Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile

by Gyles Brandreth

  As I write this, seven years later, I can still picture Oscar Wilde’s face as it was that night. I can still see his large, Neronian head just rising above the floor: his feet had refused to carry him to the top of the staircase and into the pestilential room. Seen in the flicker of the landlord’s candle, there was upon its features the horror of one who looks on the Medusa: a twinge of pity about the lips perhaps, but in the main, horror —sheer horror.

  Oscar said nothing until we had regained the street. There, in the cold midnight air, for a moment he stood quite still, his eyes shut. He breathed deeply and turned towards me in the darkness. ‘Did you not see him?’ he whispered, opening his eyes. ‘Did you not recognise him?’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘in the Room of the Dead. Did you not see him?’

  ‘Who?’ I repeated.

  ‘Bernard La Grange,’ he said. ‘I am certain it was him. Why was he there, Robert? Why?’

  7

  Curiosity

  It was Saturday morning — the morning after our visit to the Salle des Morts — and Oscar had decided that we should call on Sarah Bernhardt for breakfast. It was a little after eleven o’clock and we found the great actress, swathed in a green and gold oriental peignoir, her tousled hair pinned up on her head, her face covered in a mass of white powder (as though she had dipped it into a bag of flour), seated at a little bamboo table in the ornamental orangery at the back of her house.

  When the servant admitted us to her presence, Madame Bernhardt was leaning across the table feeding a sliver of grape to a large tortoise that sat on a silver salver before her. ‘I’m giving Methuselah his petit déjeuner. Don’t mind us, gentlemen. Help yourselves to coffee.’

  Hamlet, her Belgian griffon, whimpered at her feet. Osric, the cockatiel, squawked overhead. The caged canaries (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) twittered excitedly. Apart from the animals, she was alone. Her husband was elsewhere: befuddled and in the arms of his mistress. Her lover was elsewhere: extricating himself from the arms of another woman. Maurice, her eighteen-year-old son (‘un petit accident d’amour’), was upstairs and fast asleep. Sarah got to her feet, picked up the tortoise with both hands, and carrying it aloft as though it were the head of John the Baptist, nodded to me to open the door to the garden for her. She hadn’t yet learnt my name. (I am not sure that she ever did.) Holding it high, she carried the reptile into the garden and laid it carefully on the earth beneath the shrubbery. She came back into the orangery, stroking my cheek as she passed me and went straight to Oscar and kissed him lightly on the mouth. ‘I am so pleased you have come back so soon,’ she said. ‘There was something I meant to ask you yesterday and quite forgot. My new Japanese screens, Oscar — how should I arrange them? How? How? How?’ Dramatically she stretched out both her arms in the direction of a pair of painted screens that stood forlornly in the corner of the room.

  Oscar looked towards the screens and pondered a moment and smiled then lit his cigarette and, looking back at Sarah, said, ‘Why arrange them at all? Why not let them occur?’

  ‘Oh, Oscar!’ she exclaimed, bursting into a peal of happy laughter. She clapped her hands with delight and sat down once more. ‘Did you hear that, Hamlet? “Why not let them occur?” You are so brilliant, Oscar. You have been up half the night and still you are so brilliant! Come, take your coffee, bring your friend, sit by me, tell me everything. How was Montmartre? Did you see the dark side of the City of Light? Did Rollinat show you everything? Did you visit La Salle des Morts?’

  We collected coffee from the sideboard — and black German bread and hard Dutch cheese and slices of Italian salami — and sat on either side of Sarah Bernhardt at her bamboo breakfast table. She put her fingers together as if in prayer and pressed them gently against the point of her chin. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said, widening her eyes. ‘Tell me all that you saw. Shock and surprise me.’

  ‘What shocked and surprised me,’ said Oscar, peeling a banana for his friend and handing her the fruit, ‘was the sight of Bernard La Grange, in rags and on his knees, pale and contorted, surrounded by a sea of vagrants and vagabonds in the Room of the Dead.’

  ‘Bernard La Grange? The wunderkind? Are you sure that it was him?’ she asked, taking the fruit and breaking it to hand me a piece.

