Franny Moyle

by Constance: The Tragic

  These letters, a sad mix of love, pride, infuriation and practical housekeeping, are the tragic remnants of a relationship. For all this, they remain extraordinary in the residual love and concern that even now they display.

  Quite why Constance continued to show pride in her husband’s work, in spite of his condemnation of her, and quite why she continued to provide for him are difficult questions. Before the terrible events that led to Constance’s exile, she had written a very revelatory letter to Lady Mount-Temple that perhaps offers some explanation. Back in September 1893 Constance had urged Georgina not to ‘trouble about me. I cannot say my small troubles, but in a way one’s life troubles are easier to take up and bear than the small ones which are so trying. My motto for many years has been “Qui patitur vincit” – He conquers who endures – and so I will endure and fight my battle and try to take up my cross.’28

  ‘Qui Patitur Vincit’ had, of course, been Constance’s name of choice as a member of the Golden Dawn, and it remained her motto subsequently. Oscar constantly wrote in his fairy tales poignant stories of sacrifice. In ‘The Happy Prince’ he told the story of the bird which gives its heart to the statue of the Prince and, having carried out the Prince’s wishes for the love of him, dies at his feet. In ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, Oscar imagined a nightingale that bleeds to death to give a young lover a red rose for his sweetheart, and whose sacrifice to love goes unnoticed.

  If he had had the appropriate perspective, sitting in his cafés in Paris in 1898, Oscar might had recognized that the themes he chose in those fairy tales were those by which Constance lived her life. That Oscar, so wrapped up in the consequences of his allowing his own life to become a work of fiction, could not see that his wife had become a poem to love and constancy, is perhaps the real tragedy at the heart of this story.

  In April 1898, Georgina Mount-Temple wrote to Constance. It was, after all, Easter time, a time that in the past they had always spent together. But some days later, to her surprise, her letter was returned in another. She must have sensed instantly why. The black border around the writing paper instantly warned of the tragedy that would be recounted within its pages. It was a letter from Otho. Constance, who had turned forty that January, was dead.

  Unbeknown to her friends and family, Constance had returned to Signor Bossi’s clinic in early April to have another operation. Before she booked herself in, she wrote to Vyvyan. ‘Try not to be hard on your father,’ she wrote. ‘Remember that he is your father and he loves you. All his troubles arose from the hatred of a son for his father, and whatever he has done he has suffered bitterly for.’29

  Then on Saturday 2 April she underwent another operation. Details are murky. Anecdotally the operation was on her spine, relieving pressure on nerves there that was causing her creeping paralysis. However, Otho had referred to his sister’s tumours, and the fact that Bossi was a gynaecologist suggests perhaps that the growths were uterine. Constance had gone into the clinic with her Italian maid, Maria Segre. On her arrival, and with writing now so painful for her, Constance dictated a post card in Italian to Maria for Otho, informing him of her whereabouts. He received it on Tuesday 5 April. But to his horror, the very next day he received a telegram with a far more urgent message: T want to see you at once. I am very ill. Will pay journey & hotel.’30

  In the final hours of her life Constance had summoned both her brother and the Ranee, but neither got to her bedside in time. Otho made his way from Switzerland in a day, arriving on Thursday the 7th at seven in the evening. He ‘was told at the door quite cheerfully by a young sister of mercy that she was dead. I have never had such a shock.’31 After the operation, the creeping paralysis she was suffering, rather than being redressed, accelerated. Constance’s heart just stopped.32

  ‘It has all been so dreadful,’ Otho informed Lady Mount-Temple,

  for there seems to be no doubt that Constance was never warned of the danger she ran; she told almost no one that she was going, not one of her family knew it, and to the two friends in Nervi to whom she either wrote or named it she spoke of it as a mere nothing which would soon be over. I will not say what I think of the doctors who were responsible – the head one as soon as he was telephoned to that she was dead went right away from Genoa: his assistant read me from a telegram that he was in Savona, and said he wd be absent for three or four days: last night the British consul’s clerk was informed that he is in Spain and will not be back till Friday next. Needless to say I wait here until I have seen him. Of the friends around her not one was allowed to realize her danger; the Ranee only divined it the evening before, and the one person who was beside her when she died – of those who knew her I mean, was her devoted Italian maid, Maria Segre. Everyone who knew her is indignant with the doctors.

  ‘You knew Constance thoroughly,’ Otho continued,

  and you know how good she has always been to me; and when there are only two, just brother and sister, part of oneself is dead when she dies. And Constance to whom I always gave many years of life over mine, and whom so many loved and esteemed & would have done anything in the world to help. But of all of them you were spiritually the nearest and I dread to think of the shock I am causing to your heart.33

  Constance was buried at four o’clock on the afternoon of 9 April in the Protestant section of Genoa’s Campo Santo cemetery, which lies outside the city, in the foothills of the surrounding mountains. Otho, who had to make arrangements hurriedly, chose a plain cross inlaid with ivy leaves. Her association with the once famous Oscar Wilde was not alluded to. Rather, it was noted simply that she was ‘Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC.

