Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  After rehearsals — they usually ran from eleven in the morning to six at night — La Grange and Oscar would retreat together to La Grange’s dressing room. It was a large cabine, the size of a substantial caravan, built for the purpose in the downstage wing immediately adjacent to the stage. According to Oscar, inside it had the feel of an expensive tart’s boudoir: ‘all mirrors and velvet swags, guttering candles and overworn chaises longues’. When La Grange had an evening performance, Oscar would keep him company while he changed. Oscar was fascinated to watch the transformation as the old actor applied his make-up and donned his costume for his night’s work. Oscar noticed that La Grange always appeared to be a younger man when in character than when himself. On the rare evenings when he was not playing — on the nights when Gabrielle de la Tourbillon was giving her Phèdre, for example — La Grange and Oscar would still go to the dressing room and there they would share a bottle (or two) of yellow wine and smoke some of La Grange’s favourite Cabañas Havana cigars.

  When La Grange was dressing for a part, Traquair, the valet, was in dutiful attendance. Oscar was pleased to note that Traquair, though subdued, appeared at ease with his new master. When La Grange and Oscar were simply drinking and smoking together, Traquair withdrew to his own quarters, a tiny self-contained annexe to the dressing room: ‘the dresser’s bedroom’, a windowless cubicle not much larger than the narrow divan and washbasin it contained.

  Oscar revelled in his conversations with La Grange. For the most part Oscar listened while La Grange talked. La Grange spoke of the great acting dynasties of France — of the Baptistes, the Deburaus, the Thénards. He told stories of the travails and triumphs of his own family, going back to the time when the founder of the dynasty, Charles Varlet de La Grange, was Molière’s pupil, friend and first biographer. For Oscar’s benefit, La Grange re-enacted his forebear’s touching description of the death of Molière. It brought tears to Oscar’s eyes. ‘You are a very foolish, fond young man,’ said La Grange, raising his glass to Oscar. ‘When I was a boy, my father took me to see Macready’s Othello. Macready gave his final performance here in Paris. There you would have wept —and with some cause. The pity of it, Oscar, the pity!’

  They talked of the theatre mostly. As Oscar explained to me, ‘That’s what most theatre people mostly do.’ But they talked also of literature and philosophy and were excited to discover a mutual love for the lost world of Ancient Greece. Over Sancerre and cigars, with tears of joy in both their eyes, they spoke of Socrates and virtue, of Plato and love, of Aristotle and the soul, and of Epicurus and the elements. Edmond La Grange claimed to live his life according to the teachings of Epicurus. ‘I believe that he does,’ said Oscar. ‘Epicurus sought the tranquil life, characterised by aponia — the absence of pain and fear. He did not fear death because death is merely nothingness. He did not fear the gods because they neither reward nor punish us. He believed in being self-sufficient and surrounded by friends. That’s why La Grange — one of the great men of our age — lives his life entirely within a theatre and plays cards every night with his cronies.’

  When Oscar was closeted with La Grange, I did what I could to spend time alone with Gabrielle de la Tourbillon. I was smitten with her from the moment of our introduction. We met where Oscar and I had first met: in the foyer of the Théâtre La Grange. Oscar presented me to her saying, ‘This is my friend Robert Sherard. You have something in common. He, too, is living under an alias.’

  She laughed. ‘He is very young to be living under an alias.’ She put out her hand to shake mine.

  ‘He is not as young as he looks,’ said Oscar slyly. ‘He has nearly completed a three-volume novel!’

  She took my hand. ‘He is very cold,’ she said. She lifted my hand to her warm cheek. ‘He is terribly cold,’ she said. ‘We will have to warm him up.’ She pulled my hands together and covered them with hers.

  During rehearsals, while Oscar and La Grange sat side by side at the front of the stage, I would sit with Gabrielle in the auditorium, at the end of the fifth or sixth row of the orchestra stalls. Whenever she was required for a scene, she would slip out of her seat and move quickly and quietly through the ‘pass door’ onto the stage. She accepted me at once as her constant and devoted companion, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I fell into the habit of undertaking errands on her behalf: fetching her a glass of water, collecting her copy of the script that she had left up in her dressing room, running out to the patisserie in the rue Béranger to buy her a paper-twist of her favourite bonbons. I did as she asked me and asked no more in return but to look at her. She was to me like a goddess: tall and slim with a long, slender neck and a perfect profile. Her hair was black and silken; her eyes were cobalt blue; and between her eyes and her high cheekbones were the gentlest traces of crow’s feet — life-lines that I wanted above all else to kiss.

