Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  To Jill

  In memory of Simon

  I want to eat of all the fruit of all the trees

  in the garden of the world.

  Oscar Wilde (1854—1900)

  Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile

  Drawn from the previously unpublished memoirs of

  Robert Sherard (1861—1943),

  Oscar Wilde’s friend and his first and most prolific biographer

  Principal characters in the narrative

  London, 1890-1

  Oscar Wilde, poet and playwright

  Robert Sherard, journalist

  Arthur Conan Doyle, doctor and novelist

  John Tussaud, director, Madame Tussaud’s Baker Street Bazaar

  London, 1881-3

  Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother

  James Russell Lowell, poet and United States Minister in London

  George W. Palmer, businessman and philanthropist

  The Reverend Paul White, prison chaplain

  New York, 1882

  Colonel F. W. Morse, manager, D’Oyle Carte New York Office

  Aaron Budd, clerk, D’Oyle Carte New York Office

  W. M. Traquair, valet

  Leadville, Colorado, 1882

  H. A. W. Tabor, Mayor of Leadville

  Eddie Garstrang, gambler

  The La Grange Theatre Company, 1883

  Edmond La Grange, actor-manager

  Liselotte La Grange, his mother

  Bernard La Grange, his son

  Agnès La Grange, his daughter

  Gabrielle de la Tourbillon, his mistress

  Carlos Branco, his leading character actor Richard Marais, his business manager

  Pierre Ferrand, the company doctor

  Paris, 1883

  Sarah Bernhardt, actress

  Maurice Rollinat, poet

  Jacques-Emile Blanche, artist

  Emile Blanche, physician

  Félix Malthus, of the Préfecture of Police

  Prologue

  London, Christmas 1890

  ‘Do you recognise him?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘He has the look of a murderer, has he not?’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s his smile, Robert. Never trust a man who shows you his lower teeth when he smiles.’

  ‘But the poor wretch is dead, Oscar.’

  ‘The rule applies, nevertheless.’

  ‘And this is just a waxwork.’

  ‘But it was sculpted from life, Robert, or at least directly from the cadaver. It’s a point of honour with the Tussaud family, you know. They will have had access to the body within hours of the execution.’

  It was mid-morning on Christmas Eve, Wednesday, 2.4 December 1890, and with my friend, Oscar Wilde, I was visiting the celebrated Chamber of Horrors at what was then London’s — England’s — the Empire’s — most popular public attraction: Madame Tussaud’s Baker Street Bazaar.

  Oscar was at his most ebullient. As we toured the exhibits, peering through the flickering gaslight at the waxwork effigies of the more notorious murderers of recent years, my friend’s moon-like face shone with delight. His eyes sparkled. His large frame — he was more than six feet tall and, now thirty-six years of age, tending to corpulence — heaved with pleasure. Nothing amused Oscar Wilde so much as the wholly improbable. “Tis the season to be jolly,’ he chuckled softly, ‘and we are bent on horror, Robert.’ He glanced at the multitude around us and beamed at me. ‘It is the anniversary of Our Lord’s nativity and all London, it seems, is making a pilgrimage to a shrine to child murder.’

  Certainly, in its sixty-year history, the Baker Street Bazaar had never been busier than it was on that day. Thirty thousand people had stood in line to see Tussaud’s latest sensation: an exact reproduction of the sitting room in which, only ten weeks before, Eleanor Pearcey had battered her lover’s wife and baby to death. Mrs Pearcey had piled her hapless victims’ corpses onto the baby’s perambulator and dumped them on waste ground near her home in Kentish Town. John Tussaud spent two hundred pounds — the price of a small house — on acquiring the perambulator and other souvenirs of the murder, including the murderess’s bloodstained cardigan and the boiled sweet that the innocent baby was sucking on as he was killed. John Tussaud’s investment reaped a rich reward. In those days, entrance to the Baker Street Bazaar cost a shilling a head.

