By the end of January Wilde was in Paris. After a brief stop at the luxurious new Hôtel Continental, he installed himself at the more congenial Hôtel Voltaire on the Left Bank, just across from the Louvre; this was where he had stayed with his mother and brother in 1874.4 There, in his ‘little room over the Seine’, he set to work on completing The Duchess of Padua and revising Vera – ‘two plays’, he declared to a friend of his mother’s, ‘[it] sounds ambitious, but we live in an age of inordinate personal ambition, and I am determined that the world shall understand me’. To dramatize the moment further he acquired a white ‘burnous’ in which to work, a sort of cowled dressing gown such as Balzac had famously worn. The garment was, it seems, intended to inspire him to heights of Balzacian industry and production. It proved very effective.5
The Duchess advanced apace. Wilde elaborated the tale of ‘sin and love’ through five acts of stately blank verse, telling of the young Duchess’s adulterous passion for the handsome Guido; her murder of the cruel Duke, her husband; her despair and anger when Guido rejects her on account of this horrific deed; her mingled relief and shame when he allows her to fix on him the blame for the crime; her belated decision to save him from the gallows and die in his stead – an act of self-sacrifice that prompts Guido also to take his own life, in final affirmation of their doomed love. The unfolding melodrama chimed with echoes of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and the insistent note of Shelley’s verse-play The Cenci.6
Despite the Italian Renaissance setting, Wilde was anxious to infuse the play with themes from ‘modern life’ (‘the essence of art’, as he described it, ‘is to produce the modern idea under an antique form’). He made his Duchess into a would-be social reformer, concerned for the poor and destitute of the city. At a time of increasing social distress in England, and growing public sympathy, he felt that speeches about ‘children dying in the lanes’ or ‘people sleeping under the arches of the bridges’ could not ‘fail to bring down the house’.7 He also leavened the drama with touches of ‘comedy’. The evil Duke – another dandified cynic, to rival Prince Paul in Vera – keeps up a flow of astringent epigrams: ‘Conscience is but the name which cowardice / Fleeing from battle scrawls upon its shield’; ‘Why, she [the Duchess] is worse than ugly, she is good’; ‘the domestic virtues / Are often very beautiful in others’; and (perhaps with a nod to the author’s own experience of the popular press) ‘in this dull stupid age of ours / The most eccentric thing a man can do / Is to have brains, then the mob mocks at him’. Impatient for Anderson to accept the work, and Griffin to release the second part of his payment, Wilde even smuggled in a sly reference to ‘the gold the Gryphon guards In rude Armenia’. The work was finished on 15 March, two weeks ahead of schedule, and dispatched at once to rude America.
In answer to an inquiry from the celebrated French actor Coquelin the elder, with whom he lunched soon after, Wilde declared, ‘Mon drame? Du style seulment. Hugo et Shakespeare ont partagé tous les sujets: il est impossible d’être original, même dans le péché; ainsi il n’y a pas d’émotions, seulement des adjectifs extraordinaires. Le fin est assez tragique, mon héros au moment de son triomphe fait un épigramme que manque tout-à-fait d’effet, alors on le condamne a être académicien avec discours forcés.’8* But this was mere mystification. He had a high regard for his achievement.
