Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  The result of your writing to O is that he has written to me more or less demanding money as of right. Fortunately for him hearing that he was in great straits, I had yesterday or rather the day before sent him £40 through Robbie Ross. He says that I owe him £78 and hopes I will send it. I know that he is in great poverty, but I don’t care to be written to as though it were my fault. He says that he loved too much and that that is better than hate! This is true abstractedly, but his was an unnatural love, a madness that I think is worse than hate. I have no hatred for him, but I confess that I am afraid of him.24

  In March, Blacker visited Oscar in Paris and found a sad and devastated figure. Two of the last letters between Blacker and Constance reveal the pathetic level to which Oscar’s relations with his wife were finally reduced.

  14 Villa Elvira

  18.3.98

  Dear Mr Blacker

  … your account of Oscar is a very sad one. Still I am glad he is in Paris, for I know that he does require intellectual stimulus always. He would have been bored to death with family life, though he does not seem at present to realize this.25 What could either the children or I have given him? Vyvyan, though clever, is a baby, and Cyril, thank heaven, goes in as at his age he should, for sports … Have you see Arthur Symons’ review of the Ballad in the last Saturday Review? I think it I excellent and the best that has appeared and I would like to know what you think of it when you have seen it. Also I would be most grateful to you if you would send me the Mercure de France when it appears as I don’t know how to get hold of it. Also I wonder if you could get hold of for me a copy of the French translation of Dorian Gray? I had one, but lent it, and like most things one lends, one rarely sees them again!26

  15 Villa Elvira

  20.3.98

  Dear Mr Blacker

  I did send £40 to Mr Ross but he would not … send more than £10 at a time to him. I enclose your letters that I have had from Robbie which at any rate are truthful which I know that Oscar is not. The actual sum that I owe him, if you call it owing, is at the rate of j£i2.io a month £62.10 and not £80. This is counting from the month of November when I stopped giving him his allowance to the end of this present month. I have said that I would give him £10 a month so at the most I owe him little more than £20! By his own account to me he received £30 from Smithers and he seems to have had money since. Also he has had £10 of mine which he more than ignores in his letter to you, for he says that he has had nothing from me. Oscar is so pathetic and such a born actor, and I am hardened when I am away from him. No words will describe my horror of that BEAST for I will call him nothing else AD. Fancy Robbie receiving abusive letters from him and you know perfectly well that they are sent with Oscar’s knowledge and consent. I do not wish him dead, but considering how he used to go on about Willie’s extravagance and about his cruelty in forcing his mother to give him money, I think he might leave his wife and children alone. I beg that you will not let him know that you have seen these letters, only I wish you to realise that he knew perfectly well that he was forfeiting his income, small as it was, in going back to Lord A, and that it was absurd of him to say now that I acted without his knowledge. He owes I am certain more than j£6o in Paris, and if I pay money now he will think that he can write to me at any time for more. I have absolutely no one to fall back upon, and will not get into debt for anyone. The boys’ expenses will go on increasing until they are grown up and settled, and I will educate them and give them what they reasonably require. As Oscar will not bargain or be anything but exceedingly extravagant why should I do with my own money what is utterly foreign to my nature … But Oscar has no pride. When he had this disastrous law-suit he borrowed £50 from me, £50 from my cousin and £ioo from my aunt. The £50 I repaid my cousin, the £100 never has been and I suppose never will be repaid. I was left penniless and borrowed £150 from Burne-Jones, and have never borrowed a penny since. I still owe money in London which I am trying to pay, but all these things are nothing to Oscar as long as someone supports him! … You will say in the face of this why did I ask you to go and see him in Paris? Well, I thought you would have nothing to do with his money affairs, and I strongly advise you to leave them alone … I was silly enough to think that you would merely give him the intellectual stimulus he needed. I don’t know what name he is living under in Paris. Is it his own or the name he took when he left England? If he was fixed anywhere, I could make an arrangement to pay 10 francs a day for his board to the hotel, not to him for I know that he would never pay it. In the winter I paid at the hotel here 9 francs a day. Of course the good hotels are about 18 francs but I knew I could not afford that and did not go to them. He ought to go to a ‘pension’ and live a great deal cheaper than this, for you see it only leaves him around 12 francs a month.27

  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 rec
eived 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.