  ‘I am certain. I think that he recognised me, too. I saw fear in his sunken eyes. He was trembling. His hands were shaking. They clawed the empty air. It was pitiful, Sarah. Why was he there? Why?’

  ‘Curiosity,’ she said simply.

  Oscar shook his head and lit his cigarette.

  ‘Curiosity,’ she repeated, biting into the banana, ‘that’s why he was there.’ She swallowed the fruit and ran her fingers soothingly across Oscar’s forehead. ‘Don’t look so anxious, my friend.’

  ‘I’m puzzled,’ said Oscar. ‘That’s all. By day, he’s rehearsing Hamlet. By night, he’s sleeping in the Room of the Dead. Why?’

  ‘Why were you there?’ asked Sarah, taking Oscar’s cigarette from between his fingers and puffing on it lightly. ‘Curiosity!’

  ‘I went to observe the horror,’ Oscar protested.

  ‘And he went to experience it,’ countered Bernhardt. She got to her feet. ‘He is an actor, Oscar. You are a writer. Writers describe. Actors inhabit. You talk airily about tasting all the fruits in all the gardens of the world — the bitter and the sweet. Well, Bernard La Grange isn’t talking about it — he’s doing it.’

  ‘He was trembling, Sarah.’

  ‘He’s a fine young actor; everybody says so. He was living the part, inhabiting it to the full. He’s his father’s son.’

  ‘His hands were shaking uncontrollably.’

  ‘Perhaps he had been taking cocaine,’ she said lightly. ‘So many of the young ones do.’ She returned Oscar’s cigarette to him and ran her fingers playfully through his close-cropped curls. ‘And how is his Hamlet progressing?’

  ‘I think he will be remarkable,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Exactly,’ purred the diva, kissing my friend on the forehead.

  ‘I think it will be a remarkable production, all in all,’ Oscar continued earnestly. ‘Edmond La Grange will be a definitive Claudius.’

  ‘Of course. He is a great actor.’

  ‘Should I tell La Grange about Bernard? Should I tell him what I’ve seen?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Oscar.’ With a long, thin index finger Madame Bernhardt tapped Oscar on the nose reprovingly. ‘What the son does in his own time is not the business of the father. Besides, if it isn’t affecting the boy’s performance, Edmond La Grange won’t give a damn.’

  ‘Won’t he?’ asked Oscar. ‘La Salle des Morts is a pestilential hell-hole, Sarah. It can’t be good for the boy’s health.’

  ‘But it may be enriching his performance, deepening his understanding of the moody Dane, may it not?

  That’s all that matters to Edmond La Grange. As long as his son gives an account of Hamlet that is worthy of the great La Grange name, nothing else counts. Believe me, I know the man. I’ve known him for twenty years. He’s a cold fish.’

  ‘I find him agreeable enough,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Of course you do. You’re not his son or his lover —you’re part of his audience. He performs: you applaud. I don’t believe that Edmond La Grange has any true feeling for anyone but himself — and his audience. He adores his daughter, I know, poor, fragile thing. He feels for her, you can see that in his eyes. But the love of his life, without question, is his audience.’ She paused and pondered for a moment. ‘That may be why he’s such a great actor. He gives his all to his art.’

  Oscar chuckled. ‘He’s kind to his poor old mother.’

  ‘He respects his heritage, certainly,’ said Sarah seriously.

  ‘Madame La Grange is not an easy lady,’ I volunteered. I had been looking for an opportunity to make a contribution.

  ‘She is impossible!’ shrieked Sarah, throwing up her hands in a theatrical ges
ture of despair. ‘My darling Hamlet and her wretched Marie Antoinette have never got on.

  ‘Her “wretched Marie Antoinette” is dead,’ said Oscar.

  ‘No!’ cried Sarah, suddenly moved. Her eyes were pricked with tears. (The Bernhardt temperament was nothing if not mercurial.) ‘I should not have spoken of the poor little dog like that. When did she die? She was not that old.’