  Oscar and I had not paid the price of admission, however. Nor had we queued to get in. We had gained access to Tussaud’s via the staff entrance in Marylebone Road as special guests of the management. We were due to meet up with our friend, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Doyle was a friend of Madame Tussaud’s great-grandson and heir, John Tussaud. Arthur had arranged the visit as a Christmas treat for Oscar and Oscar had arrived bearing a Christmas present for Arthur. The two men had only known each other for sixteen months, but they were firm friends. Their intimacy — their ease with one another — surprised me because, as personalities, they were so different. Oscar was Irish, an aesthete and a romantic. Oscar was flamboyant: he revelled in the outrageous. Arthur was Scottish, a provincial doctor and a pragmatist. Arthur was stolid: he respected the conventional. But both were writers of high ambition, with keen intellects and lively sensibilities, and both were fascinated by the vagaries of the human heart and the workings of the criminal mind.

  Oscar was five years older than Arthur, and, in 1890, undoubtedly the better known. The pair had been introduced to one another by an American publisher, J. M. Stoddart, who, on the same evening, in August 1889, had commissioned a ‘mystery adventure’ from each of them. For Stoddart, Doyle was persuaded to write his second Sherlock Holmes story and Oscar conjured up his novel of beauty and decay, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Doyle’s Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four, was well received and helped consolidate the young author’s growing reputation as a skilful spinner of satisfying yarns. In its way, Dorian Gray helped consolidate Oscar’s reputation, too. The book was denounced as immoral.

  The Athenaeum called it ‘unmanly, sickening, vicious . The Daily Chronicle derided it as ‘a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents — a gloating study of mental and physical corruption’. It was banned by the booksellers W. H. Smith.

  Oscar envied Arthur his creation of Sherlock Holmes.

  Arthur envied Oscar his way with words. Arthur had no reservations about Dorian Gray. He considered the work subtle, honest and artistically good. He respected Oscar both as a writer and as a gentleman. And, amusingly, he also reckoned that Oscar had the qualities essential in a private detective: ‘a retentive mind, an observant eye, and the ability to mix with all manner and conditions of men’. Arthur told Oscar that if ever he should write another Sherlock Holmes story he would invent an older brother for the great detective and base him on Oscar. ‘Do so, Arthur, please,’ said Oscar. ‘Your stories will stand the test of time and I have immortal longings.’

  Madame Tussaud’s, that Christmas Eve morning, was packed to overflowing, but even among the crowds and in the half-light of the Chamber of Horrors, Messrs Doyle and Tussaud had no difficulty in finding us as we hovered between the reproduction of Mrs Pearcey’s sitting room and the ghastly waxwork of the grinning murderer with the exposed teeth. Oscar was both the tallest man in the room and the most conspicuous. He was dressed for the season: his elaborate bow-tie was holly red; his dandified frock-coat was ivy green; and in his buttonhole he sported a substantial sprig of mistletoe.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Oscar!’ called out Conan Doyle, pushing his way through the throng towards us. ‘Season’s greetings, Robert.’

  Doyle held out his right hand towards Oscar. Oscar ignored it
and, passing the brown parcel containing Doyle’s intended Christmas present to me to carry, embraced the good doctor in a mighty bear hug. Oscar knew that this hug embarrassed Conan Doyle, but it was the way in which he always greeted his friend: Arthur’s handshake was almost unendurable. Doyle was not tall, but he was well-built, sturdy, fit and strong, and the vice-like grip of his hand was as forbidding as his fierce moustache. Conan Doyle’s dark walrus-like whiskers would have done credit to a Cossack general.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ said the young doctor, prising himself from Oscar’s warm embrace. ‘The train from Southsea was delayed. A body on the line. Most unfortunate.’

  ‘Some people will do anything to avoid a family Christmas,’ murmured Oscar.

  Arthur sniffed and furrowed his brow disapprovingly. ‘May I present our host, Mr John Tussaud?’ he said, taking a step back to introduce us to his companion. Mr Tussaud rose briefly onto his toes, nodding his head briskly towards each of us as he did so. With his drooping moustache and wire-framed spectacles, he looked more like a mild-mannered schoolmaster than a purveyor of horror to the masses.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality, sir,’ said Oscar, with a gentle bow. ‘And congratulations on the show.’ He looked about us at the crowds, two or three deep — men and women, gentlefolk and workers, children and babes-in-arms — trooping steadily past the exhibits, mostly in silence. ‘It is a triumph.’