  The boys did not attend their mother’s funeral. The news of her demise was broken to them by their respective schools. Their lives were now frozen in limbo while their guardian, Adrian Hope, thought about what would be best for their futures.

  One month later Otho wrote a second letter to Babbacombe Cliff. Its contents were much to be expected. He brought Georgina up to date with news of the boys and provided a sense of the other letters he had received in memoriam of his sister. In the very final paragraph, before signing off, he noted almost casually that he had come across a friend of Oscar Wilde’s who had told him that Oscar ‘had not given a hang for the death of his wife’.34

  Otho had developed a profound dislike for Oscar for his treatment of his sister. This is why he perhaps chose to convey this about Oscar to Constance’s great friend rather than the response Oscar himself had sent him on hearing the news: ‘Am overwhelmed with grief. It is the most terrible tragedy.’35

  The version of Oscar that Otho chose to share with Georgina is closest to that which history has adopted more generally with regard to Oscar’s relationship with his wife. This version is, of course, incomplete. Oscar also wrote to Carlos Blacker after Constance’s death and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. If we had only met once, and kissed each other.’36 In this ambiguous sentence lies a far more appropriate sentiment from a man who some say should have never married.

  By 7 April the press, once so infatuated with Constance, had got the story of her death. The brevity of the announcements of her death reflects the general distaste with which the whole Oscar business was still handled. ‘A Torquay telegram states Mrs Oscar Wilde died on Thursday week on the Riviera under distressing circumstances,’ Reynolds’s newspaper announced.37 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper had little more to add other than the context that ‘After recent events she retired with her two sons to the Continent.’38

  Constance’s circle of close friends and family were devastated by her death – none more so than the Napiers. The Hopes had the dreadful duty of breaking the news to them. ‘We received the telegram on Friday and went to the Napiers that afternoon,’ Laura Hope related. ‘They had heard nothing whatsoever and had no idea Constance was ill – beyond the usual poor health she had had of late years, & were terribly shocked. Her last letters had been brighter – & full of a visit she hoped to have paid the Napiers in
London shortly.’39

  On 12 April, Constance’s friends John and Jane Simon invited some of her London friends to their home in Kensington Square to remember her. Most of them felt that such a sorry end could have been avoided. Jane Simon insisted that Constance had been advised time and again in England that surgery was not appropriate for her condition. And Aunt Mary Napier had ‘been most urgent in advising her to avoid operations’.40

  But Constance had wanted to be able to enjoy life with her sons. She had made a brave and bold decision that she thought would benefit Cyril and Vyvyan. Such bravery was characteristic of her. Her relatives noted, however, that it was typical of a woman who would ‘go her own way, as is the case of the marriage which wrecked the happiness of her life’. In this regard the consensus among Constance’s friends and family was that her death, despite her relative youth, was for the best. Many, like the Simons, felt that ‘death for her must have been the solution of almost intolerable misery’. At the end they ‘all felt that she was safe. Safe from him – safe from herself.’41

  A few years later one writer who had known Oscar and Constance rewrote the outcome of their story, offering a version of their tragedy that was more palatable to a judgemental society than the actual events. It was less that Constance had been saved by death than that Oscar should have saved her and the boys by killing himself. In her novel The Rose of Life, Mary Braddon’s character Daniel Lester fraudulently embezzles from a friend. When his friend discovers his crime and threatens to reveal it, Lester faces prison and ruin. He considers flight but in the end chooses suicide, although the latter course is so carefully executed that the coroner returns a verdict of natural death. In this manner Lester is redeemed, for his actions have been taken for the sake of his wife. She has been spared the shame and ignominy that his incarceration would have visited on her.

  Bosie Douglas also offered an assessment of the Wildes’ tragic story, although he was as harsh in his judgement of Constance as most others were in theirs of Oscar. ‘As to his wife,’ Bosie said, ‘he married her for love and if she had treated him properly and stuck to him after he had been in prison, as a really good wife would have done, he would have gone on loving her to the end of his life … Obviously she suffered a great deal and deserves every sympathy, but she fell woefully short of the height to which she might have risen.’42

  These judgements passed upon Oscar and Constance by their society were brutal. For their children, however, death offered little comfort. Otho told Lady Mount-Temple: ‘Cyril has deeply felt the loss of his mother, I think there is no doubt of that, though boy like he was at a loss for words to express himself, and I believe her memory will for a very long time have a hold on his mind, and perhaps for ever. At first he hardly realized very Ukely what it meant for him that his mother was gone, and he must have had many a pang as it slowly came home to him that he could not look forward any more to seeing her again.’43 Writing years after her passing, Vyvyan recalled: ‘My grief for my mother was very genuine and deep. I worshipped her, and all the weight of the world seemed to descend upon me after her death.’