  Whenever, in the half-darkness of the auditorium, she turned towards me and saw me gazing up at her, she took my hand in hers and whispered, ‘Robert, I am not a museum exhibit. I am your friend.’ She held my right hand gently in both of hers and, slowly, softly, ran her fingers along each of mine. Sometimes, holding my hand in her lap she took my fingers and held them together and pressed them against her womanhood.

  When I told Oscar this, he roared.

  ‘Is this a lie?’ he spluttered through his laughter. ‘A beautiful lie — at last!’

  ‘No, it is the truth,’ I protested, blushing furiously and running my hands through my hair in my embarrassment. ‘It is the truth. Do you not believe me?’

  He saw that my distress was genuine. ‘I believe you, Robert,’ he said at once. He smiled at me. ‘Indeed, I congratulate you. Gabrielle de la Tourbillon is a very attractive woman.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ I asked. ‘What does it signify?’

  ‘It means that she is an actress. This is what actresses do. I fear that you will find that it signifies very little.’

  ‘“What actresses do”?’ I repeated, uncomprehending.

  ‘By custom long established, during the course of a theatrical production the leading lady has an affair with her leading man. It’s almost inevitable. It’s virtually compulsory. But in this instance there is a difficulty. Mademoiselle de la Tourbillon is already the mistress of the senior leading man — and the junior leading man is her lover’s son.’ He gave me a kindly grin and proffered me a cigarette. ‘She is having to turn her attention elsewhere.’

  ‘Does she not love me then — even a little?’

  ‘She is flirting with you, Robert.’

  ‘I love her,’ I said. I said it passionately and I meant it.

  Oscar struck a match and held it to my cigarette. ‘Be careful, Robert. You are twenty-one. She is thirty. Take great care. You are an innocent moth and her flame burns very bright.’

  I heard Oscar’s warning, but I did not heed it. My moments with Gabrielle de la Tourbillon, sitting in the darkened orchestra stalls of the Théâtre La Grange, were simply too intoxicating. They were frustrating, too. There were so many things that I wanted to say to her, so many questions that I wanted to ask, but there was never an opportunity. When we were in the stalls, her focus was on the stage and the rehearsals. When we were elsewhere in the theatre — or in the street outside or in one of the cafés nearby — other people were always there. We were never alone. She had no private space. She shared her dressing room with another actress, a young girl called Lisette who also served as her understudy and helped to dress her. She shared her bed with Edmond La Grange. They lived together in an apartment immediately above the theatre. It was a huge apartment, by all accounts, built into the roof of the theatre, containing a series of independent suites of assorted sizes — Liselotte La Grange (Maman), and Bernard and Agnès La Grange, and Richard Marais, the business manager, and Eddie Garstrang, as La Grange’s secretary, all had rooms up there — and from its high, wide windows, apparently, you could see right across Paris, as far as the Butte de Montmartr
e in the north and the banks of the Seine to the south. The apartment was La Grange’s territory: I was never invited there.

  Oscar was rarely invited, either. ‘After Racine,’ explained La Grange, ‘one doesn’t want brilliant conversation; one wants a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and a silent hand of euchre.’ When he played cards, La Grange required Eddie Garstrang to make up the foursome, and Gabrielle de la Tourbillon to pour the wine and clear the ashtrays.

  Garstrang was now, evidently, La Grange’s man. From what Oscar could see, he appeared to have settled immediately into the ways of the great French actor and his unusual entourage. It helped considerably that Maman accepted Garstrang. It would be an exaggeration to say that she warmed to him, but, certainly, she did not object to him. When Richard Marais was otherwise engaged, Liselotte La Grange even allowed Eddie Garstrang to take her new pet poodle for one of her several daily walks.