Overflowing with nervous excitement and anxiety, he had followed up the manuscript with a long letter to Anderson, in which he described the play as ‘the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef d’œuvre of my youth’. He had then set about explaining, in perhaps too much detail, the ‘scientific’ thinking behind his various authorial decisions – the admixture of ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’ (‘the strain of emotion on the audience must be lightened: they will not weep if you have not made them laugh’); the setting of ‘intense emotion [against] a background of intellectual speculation’; the deliberate introduction of ‘modern’ ideas into the ‘antique form’. By the end of this ‘Titan’ epistle it was unclear whether he was trying to convince the actress or himself of the play’s merits. He closed with a request that Anderson telegraph her decision to him at his mother’s London address.9
Meanwhile he still had Vera to keep him busy. Marie Prescott was now proposing to produce the play in New York at the end of the summer. Although Wilde readily followed up many of her suggestions about the text, he was obliged to use similar arguments to the ones he had given Anderson in order to convince her not to cut out the ‘comedy lines’. It was, he declared, ‘one of the facts of physiology’ that any ‘intensified emotion’ needed to be relieved by its opposite. ‘Success is a science,’ he went on; ‘if you have the conditions, you get the result. Art is the mathematical result of the emotional desire for beauty. If it is not thought out, it is nothing.’ Prescott, anxious to put all the ‘conditions’ in place, involved herself not only with the text but also with ideas for casting, costumes and scenery. She took on, too, the business negotiations from her husband, proposing to advance Wilde $1,000 for exclusive acting rights to the play, with a further $50 to be paid per performance (seven performances a week being guaranteed). It was an offer that Wilde was ready to accept.10
Things seemed to be falling into place. Wilde was working well: full of energy and overflowing with schemes. He completed some more of his poetic ‘Impressions’ (one about children carrying balloons in the Tuileries Garden), as well as a ‘Symphonie en jaune’, and dispatched them to the World. To his disappointment, however, Yates decided – ‘on second thoughts’ – against publishing them. ‘Second thoughts are very dangerous,’ Wilde declared, ‘as they are usually good.’11 Returning to the ‘faery tales’ he had spun during his summer in America, Wilde also sketched out ‘a real children’s story’ and sent it to Dorothy Tennant – in the hope that she might provide illustrations. Her work, he considered, had the right admixture of ‘fancy’ and ‘truth’, ‘delicacy’ and ‘directness’ ‘that faery tales require’. She was charmed by the story, but nothing came of the planned collaboration.12
Wilde’s French, already good, improved. He began to compose epigrams in the language: ‘La poésie c’est la grammaire idéalisée’; ‘Artiste en poésie, et poète; deux choses très différentes: c. q. Gautier et Hugo.’† His letters to his mother, written in French, were, she at least declared, ‘worthy of Balzac’ – ‘so pure and eloquent’.13 And indeed Wilde’s engagement with that author’s novels, begun in America, was continued. It was an immersive experience. ‘After reading the Comédie Humaine,’ Wilde later declared, ‘one begins to believe that the only real people are the people who never existed… A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and acquaintances to the shadows of shades.’14 He developed a particular cult for Lucien de Rubempbré, the beautiful would-be poet, who arrives in Paris full of hopes for a literary career, is seduced by the criminal underworld, betrays his friends and family, and, after a brief season of triumph, ends up in prison, where he commits suicide. Wilde called Lucien’s death ‘one of the greatest tragedies of my life’ – ‘a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.’15
The Balzacian dressing gown was not Wilde’s only sartorial acquisition that season. He began to model his dress on Lucien’s ‘elegancies’, assuming the costume and manner of an 1830s dandy – his trousers and sleeves so tight as to draw comment on the boulevards. He even carried – as Balzac had done – a turquoise-headed ivory cane. It was part of a complete transformation in appearance that he effected while in Paris. Inspired by a bust of Nero at the Louvre, he had his hair cut and curled in the same manner. He let it be thought that he had taken his barber specially to inspect the sculpture. The result was, he considered, a huge success: an outward symbol of his new vision of himself – as Olympian lecturer, successful playwright and Impressionist poet. ‘The Oscar of the first period is dead,’ he declared. ‘We are now concerned with the Oscar of
