WILDE’S FINAL RESIDENCE was the Hôtel d’Alsace at 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, on Paris’s left bank, a stone’s throw away from the Seine. His room contained a desk, a narrow bed, curtains that had turned the colour of purple wine with age, and a mantelpiece on which there was a hideously ornate marble clock. Although it was clean, the room could hardly be described as luxurious.
At the foot of the bed, against the wall, there were a few shelves on which Wilde set out his books. They were not capacious enough to accommodate all of the three hundred or so volumes he had amassed over the previous two years and most of the books were strewn across the floor or piled up in the corners of the room.1 The bohemian setting recalls Wilde’s rooms on the Kitchen Staircase at Magdalen; indeed, some of his friends compared his Parisian abode and lifestyle to that of a student.2
Robert Sherard remembered some of the titles from Wilde’s last library. There was Gautier’s Émaux et Camées, and countless French novels by authors such as Huysmans and Balzac. Wilde had also assembled a considerable body of prison literature. This included numerous pamphlets and magazine articles on prison reform, as well as several novels concerning prison life, such as Hornung’s The Rogue March and Tolstoy’s Resurrection, which Wilde read in a French translation.3
The hotel’s kindly patron, Monsieur Dupoirier, remembered Wilde as a great reader: ‘one rarely saw him,’ he said, ‘without a volume in his hand.’ He would sit for hours in the quiet hotel courtyard with a book and a glass of wine, or a fine brandy when he was in funds. Wilde passed many of his afternoons in this fashion, turning the pages of his book, as the shadows lengthened across the yard. After sundown, he left the hotel to enter what he called ‘the circle of the boulevards’, meeting up with faithful old friends such as the Sphinx and Robbie Ross, and forging new friendships in the cafés. He wearied many a moon with his talk there, enjoying nights that were, in his phrase, lit up with ‘beauty and wine’. When he woke up, a little worse for wear in the mornings, he would nurse his hangover by reading in bed.
The Hôtel d’Alsace in the early twentieth century.
During the autumn of 1900 bed was the only place where Wilde could read. He was more or less confined there with an illness, now believed to have been ‘middle ear disease’, which he had contracted in prison. But, of course, all of the physical and psychological sufferings he had endured in jail contributed to his premature death. Major Nelson reckoned that men of Wilde’s class usually died within two years of completing a sentence of hard labour; it is a testimony to the robustness of his constitution, and to the benevolence of men such as Nelson and Haldane, that Wilde survived for three and a half.
Wilde’s end would come on 30 November 1900. Before death entered the hotel room, he played out what has become one of the most famous final scenes since the demise of Socrates. This featured a spectacular last-minute ‘conversion’ to Roman Catholicism, the creed Wilde had dallied with throughout his life. As we have seen, Wilde had been baptised both as a Catholic and as a Protestant, but he had been raised in the latter faith. For aesthetic, as well as theological reasons, he evidently believed that the Roman faith was the ‘only [one] to die in’; the conversion was also consistent with his role as the ‘Infamous Saint Oscar’. ‘The Catholic Church,’ he declared, ‘is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people the Anglican Church will do.’4 Wilde’s last scene was illuminated by some characteristically funny and flamboyant verbal flashes that have passed into history. ‘I will never outlive the century,’ he remarked at one point. ‘The English people would not stand for it.’5
Reginald Turner, the friend who nursed Wilde during his final illness, doubtless read to him as he lay in bed. As he approached his end Wilde became inarticulate and babbled of books in French and English.6 In one of his last lucid intervals he mentioned Senator North, a popular novel by the American author Gertrude Atherton: ‘This is a fine study of the American politician,’ he commented, ‘and possesses the quality of truth in characterisation. What else has the lady written?’7The remark suggests that Wilde indulged in a diet of light reading just before he ‘crossed the bar’. During his 1882 tour of Nebraska prison he had visited the cell of a ‘murderer with melancholy eyes’ who had been condemned to death by hanging. The prisoner chose to while away the three weeks left to him on earth by reading novels. Wilde had taken a rather dim view of this at the time: it was, he thought, ‘a bad preparation for facing either God or nothing’.8 Yet the same could be said of Wilde’s own reading during his final days – it hardly points to a serious state of mind at the last.
As his life slowly ebbed away from him, Wilde uttered the apparently nonsensical remark, ‘Could you get a Munster to cook for me?’ and then added, ‘one steamboat is very like another.’9 He was delirious when he said this, on account of his illness and the numerous cocktails of champagne and morphine he downed to dull his pain. Yet his words were not complete gibberish: ‘The Munster’ was a steamboat that ferried passengers across the sea from Wales to Ireland. As he approached his end, Wilde was going back, in his mind, to his native home and point of origin. Perhaps he was also expressing a wish to return in body as well as in imagination. His remark brings to mind a number of stories in his mother’s collections of folklore, which describe the terrible longing experienced by Irish corpses interred abroad. ‘The souls of the Irish,’ as Speranza says in her commentary to these tales, ‘will not rest peaceably unless laid with their forefathers and their own people.’10
Just before the end, Wilde was suddenly deprived of the power of speech. Yet if he was no longer able to talk books, he could at least gaze at them on the shelves at the end of his bed. Their spines would have been among the last things he ever saw. Wilde believed that, as people become older, the colours of the world become progressively less vivid and vibrant to their eyes, and that, as they approach death, the world loses all of its hues and turns grey.11 If that is indeed the case then he would have seen, from his bed, the myriad bright colours of his books slowly drain away, in the moments before his eyes finally closed at 1.50 p.m.
It would have been apt if Balzac’s A Harlot High and Low had been among the volumes that Wilde fixed his eyes on just before he gave up his ghost. The novel ends with Lucien de Rubempré’s funeral, which takes place at the church of St Germain-des-Prés, after which the young poet’s body is interred at Père Lachaise cemetery. Wilde’s own funeral mass would be said at the same church on 2 December, and Père Lachaise would also be his final resting place. In his posthumous existence Wilde continued to imitate art.
During his glorious days of ‘purple and gold’ Wilde had, on various occasions, outlined his fittingly bookish vision of what heaven would be like. On arrival he wanted to be handed ‘a number of volumes in vellum’ and then ‘be told’ that they ‘were his’.12 There would also be a copy of Pater’s Renaissance waiting for him to savour.13 Inside the ‘Elysian fields’ he hoped to find his literary heroes, lounging around reading ‘shadowy copies’ of Dorian Gray with approval (the cover of Gautier’s copy ought, he thought, to be ‘powdered with gilt asphodels’).14 All of these books would be produced by magical means, for there would be no place in paradise for publishers.15
In the 1920s the medium Mrs Travers Smith claimed to have contacted Wilde’s spirit. The messages she received suggest that his bookish vision of heaven turned out to be accurate. His ghost, it seems, now dwells in a sort of Elysian library, where he reads the publications of posterity and passes terrible judgement upon them. ‘Flaubert’s secret,’ he commented during one seance, is ‘quite unknown’ to Arnold Bennett; at another he dismissed James Joyce’s Ulysses as ‘vomit continued through countless pages’.16 That last criticism sounds far too crude for Wilde and, of course, Mrs Smith was probably a charlatan. Yet it is pleasant, nonetheless, to think that Wilde is still reading and discussing other people’s books beyond the grave, just as we continue to read and talk about his.