Wilde about Paris – An Irishwoman’s Diary about Oscar Wilde’s life in exile

Legions of artistic and literary ghosts haunt the streets of Paris, their presence signalled by plaques on the facades. The one outside L'Hôtel, at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts in the sixth arrondissement, records that Oscar Wilde spent the last two years of his life here.

Wilde had learned French from the family Bonne. "He spoke it well, I imagine with an Enniskillen accent," says David Charles Rose, the retired Irish academic and author of Oscar Wilde's Elegant Republic; Transformation, Dislocation and Fantasy in fin-de-siècle Paris.

Wilde had attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, then Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College in Oxford.

"He said that Greek and French were the only two languages a civilised man should speak," Rose continues. "When he came to Paris in the 1880s, Wilde bought up unsold copies of his 1881 collection of poems and sent them with elaborate inscriptions to the people he wanted to meet, including Mallarmé and Zola. When he arrived in Paris, he presented himself at their door and was greeted with, 'Cher poète, cher maître'."

In a huff

Wilde saw the great French actor Sarah Bernhardt onstage in Paris, London and Nice. She wanted to play the lead role in a London production of Salomé, which Wilde wrote in French. But the lord chamberlain refused to give the play a licence and Bernhardt left in a huff.

"After Salomé was banned, Wilde talked seriously of taking up French citizenship, because in France they appreciated artists, and England was too philistine," Rose says.

Wilde lost his defamation case against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie. The writer’s friends begged him to flee to France.

“If that had happened, his life could have been so different,” Rose says wistfully. “It was possible to acculturate oneself in Paris. A lot of English and American writers did that.”

In 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for “gross indency”. William Butler Yeats launched a petition in his favour. “He hardly got any signatures at all, so it rather fell through,” Rose says.

France

When Wilde was released from prison on May 18th, 1897, he sailed immediately for France. “I’ve often fantasised about him being met by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory at the prison gates and whisked off to a little cottage on the Coole Park estate, where he could have lived out his days”, Rose says.

Wilde used the name Sebastian Melmoth, after a novel written by his great-uncle, for the last three years of his life in France. He wrote his masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, with its timeless refrain of "each man kills the thing he loves", in the seaside village of Berneval-le-Grand.

He and Bosie were briefly reunited in Naples. But Wilde’s wife and Bosie’s mother threatened to cut off their allowances, and the lovers separated out of financial necessity.

Back in Paris, “A lot of people whom Wilde had previously known dropped him or made it clear that they did not want to see him,” Rose says. “Sometimes he avoided people because he was embarrassed.”

Bankrupt

Homosexuality was not the problem. "The fact he'd been in jail was, and the fact he was bankrupt. He was in disgrace, déclassé, says Rose. "He did tend to pick up rent boys on the boulevards, which embarrassed his more strait-laced friends."

Wilde hailed the French writer André Gide one day, as Gide passed a cafe terrace. “Gide sat with his back to the pavement, and Oscar said ‘No. Come and sit next to me’,” Rose recounts. “Gide did not want to be seen sitting next to Wilde, but he obeyed. That was the last time they saw one another.”

In fin-de-siècle Paris, Wilde slept late, drank brandy for breakfast and spent his days moving from cafe to cafe, or writing in his hotel room. It was fashionable to s'encanailler – frequent the riff-raff – in cabarets in Montmartre like Le Rat Mort and Le Moulin Rouge, where Wilde went to smoke and drink.

Health

Wilde's health had been broken by his stay in prison and he had written himself out. "This poverty really breaks one's heart: it is so sale [filthy], so utterly depressing, so hopeless. Pray do what you can," he wrote to his publisher.

But Wilde kept his sense of humour. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death,” he quipped on one of his last forays outside the hotel. “One of us has got to go.”

Today you can rent the suite where Wilde died at L’Hôtel for € 850 a night. The former dosshouse where Wilde died on November 30th, 1900, is Paris’s smallest five-star hotel. A green peacock mural decorates the wall behind the bed. When Wilde was an Oxford student, he had decorated his room with peacock feathers.