  John Tussaud flushed with pleasure and pushed his spectacles further up his nose.

  Oscar went on: ‘I was particularly taken with the half-sucked sweet retrieved from the dead baby’s mouth.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tussaud eagerly, ‘the sweet does seem to have caught everybody’s imagination. It’s raspberry-flavoured, you know.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ exclaimed Conan Doyle. ‘Did you taste it?’

  ‘Only briefly,’ said Tussaud with a nervous laugh. ‘I felt I should. The visitors like as much detail as possible.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ said Oscar soothingly. ‘Your visitors need to know that what they’re witnessing is the genuine article. The more corroborative detail you can give them the better.’

  Tussaud looked up at Oscar gratefully. ‘You understand, Mr Wilde.’

  Oscar smiled at John Tussaud and touched him on the shoulder. ‘I was telling my friend Sherard here that all your waxwork models are drawn from life — or death, as the case may be.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ replied Tussaud seriously. ‘We insist on it — wherever possible. With the murderers, of course, we’re very much in the hands of the authorities. Some prison governors let us in prior to the execution, so that we can make a model of the murderer while he’s still alive. Others won’t let us in at all — or only give us access to the murderer’s body after the execution has taken place. That’s not very satisfactory, to be candid.’

  ‘Hanging distorts the features?’ suggested Oscar.

  ‘It can do, I’m afraid,’ replied Tussaud, lowering his voice as a group of young ladies pressed past us. ‘From a waxwork modeller’s point of view,’ he continued, sotto voce, ‘the ideal method of execution has to be the guillotine. My great-grandmother was so fortunate in that respect. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris sentenced sixteen thousand, five hundred and ninety-four people to death, you know. The guillotine was invented to cope with the numbers.’

  ‘You are a “details man”, I can tell, sir,’ said Oscar, smiling.

  ‘I have the complete list,’ murmured Tussaud. ‘All the names.’

  ‘Your great-grandmother must have been spoilt for choice,’ said Conan Doyle grimly.

  ‘And run off her feet,’ added the great-grandson. ‘Families wanted death-masks of their loved ones. Those who were about to die wanted to be immortalised in wax. The demand was incredible — one head after another. We have the original guillotine here, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oscar. ‘Mr Sherard and I have just been admiring it — together with the last head it claimed.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ purred Mr Tussaud. ‘In its way, it is a thing of beauty; almost a century old, but still in perfect working order. The craftmanship’s extraordinary. It was in use until just three years ago. I acquired it from the French authorities for a tidy sum. I knew in my bones that my great-grandmother would have wanted us to have it here. She was a remarkable woman. Have you yet seen her death-mask of Marie Antoinette? It’s one of her best.’ Our host’s spectacles glinted in the gaslight as he raised both hands and beckoned us to follow him.

  He led us away from the throng and through an unmarked door, across a darkened corridor and through a second door into a smaller exhibition room, entirely lit by candlelight. There were no crowds here, just half a dozen visitors standing behind a rope cordon gazing at an assortment of individual human heads lolling on scarlet cushions.

  ‘This is my favourite room,’ said Tussaud, lowering his voice once more and gesturing proudly towards the exhibits. ‘Look. To the left, we have the revolutionaries. Robespierre is the third one along. And to the right — slightly elevated, you notice — we have Louis XVI and his queen.’

  ‘Their faces appear to be larger than those of the revolutionaries,’ said Conan Doyle, gazing at the waxed visages of the royal couple.

  ‘They are larger, Arthur,’ said Oscar quietly. ‘They were better fed.’

  ‘And behind you,’ announced Tussaud in an excited stage-whisper, ‘we have Citoyen Marat, murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday.’

  ‘Oh my,’ murmured Oscar, turning round, ‘that is most lifelike.’