  Under the terms of Constance’s will Oscar was restored his income of £150 a year. It was a provision that was in the end barely used, since he himself died within two years of his wife. On 25 February 1899, just months before his own demise, Oscar visited Constance’s grave.

  ‘It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb – her surname, my name not mentioned of course – just Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd QC,’ Oscar wrote to Robbie Ross. ‘I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected – with a sense also of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise and life is a terrible thing.’44

  Epilogue

  AFTER SEPARATING FROM Bosie in Naples, Oscar based himself in Paris, where his life was coloured by meagre means and perpetual debt, although he continued to be supported by a small circle of devoted friends and well-wishers. He established himself first in rooms in the Hôtel de Nice in the rue des Beaux-Arts, and later in the Hôtel d’Alsace. Throughout he complained constantly of being penniless and unable to meet his bills. In addition, his health was poor, and the punishment for his crimes seemed unending. Even in Paris, Oscar suffered the humiliation of seeing former friends and colleagues shun him in public.

  When not in Paris, much as his wife and children had done Oscar moved through Europe’s fashionable resorts, taking people up on their offers of hospitality wherever possible. In the autumn of 1898 he travelled to the south of France at the recommendation of his friend Frank Harris, and then in the spring of 1899 he stayed in Switzerland with another well-wisher, Harold Mellor. It was en route to Mellor’s that Oscar took a detour to Genoa, where he spent three days with a young Italian actor he met there, call Didaco. The primary purpose of his visit to the city, however, was to pay a visit to Constance’s grave.

  By May 1899, Oscar had tired of Switzerland and was in rooms above a restaurant in Santa Margherita, an Italian resort close to Nervi, where his wife and family had spent so much time in the previous years. Here he became bored and drank, and in the end Robbie Ross, perhaps the most devoted of all his friends, dashed out to return him to the French capital.

  Throughout the course of 1898 and 1899 Oscar worked slowly on a number of literary projects. The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were both published during this time, and Oscar also entered an agreement with Frank Harris to collaborate on a play, Mr and Mrs Daventry, which eventually went into production at London’s Royalty Theatre in November 1900.

  But in the first year of the new century Oscar’s health went into rapid decline. Early in the year he complained persistently of food poisoning and blood poisoning, and although he rallied sufficiently to visit Italy with Harold Mellor in the spring, during which time he took a trip to Rome and received a blessing from the Pope, on his return to Paris he was once more terribly unwell.

  Although Oscar continued to see Bosie from time to time, the latter had made a return to London society – a privilege that would never again be extended to Oscar himself. Back home in England, Bosie may well have noted the sale of a group of artworks at Messrs Foster of Pall Mall. On 1 August 1900 eleven pictures came under the hammer, raising just over £60. These were Constance’s pictures, being sold on behalf of her estate by Mr Hargrove. Three etchings of Venice by Whistler, which in early descriptions of Tite Street hung in the drawing room there, must have been removed by Constance from her former home before the bailiffs moved in. Each one sold spoke of a period in Constance’s life. Hanging in the Villa Elvira, they must have served as a reminder of her past and the friends she continued to hold dear. In addition to Whistler’s Venetian scenes there was an etching of a geisha by Mortimer Menpes, a portrait of Sarasate by Whistler, two pencil drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, a proof engraving and a photogravure by Watts (one, if not both, almost certainly of his portrait of Georgina Mount-Temple) and a photograph of Tennyson and his friends, by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron.

  While these sad relics of a lost life went under the hammer in London, in Paris Oscar was spending more and more time confined to his small room in the Hôtel d’Alsace. He was having great trouble with his ear, almost certainly as the result of a fall he had had in prison that had done permanent damage to it. By October the ear was terribly painful, and in the end Oscar agreed to have an operation on it, which was undertaken in his hotel room. Robbie Ross and Reginald Turner cared for him during this period. But despite their best efforts, within three weeks Oscar had developed a post-operative abscess in the ear and meningitis had set in. Although Robbie left Oscar’s bedside on 12 November to visit his mother in the south of France, he returned at the end of the month, alerted by Reggie to the fact that Oscar’s condition had become terminal. On 29 November 1900 Robbie fetched a Catholic priest, and Oscar was taken into that faith. The very next day he died. Bosie, summoned by Robbie, failed to reach Oscar’s bedside in time. He did, however, take the place of chief mourn
er at the funeral, although it was Robbie Ross who was holding Oscar’s hand as he passed away. Oscar was buried in the cemetery in Bagneux in a temporary concession. In 1909 his remains were removed to a permanent resting place in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.