  Garstrang’s integration within the La Grange company was also eased by the fact that he spoke French. It was not classical French — it was rough, Louisiana French, learnt in the casinos of New Orleans and at the gaming tables on board the riverboats of the Mississippi — but it served. Washington Traquair had no such advantage. When Traquair was busy — dealing with La Grange’s laundry, darning the great man’s socks, pressing his shirts, laying out his wardrobe for the evening’s performance, assisting the actor into and out of his elaborate costumes — he was relatively content. But when he was idle, he was lonely. He spoke no French. He had no friends in Paris. He was a black man in a white man’s city. He spent his time — almost all his time — hidden in his tiny quarters, the windowless room (it was no more than a vestibule, really) that adjoined La Grange’s dressing room at the Théâtre La Grange. When he ventured out into the streets around the theatre, he was regarded, at best, as a curiosity, a figure of fun; at worst, as an alien, an object of derision.

  One day, not long after his arrival in Paris, Oscar found Traquair in his little bedroom, lying on his bed, weeping. The young man was homesick. It was as simple as that. Oscar talked to him. Oscar made him laugh. (Oscar’s conversation could cure the toothache.) Oscar succeeded — at least, for the moment — in talking Traquair out of his misery. Cajoled by Oscar (who promised to teach him French), the black valet agree to ‘give it six months’. If, by the end of the summer, he still felt that he had not settled in, Oscar undertook to find the money to pay for Traquair’s return passage to America.

  That February, when we weren’t with Edmond La Grange and his close-knit circle, our social life revolved around the home of Paris’s other great theatrical luminary, Sarah Bernhardt. She was extraordinary. ‘The eighth wonder of the world,’ Oscar called her, ‘the greatest personality France has had since Joan of Arc.’ She was thirty-eight in 1883, at the height of her fame and fortune. Her appearance was nothing: she was skeletally thin, with pale sunken cheeks and an unruly mop of fuzzy ginger-coloured hair. Her presence was everything. ‘She is a force of nature,’ said Oscar, ‘as irresistible as the incoming tide, as fascinating as a rainbow, as mysterious as the moon.’ Oscar was intrigued by Edmond La Grange, charmed by him and flattered to be working with him on his production of Hamlet. He was a great actor and an engaging companion. ‘But, ultimately,’ said Oscar, ‘what is he? Simply a man. While Sarah is something else:

  Sarah is divine!’

  Sarah also had a vast range of interests beyond the stage and the card table. She was quite as passionate about her sculpture and her painting, her pistol-shooting, her ballooning, her fishing and her alligator-hunting, as she was about her acting. Everything she did she did on a magnificent scale. Liselotte La Grange kept a pet poodle called the Princesse de Lamballe. Sarah Bernhardt kept a toy griffon called Hamlet — and an ocelot and a puma and, for a time, in her house on the corner of the rue Fortuny and the avenue de Villiers, a fully grown lion. She adored wild animals. She told Oscar that she had consulted a surgeon to find out if it would be possible for him to graft a living tiger’s tail to the base of her spine so that she could lash it from side to side when she was angry.

  The aspect of Bernhardt’s character that Oscar was most drawn to was her capacity for telling ‘beautiful lies’. She spoke always with such sincerity that, somehow, whatever she told you, you wanted to believe. When I first met her — taken to her house for lunch as Oscar’s guest towards the end of the second week of the Hamlet rehearsals — she told me that the Shah of Persia had just left Paris and, so impressed was His Majesty with the ballerinas at the Paris Opéra, that with Sarah’s help he had bought beautiful tutus for every member of his harem to wear. Was it possible? Could it have been true?

  When Sarah told me that she slept every night in her own satin-lined coffin, I told her that I did not believe her. At once she took me by the hand and, running in bare feet, led me through the house to her bedroom. ‘There!’ she cried triumphantly, showing me the open rosewood coffin with her nightdress lying at its side. ‘That is where I sleep each night — at ease and all alone.’

  In truth, Sarah rarely slept alone. She had many lovers. She was reputed to have seduced all the crowned heads of Europe — including His Holiness the Pope. ‘I am the most lied-about woman in the world!’ she wailed, casting her eyes towards heaven. When I first knew her she was married to a handsome Greek ne’er-do-well eleven years her junior: a womaniser, spendthrift and dope-fiend by the name of Jacques Damala. His party-piece was to produce his hypodermic syringe at the dining table and inject himself with his narcotic through his trouser leg in full view of his wife and her guests. This was Paris in 1883, at the height of ‘La décadence’. I smoked an occasional pipe of opium myself.

