It was the chain-smoker's last hurrah: the actor, the artist and the dead man in his sarcophagus were all puffing away like Mount Etna.
A bronze and marble memorial to Oscar Wilde, the man who said the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about, was finally unveiled yesterday in the heart of London.
The unsolemn ceremony was performed by his grandson Merlin Holland, great-grandson Lucian Holland, and the cigarette-brandishing actor Stephen Fry, in a crush in which politicians, artists, lords, dames, biographers, actors and sponsors were trampling one another underfoot.
The bronze and marble statue by Maggi Hambling, sculptor and ardent smoker, is called A Conversation with Oscar Wilde.
It shows the writer and wit popping up out of his coffin, cigarette in hand. The silver letters at his toes read: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Actually he is looking diagonally across the Strand, at Charing Cross station - the public is invited to sit on his coffin and attempt to attract his attention. "Of course he'd like it," Ms Hambling said, "he's still talking a lot and smoking a lot; he'd have loved it." Culture Secretary Mr Chris Smith looked at the clouds of smoke fogging the narrow street and accused the sculptor of "a last fling against the government's policy on smoking".
Actors Judi Dench and Nigel Hawthorne then read a stream of aphorisms from A Woman Of No Importance. "One can survive anything now except death, and live down anything except a good reputation" was delivered in a theatrical bellow, over the wail of an ambulance siren. Most of the £175,000 cost was collected by public subscription. It is just over a century since Wilde was released from Reading Gaol, which broke his health and spirit, and just short of a century since his death in exile in a Paris hotel, last bill unpaid.