglas's book, particularly unfortunate for the author, that he should so have insisted upon his own superiority as a poet to his friend Oscar Wilde, and as a writer, presumably of bare letter, to Mr. Justice Darling. I can say this, however, that Oscar Wilde had a very high respect for Dawson's literary gifts, and showed him actual deference. Apart from his talents, Ernest Dawson was not at all the kind of man with whom Wilde would ever have cared to associate, to say nothing of admitting him to his friendship, for he was very untidy, even dirty in his dress, neglecting himself utterly with the deliberation of the penitent seeking in the humiliation of sackcloth and ashes and vermin the absolution of his follies and sins. He was usually drunk, and at most times, when so, noisy and boisterous. Yet Oscar Wilde, because he admired his genius, was at all times glad to see him. During those awful days of anxiety at Oakley Street, when he was out on bail between the second and third trials, he did not wish to see any of his friends, except myself, for he said his nerves could not endure the presence even of those most kindly disposed towards him. But when one day I said to him, Oscar, may I bring Ernest Dawson to see you this evening? He would very much like to come. He said, oh, bring him by all means. He is an Oxford man and a fine writer of poetry and of prose, and it will do me good to have a caserie with him. So I kept Ernest sober all that afternoon, and in the evening took him round to Oakley Street, and he and Oscar sat together in the front room, where the bills were now rapidly accumulating unpaid in the lacquer rack, till long after it was dark. Neither of them spoke very much, and such remarks as were passed were mainly on matters artistic, but that evening was one of the pleasantest, as he told me, that during his brief interval of liberty Oscar Wilde enjoyed.