the second period.’16
As the pressure of his dramatic deadlines eased, and spring advanced, Wilde went out more into society. Having arrived in Paris with several introductions – and several copies of Poems – he now began to make use of them. He was taken up by Kate Moore, the formidable American socialite and hostess. He found himself invited to literary salons, exhibition openings and dinner parties. He received a gratifying invitation to visit the great man of letters, Edmond de Goncourt. The way had been paved by the art critic and friend of Whistler Théodore Duret, as well as by Wilde’s own gift of Poems, sent with a flattering letter to the infinitely admired ‘auteur de La Faustine’. Goncourt, an inveterate gossip, was amused by Wilde’s tales of literary London – recording in his diary: ‘He described how Swinburne… had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his pederasty and bestiality, without being in the slightest way either a pederast or a bestialist.’ Goncourt was intrigued by Wilde’s own sexual identity, setting him down as of ‘doubtful sex’ (‘au sexe douteux’).17
Wilde spent much time among painters and pictures. It may be that he even planned to take up his idea of studying painting, although nothing seems to have come of it. Whistler’s name secured him an entré into the Impressionist circles of the Paris art world. He attended a reception given by Giuseppe de Nittis (a painter of exquisite metropolitan street scenes), where he cut a distinctive figure, leaning against the tapestried wall, under the flambeaux, talking of pictures to Camille Pissarro and Jean-Charles Cazin. Even the famously gruff Degas was inclined to listen. And although he considered that the newly dandified Wilde had the look of someone playing Lord Byron in a provincial theatre, he was impressed enough to invite him to his studio.18
Wilde saw a good deal of the expatriate American artist John Singer Sargent. They dined together on the Left Bank at Lavenue, where Sargent made a sketch of him – together with the writer Paul Bourget – in the restaurant’s ‘album’.19 Wilde went round the galleries with Jacques-Emile Blanche; the well-connected young painter, a friend of Walter Sickert, was, flatteringly, exhibiting a picture of a woman reading a copy of Wilde’s Poems.20 Sickert himself came over to Paris that spring, accompanying Whistler’s picture Arrangement in the Grey and Black (The Artist’s Mother) on its way to the salon. ‘Remember he travels no longer as Walter Sickert,’ Whistler explained to Wilde; he was now an ambassador: ‘Of course he is amazing – for does he not represent The Amazing One.’ He stayed with Wilde at the Hôtel Voltaire. In their talks about art, Sickert passed on a comment by Degas: ‘Il y a quelque chose plus terrible encore que le bourgeois – c’est l’homme qui nous singe’ (‘There is one thing more terrible than the bourgeois – that is the man who apes us’). Wilde noted it in his commonplace book.21
Among Wilde’s useful contacts was Burne-Jones’s one-time muse, the beautiful and wealthy Maria Cassavetti Zambaco. Wilde, in his 1877 Grosvenor Gallery review, had described her – in her role as Vivien in Burne-Jones’s Beguiling of Merlin – as ‘tall, lithe… beautiful and subtle to look on, like a snake’. She was living in Paris, studying sculpture with Rodin. Young artists and writers – Sargent and Bourget among them – gathered at her table. At one of her dinners Wilde encountered a twenty-two-year-old Englishman called Robert Sherard. He was a striking figure, tall, blue-eyed with regular features, a broad brow and long blond hair. Wilde at first thought he was part of the entertainment: ‘Herr Schultze on the violoncello’. He was soon disabused.
To Wilde’s vivid account of how he would pass happy hours at the Louvre contemplating the beauties of the Venus de Milo, Sherard responded, with a blunt disavowal of all artistic interests: ‘I have never been to the Louvre.’ He claimed. ‘When that name is mentioned, I always think of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, where I can get the cheapest ties in Paris.’ Wilde was both intrigued and attracted. He recognized that the young man had ‘scientifically’ thought out a pose that might interest him.22 ‡
Living amid the excitements of a foreign city, Wilde wanted a comrade. And Sherard, it seemed, had potential. The son (like Frank Miles) of a wealthy Anglican cleric, he had abandoned Oxford to come to Paris and write. Thus far his main claim to literary distinction was as the great-grandson of William Wordsworth, but he had just finished a novel, was busy on a volume of poems, and contributed occasional articles to the press. Cut off by his disapproving father, he lived the bohemian life. But he was eager for literary connections. He counted Alphonse Daudet as a friend, and he could claim an acquaintance with Victor Hugo. On the evening after that first meeting Wilde invited Sherard to dinner amid the discreet opulence of Foyot’s, in the rue de Tournon. Living in daily expectation of Mary Anderson’s $4,000, Wilde announced that ‘we dine with the duchess tonight’. It was the first of an almost daily round of meals and meetings over the coming six weeks.23