  Sarah picked up her own little dog and cradled the griffon in her arms as Oscar told the sorry tale of what had occurred on the SS Bothnia. The actress was visibly moved by the story. ‘Who did this terrible thing?’ she asked when Oscar had finished his narrative. ‘Who can have been so cruel?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Oscar. ‘I have no idea. I’ve asked questions. I’ve made enquiries of each and every one of the members of the La Grange company who was on board at the time and none of them seems either interested or concerned. Not one of them cares.’

  ‘Are you surprised? They’re all actors after all.’

  ‘But you’re an actress,’ I said, ‘and you love animals.’

  ‘There is a difference,’ she replied, kissing her griffon on the nose and lowering him gently to the ground. ‘They are French and I am not. I am Jewish.’

  Suddenly, her mood apparently once more transformed, Madame Bernhardt turned to me and, smiling, asked, ‘Would you like to meet Victor Hugo, young man? He is very old and quite harmless.’ Without waiting for my reply, she grasped me by the hand and pulled me from my chair.

  ‘I’ve met him, in fact,’ I said, a little confused. ‘In Guernsey, when I was a boy.’

  ‘Did he try to bite you?’ she asked, laughing. ‘He probably did. But he’s quite toothless now and he means no harm. He’s chained up in the cellar. We’ll take him some salami. Come.’

  I stood, bemused, as France’s greatest actress tried to entice me across her orangery with a large salami in her tiny hand.

  Oscar barked with laughter and banged the bamboo table with such force that the teaspoons rattled in their saucers. ‘Victor Hugo is Sarah’s African lion, Robert. He’s a mangy old creature and stinks to high heaven. You don’t want to meet him, believe me, especially when you’ve met the real thing.’ Oscar got to his feet and rescued me from the divine Sarah’s grasp. He prised the salami from her and laid it back on the sideboard. He took the tiny actress in his arms and embraced her. ‘We must go, my friend. We will see you soon.

  ‘I look forward to the La Grange Hamlet,’ she said. ‘I shall come to the first night. I imagine all Paris will be there. Will I recognise a Wilde touch or two in the production? I hope so. I collect Hamlets, you know. I have seen all the greats. I shall play the part myself one day.’

  Oscar laughed. ‘And when you do, will all Paris come?’ he asked.

  ‘All the world will come, Oscar,’ she answered, pulling her peignoir about her. ‘And do you know why?’

  ‘No, Sarah. Tell me: why?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  By fiacre, from Sarah Bernhardt’s house in the XVIIth arrondissement, we reached the Théâtre La Grange, in the troisième, in less than half an hour. It was an imposing building with a fine neo-classical façade, the oldest of the seven theatres that had once been situated on the boulevard du Temple. The street was known as the ‘boulevard du crime’, not because it was frequented particularly by the criminal classes, but because murder and melodrama had been the staple fare of all the theatres along the thoroughfare. In the early 1860s, when Baron Haussmann was charged with redesigning Paris, clearing away slums and driving arterial highways through the heart of the city, Edmond La Grange had seized the moment to acquire the freehold of the largest of the theatres in the boulevard and redevelop it. La Grange had given the theatre his name and changed its nature, transforming it from a down-at-heel playhouse specialising in cheap sensation into Paris’s leading commercial theatre with a popular classical repertoire, the only serious rival to the Comédie-Française.

  The Théâtre La Grange was his home — and his life. What leisure time he allowed himself was spent in his apartment. The rest of Edmond La Grange’s waking existence was passed either on the stage itself, rehearsing or playing; or behind the scenes and below the stage, supervising the building of the sets and the creation of the costumes; or in his dressing room, in the wing immediately adjacent to the stage, on the right-hand side of the proscenium arch. When his dressing-room door was open, from the mirror on his dressing-room table the great actor-manager could command a clear view of the centre of the stage.

  The rest of the theatre’s dressing rooms were to be found, not at stage-level, but on four separate floors, reached by a single narrow stone stairway at the rear of the building. La Grange’s dressing room, larger than any of the others, was the heart of his empire. It was where he planned his productions; where he learnt his lines; where, day after day, six days out of seven, he applied his make-up and donned his costumes to turn himself from whoever he was into whoever he wanted to be; and it was where, on days when there were matinées, between the afternoon and the evening performance, on his chaise longue (the chaise longue on which Molière himself was said to have breathed his last), he dozed, recollecting past triumphs, dreaming of future glories.