  ‘Marie Tussaud was among the first on the scene. ‘‘In at the kill,’ whispered Oscar, impressed. ‘She made it her business,’ said Tussaud earnestly. ‘It was her business. She told the story of her time. She was an artist — a portraitist who worked in wax instead of oils. Monsieur David’s famous painting of this very scene is based on her waxwork. Monsieur David was a family friend. So was Marat. And Rousseau. And Benjamin Franklin. Marie made models of them all. She knew all the great men of the age. And the women, too.’

  ‘I envy her,’ said Oscar quietly, turning his back on the bath and surveying once more the row of severed heads. ‘I should have liked to have met Queen Marie Antoinette.’

  ‘You have met Queen Victoria, haven’t you?’ asked Arthur playfully.

  ‘It’s not quite the same thing,’ murmured Oscar.

  ‘Marie Tussaud met everybody,’ repeated her great-grandson proudly.

  ‘Oscar’s met everybody,’ I said defensively.

  Oscar smiled. ‘Not Robespierre, alas.’

  ‘But you met the man who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria, didn’t you?’ I persisted.

  ‘I did, Robert. Once. And very briefly.’ He turned to John Tussaud, adding by way of explanation: ‘The man was an unhinged versifier named Roderick Maclean. A poor poet and a worse shot.’

  Mr Tussaud laughed and looked at his watch. ‘It’s lunchtime, gentlemen. I want to hear all about Queen Victoria’s failed assassin over our lobster salad and roast pheasant.’

  ‘Lobster salad?’ repeated Oscar happily. ‘Roast pheasant?’ He looked at Conan Doyle with shining eyes. ‘You are the best of friends, Arthur, and you have the best of friends.’

  ‘I’m taking you to our new restaurant,’ explained John Tussaud. ‘We shall dine by electric light to music provided by Miss Graves’s Ladies Orchestra. They have promised to give us a selection of tunes from the Savoy operas.

  ‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ said Oscar genially. ‘I have met both of them.’

  ‘Oscar’s met everybody,’ I repeated. ‘Poets, princes, artists, assassins …

  John Tussaud was leading us towards the stairway at the end of the exhibition room. We passed a familiar profile. ‘Yes,’ said Tussaud, nodding at the bust:

  ‘Voltaire. Marie Tussaud knew Voltaire.’

  Oscar paused. ‘How I envy her!’ He sighed. ‘I met Louisa May Alcott once,’ he said, ‘the author of Little Women. She
was a little woman.’ He gazed fixedly at Madame Tussaud’s head of Voltaire. ‘And I met P. T. Barnum,’ he added. ‘And, through him, of course, I met Jumbo the Elephant. It’s not quite Voltaire, but it’s something.’

  Conan Doyle burst out laughing. ‘You’re impossible, Oscar!’ he cried. ‘Jumbo the Elephant? I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true,’ protested Oscar.

  ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘Give him the manuscript, Robert.’

  I handed Conan Doyle the parcel that I was carrying.

  ‘This is my Christmas present for Arthur,’ Oscar explained to John Tussaud. ‘It’s some holiday reading, something for him to puzzle over at his Southsea fireside.’

  The manuscript was wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. Conan Doyle turned it over slowly in his hands.

  ‘They’re all there, Arthur,’ said Oscar teasingly. ‘Louisa May Alcott, Jumbo the Elephant, the man who tried to shoot Queen Victoria …’

  Conan Doyle looked up at Oscar and furrowed his brow. ‘What is this?’

  ‘As I say: your Christmas present, Arthur. Last year you gave me The Sign of Four. This year I’m giving you this. It’s a manuscript — and a challenge. It’s a story from my salad days, an account of a year and a half of my life — a while ago now. Before I was married. Before I was a family man. Before my responsibilities had made me fat. The story begins in 1882, when I was in my mid-twenties, footloose and fancy free. A time when I travelled the world and came to know some remarkable men and women. Not Robespierre and Marie Antoinette, not Voltaire, to be sure, but remarkable nonetheless: Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond La Grange … Names to reckon with — and people you’ve never heard of.’

  Conan Doyle balanced the package on the palms of his hands as though assessing its weight. He brought it up to his face as if by sniffing at it he might better estimate its value. ‘Is it autobiographical?’ he asked.