ON A crisp, sharply lit winter’s afternoon at Père-Lachaise cemetery, 111 years to the day since the writer’s death, Ireland and France celebrated one of their shared cultural treasures yesterday with the unveiling of the restored tomb of Oscar Wilde.
The sculpture of a modernist angel, completed by Jacob Epstein in 1914, is the most-visited grave in Paris’s most famous cemetery. It is designated by France as a historic monument, but decades of graffiti and lipstick kisses had degraded the stone and left it close to being irreparably damaged.
The renovated tomb – funded by the Irish State after an approach from Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland and Sheila Pratschke of the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris – has been thoroughly cleaned and surrounded by a discreet glass screen to prevent further damage.
“Oscar Wilde did once say, ‘Save me from my disciples’,” joked the actor Rupert Everett, who has performed in many of Wilde’s plays.
“Oscar is my patron saint and someone who has been with me all my life. For me, he has the perfect blend of brilliance and silliness, pride and humility . . . From the dress circle to the drains, his life was his greatest work of art and an inspiration to anyone who has ever felt outcast.”
Everett read from De Profundis, a long prison letter – part confessional, part love letter – in which Wilde laid bare his life to Alfred Douglas.
Wasn’t it a shame that fans could no longer kiss the tomb, a French reporter asked afterwards? “Kiss the glass, baby,” Everett replied.
When Wilde died in Paris in 1900, he was penniless and bankrupt. All friends could do was offer him a sixth-class burial at Bagneux, outside the city.
During the next few years his friend and literary executor Robert Ross managed, through the sale of the writer's works – notably De Profundis– to annul Wilde's bankruptcy and buy a burial plot "in perpetuity" at Père-Lachaise.
Apart from the hacking off of the angel’s genitalia in the early 1960s, the monument survived relatively unscathed until 1985, when graffiti began to appear more regularly. Since “kissing Oscar’s tomb” became part of the Paris tourist trail around 1999, though, leaving lipstick grease to seep into the stone, the sculpture has been slowly deteriorating.
Before a Franco-Irish crowd of officials, Wilde fans and passersby, Dinny McGinley, Minister of State for the Arts, led tributes to “a very great Irishman” and “one of the world’s most celebrated writers.
“This magnificent city welcomed and sheltered the Irish through the centuries, but especially our writers and artists. We in Ireland do not forget these things. As many of you know, we have long memories.”
Representing French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand, his adviser Florent Stora spoke of the “cult of devotion” that had developed around Wilde and his neighbours in Père-Lachaise: Chopin, Rossini, Proust, Jim Morrison and many others. With the restoration, the grave had “retrieved its original splendour”.
In his affectionate speech, Holland said he had been torn between two emotions. He was touched by the attention given to his grandfather by hundreds of visitors each day, “especially given the fact that he was effectively run out of England in 1897”, but he also felt responsibility for the tomb as a historic monument.
By honouring its commitment, made before the economic crisis began, to fund the restoration, Ireland had not only honoured one of its children but sent out a “a cultural beacon that lights the darkness of material uncertainty the world feels these days. I only have 25 per cent Irish blood in my veins,” Holland said, before he and his wife Emma placed the first flower at the graveside.
“I can tell you I’m proud of it and, given everything that has happened these past few years, culminating today, I regret that it’s not 100 per cent.”