Sherard liked to present himself as a gloomy Calvinist, lit up by Wilde, the ‘joyous Celt’. But, though there might be some truth in this picture, it fails to convey how attractive the young Sherard was as a person and a personality. One contemporary recalled him as ‘astonishingly handsome’, another as ‘a superb specimen of blond manhood’. His face and his story gave him an air of romance. And if some people considered that he was like the doomed poet Chatterton, he encouraged the idea. There was energy there too. He was sometimes gauche and crass, but he could also be described as ‘a wonderful person… exceptionally well informed, and possessed of a tremendous flow of conversation on any and every imaginable subject… a constant joy and surprise to his intimates’.24 Wilde certainly found him both ‘lovable’ and stimulating; his descriptive powers were rare (‘touched with colour, and tinged with joy’), and they shared ‘a desire for beauty in all things’.25
But if Sherard was to be a friend, he was obliged also to acknowledge his position as a disciple. At their second meeting, when Sherard had called for Wilde at his hotel and admired the view from his rooms, out across the river, Wilde had asserted his position with the remark, ‘Oh, that is altogether immaterial, except to the innkeeper, who, of course, charges it in the bill. A gentleman never looks out of the window.’26 Having established his authority, Wilde carried Sherard off on a happy progress of Parisian pleasures – dinners, lunches, theatres, excursions, suppers. He always paid; Sherard assumed that he must be a very wealthy man. There were spontaneous gifts. When Sherard admired a print by Puvis de Chavannes propped above Wilde’s desk – the strange image of a young, naked woman seated on ‘her unravelled shroud’ in a verdant landscape – Wilde presented it to him, inscribing the mount with Musset’s line, ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’, and advising that the image might look best in ‘a slender, narrow frame of vermilion streaked with a line of grey’.27
They called on Sarah Bernhardt in her dressing room at the Vaudeville Theatre during the performance; she was delighted to see her old London friend. And later they visited her home, on the avenue de Villiers, where Sherard was impressed that an elderly playwright, who was also present, addressed Wilde as ‘cher maître’. Wilde found the old author ‘tedious’ – his favourite adjective of disapprobation that season. They visited Wilde’s barber together. The new ‘Neronian coiffure’ required almost daily maintenance. And Sherard was persuaded to have his ‘honey-coloured’ hair curled too, for once.28 As a return for all these favours, Sherard brought Wilde to a reception chez Victor Hugo. Wilde impressed the assembled company with his now well-rehearsed tales about Swinburne’s peculiarities, although the octogenarian Hugo failed even to register his scintillating guest; he was dozing in his chair by the fireside.29
During those weeks, as Sherard recalled them, there was, for the two companions, ‘nothing outside literature’; it dominated all their thoughts and discussions. Wilde presented his new friend with a copy of Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf, hoping he would enjoy the poems and admire L’Envoi. He also sought out for him a small volume on the poet Gérard de Nerval. The French Romantic author, who had paraded through the Palais-Ro
yal gardens with a lobster on a blue ribbon, was one of their shared passions.§ They talked, too, of other poets, dead before their time; of Chatterton and Poe, and above all of Baudelaire, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal.30
Wilde – through his study of Swinburne – had already registered the attractions of Baudelaire, but now, back in Paris, he engaged anew with the poet: his verse, his life and his ideas. He enthused Sherard with an appreciation for the morbid horrors of ‘The Carcase’ and ‘The Murderer’s Wine’, and the stately cadences of ‘La Musique’.31 He grappled again with the challenging idea that an artist could take subjects previously excluded from consideration as evil or ugly and make them beautiful through art.
Among the epigrams he composed that spring was: ‘The Greeks discovered that “le beau était beau:” we, that “le laid est beau aussi.”’ He also recorded the following exchange from his meeting with Coquelin:
Coquelin: Qu’est-ce que c’est la civilization, Monsieur Wilde?
Ego: L’amour du beau.
Coquelin: Qu’est-ce que c’est le beau?
Ego: Ce que les bourgeois appellent le laid.
Oscar Page 37