  The dressing room was also the room in which Edmond La Grange conducted his business; where (with such high hopes!) he hired new actors and (with such deep regret!) let go those who no longer met his exacting standards; it was the room in which he and Oscar sat for long hours poring over their translation of Hamlet; it was the room in which he and Richard Marais sat each night by gaslight, checking and counter-checking the day’s box-office takings. It was not a room I had yet visited. It was a room in which Oscar felt very much at home.

  ‘It’s the holy of holies,’ said my friend, leading the way across the darkened stage towards the dressing-room corner. ‘Tread softly and speak low. Sacred are its mysteries.’

  ‘Are we expected?’ I asked, lowering my voice. ‘Isn’t there a matinée?’

  ‘There is and we are,’ Oscar replied gaily, and then, abruptly, even as he spoke, he hushed himself — ‘Sshh!’ — and held out his hand to halt me in my tracks. ‘Quiet!’ he hissed.

  We had reached the dressing-room door. We froze where we were. I held my breath. Slowly, Oscar turned his eyes towards me and inclined his ear towards the door. From within the room we could hear the sound of a woman sobbing. A man spoke — his voice was raised and angry. His words were indistinguishable. Another man spoke — an older man: there was the force of anger in his voice, too. The woman’s sobs became louder and louder — and faster and faster — and then burst, like a wave upon the shore, and subsided into tears. Were they tears of anguish or tears of laughter? Oscar narrowed his eyes and leant his body further towards the door. I made to speak. I felt we had no business to be there. Oscar lifted a finger to his lips to silence me. Within the room, the two men’s voices were raised once more, sharper and angrier than before. Suddenly a third voice joined the fray. It was deeper than the others, and calmer, too. I recognised it because of the slight Portuguese accent. It was the voice of Carlos Branco. ‘Mais en fin!’ he cried. ‘Mais en fin!’

  Quite suddenly, Oscar pulled me away from the dressing-room door and, as he did so, the door itself swung open. In the doorway, in his dressing gown, barefoot, stood Edmond La Grange. For a brief moment — no more — I saw wild confusion in the actor’s eyes. His fingers trembled at his temples. He ran them rapidly through his thick white hair. Then he recognised Oscar in the half-light of the wings and laughed. ‘Oscar! What are you doing here?’

  ‘We have a rendezvous,’ answered Oscar, smiling.

  La Grange slapped his palm against his forehead. ‘I’d forgotten. Forgive me.’ He hit himself a second time and raised his eyes to heaven and shook his head in mock despair. Behind him, close together, stood Carlos Branco, Bernard La Grange and Agnès La Grange. From within the room, each of them stared out at us. Each of them was smiling. ‘We’ve been discussin
g the play, Oscar,’ La Grange continued. ‘We’ve been experimenting.’ He glanced at Carlos Branco. ‘Old Polonius here has had some novel ideas. We’ve been taking them on board.’

  ‘I must dress for the matinée,’ said Branco genially.

  ‘There’s no rush,’ said La Grange, raising his hand to prevent his friend from leaving. ‘Let us finish our discussion — if Oscar will excuse us.

  ‘By all means,’ said Oscar, bowing and retreating, ‘unless I can be of service?’

  La Grange waved his hand dismissively. ‘It’s all technical stuff,’ he said, ‘who goes where, what happens next — that kind of thing. It’s for the craftsmen, not the poet. Can we meet after the matinée? Shall we have English tea? I’ll get Traquair to toast some muffins.’

  Oscar repeated himself. ‘By all means,’ he said.

  I looked at my friend and saw that his gaze was fixed on Bernard La Grange. The young actor was staring at Oscar, with his head held back and tilted to one side. There was no trace of strain in his face, no apparent signs of the after-effects of his night in the Salle des Morts.

  ‘A tout à l’heure,’ said Edmond La Grange, closing his dressing-room door.

  ‘A tout à l’heure,’ said Oscar.

  We spent the rest of that Saturday afternoon over a bottle of absinthe in the little bar in the cobbled alley off the boulevard du Temple.

  ‘You have read The Murders in the rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe?’ Oscar asked.