  Edmond La Grange’s circle was a small one. He spent his time in his theatre, with his family and a handful of cronies. Sarah Bernhardt, by contrast, entertained the world. She kept eight servants and an open house. Whenever Oscar and I called to see her, there were always other guests. At that first lunch party, in February 1883, I was seated between Jacques-Emile Blanche, a young artist yet to make his name, and Maurice Rollinat, a notorious poet and musician, one of Sarah’s celebrated ‘discoveries’. I took immediately to Jacques-Emile Blanche: we were exact contemporaries and there was an openness about him — a freshness and a freedom of spirit — that I found wonderfully appealing. Oscar was equally taken with Maurice Rollinat. They found at once that they shared a passion for the works of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Rollinat’s own poetry took as its themes death, murder, suicide, live burial, diabolism, disease and putrefaction. ‘You don’t get many laughs with Maurice Rollinat,’ said Oscar, ‘but if you’re in the mood to ponder human misery, degradation and despair, grey-faced Maurice is your man.’

  On the evening of that first luncheon chez Madame Bernhardt, Oscar persuaded Rollinat to take us on a guided tour of what he termed ‘the darkest corners of the City of Light’ — the haunts of the lowest criminals and poorest outcasts of the city. ‘Lift the veil, Maurice,’ said Oscar. ‘Show us the show-places of the Paris inferno.’

  It was a grim but unforgettable evening, made bearable by the glasses of absinthe that we consumed at each filthy bar we visited along the way. The expedition culminated at the infamous tavern of the Château-Rouge in Montmartre. ‘Our tour is nearly done,’ said Rollinat, standing in the darkened doorway of the inn. ‘I have brought you here to show you the Salle des Morts.’

  ‘The Room of the Dead? I have heard of it,’ said Oscar.

  With a curious smile playing on his thin, grey lips, Rollinat explained: ‘In London you have Madame Tussaud’s famous exhibition. In Paris we now have the waxworks of the Musée Grévin. But here at the Château-Rouge is a tourist attraction of a different order. La Salle des Morts is a chamber of living horrors where the desperate and the destitute — the homeless, the lame and the halt, prostitutes and drug addicts, beggars and vagabonds — crouch and huddle and lie together in near-darkness to be viewed for half a sou by visitors in search of the macabre.’

  ‘Must
we see this?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Oscar, looking at me. ‘At least, I must. I want to eat of all the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world. I must taste the bitter as well as the sweet.’

  ‘There is no hurry,’ said Rollinat, holding open the door to the tavern. ‘We have time for a drink first. Those that we have come to see will not run away.’

  We spent some time in the crowded, smoke-filled bar on the ground floor of the Château-Rouge, sipping absinthe, talking to thieves and the saddest daughters of joy, listening to the obscene songs of a frightful old, noseless hag, and watching a group of professional beggars display the tricks by which they feigned infirmities. As midnight struck, the landlord nodded to Rollinat and beckoned to us to follow him. We made our way to a narrow wooden staircase at the rear of the bar and followed the landlord, a large, lumbering man, as slowly, breathing heavily, he climbed the stairs. ‘This is our pièce de résistance,’ the landlord wheezed. ‘It’s a good business, too. You pay to see it and the poor bastards who live here, they pay too — half a sou a night. It’s just a room in the rafters, but it’s safe, and shelter and company of a kind.’

  The room was as wide and deep as the bar below, but totally bereft of furniture, low-ceilinged and windowless. To reach it we had to climb a second, narrower, steeper stairway that came up through the floor into the centre of the room itself. The landlord went first, followed by Rollinat. I came next, leaving Oscar to bring up the rear.

  ‘Et voilà!’ declared Rollinat, under his breath. The landlord held his candlestick high in the air and slowly swung it round in a circle to illuminate each corner of the room.

  It took a moment to adjust to the gloom. It took more than a moment to adjust to the stench and to absorb the horror of what we were witnessing. It was a sight to appal the eye and pierce the soul. Stretched out in every posture of pain and discomfort, many in the stupor of drink, many displaying foul sores, maimed limbs, or the stigmata of disease, all in filthy and malodorous rags, the sleepers of the Room of the Dead, with their white faces, immobile and sightless, looked indeed like corpses. Oscar read my mind. ‘But the dead and buried rest in peace,’ he murmured, ‘for they are in heaven. These wretches are the living dead. This is a hell on earth.’