Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (288 page)

“Delighted to see you, Jean.”

For some reason or other, most probably out of tawdry vanity, Lorrain folded his arms theatrically and replied:

“I regret I cannot say as much: I can no longer be one of your friends, M. Wilde.”

The insult was stupid, brutal; yet everyone was on tiptoe to see how Oscar would answer it.

“How true that is,” he said quietly, as quickly as if he had expected the traitor-thrust, “how true and how sad! At a certain time in life all of us who have done anything like you and me, Lorrain, must realise that we no longer have any friends in this world; but only lovers.” (Plus d’amis, seulement des amants.)

A smile of approval lighted up every face.

“Well said, well said,” was the general exclamation. His humour was almost invariably generous, kind.

One day in a Paris studio the conversation turned on the character of Marat: one Frenchman would have it that he was a fiend, another saw in him the incarnation of the revolution, a third insisted that he was merely the gamin of the Paris streets grown up. Suddenly one turned to Oscar, who was sitting silent, and asked his opinion: he took the ball at once, gravely.

“
Ce malheureux! Il n’avait pas de veine — pour une fois qu’il a pris un bain
....” (Poor devil, he was unlucky! To come to such grief for once taking a bath.)

For a little while Oscar was interested in the Dreyfus case, and especially in the Commandant Esterhazy, who played such a prom
inent part in it with the infamous
bordereau
which brought about the conviction of Dreyfus. Most Frenchmen now know that the
bordereau
was a forgery and without any real value.

I was curious to see Esterhazy, and Oscar brought him to lunch one day at Durand’s. He was a little below middle height, extremely thin and as dark as any Italian, with an enormous hook nose and heavy jaw. He looked to me like some foul bird of prey: greed and cunning in the restless brown eyes set close together, quick resolution in the out-thrust, bony jaws and hard chin; but manifestly he had no capacity, no mind: he was meagre in all ways. For a long time he bored us by insisting that Dreyfus was a traitor, a Jew, and a German; to him a trinity of faults, whereas he, Esterhazy, was perfectly innocent and had been very badly treated. At length Oscar leant across the table and said to him in French with, strange to say, a slight Irish accent, not noticeable when he spoke English:

“The innocent,” he said, “always suffer, M. le Commandant; it is their
métier
. Besides, we are all innocent till we are found out; it is a poor, common part to play and within the compass of the meanest. The interesting thing surely is to be guilty and so wear as a halo the seduction of sin.”

Esterhazy appeared put out for a moment, and then he caught the genial gaiety of the reproof and the hint contained in it. His vanity would not allow him to remain long in a secondary
rôle
, and so, to our amazement, he suddenly broke out:

“Why should I not make my confession to you? I will. It is I, Esterhazy, who alone am guilty. I wrote the
bordereau
. I put Dreyfus in prison, and all France can not liberate him. I am the maker of the plot, and the chief part in it is mine.”

To his surprise we both roared with laughter. The influence of the larger nature on the smaller to such an extraordinary issue was irresistibly comic. At the time no one even suspected Esterhazy in connection with the
bordereau
.

Another example, this time of Oscar’s wit, may find a place here. Sir Lewis Morris was a voluminous poetaster with a common mind. He once bored Oscar by complaining that his books were boycotted by the press; after giving several instances of unfair treatment he burst out: “There’s a conspiracy against me, a conspiracy of silence; but what can one do? What should I do?”

“Join it,” replied Oscar smiling.

Oscar’s humour was for the most part intel
lectual, and something like it can be found in others, though the happy fecundity and lightsome gaiety of it belonged to the individual temperament and perished with him. I remember once trying to give an idea of the different sides of his humour, just to see how far it could be imitated.

I made believe to have met him at Paddington, after his release from Reading, though he was brought to Pentonville in private clothes by a warder on May 18th, and was released early the next morning, two years to the hour from the commencement of the Sessions at which he was convicted on May 25th. The Act says that you must be released from the prison in which you are first confined. I pretended, however, that I had met him. The train, I said, ran into Paddington Station early in the morning. I went across to him as he got out of the carriage: grey dawn filled the vast echoing space; a few porters could be seen scattered about; it was all chill and depressing.

“Welcome, welcome, Oscar!” I cried holding out my hands. “I am sorry I’m alone. You ought to have been met by troops of boys and girls flower-crowned, but alas! you will have to content yourself with one middle-aged admirer.”

“Yes, it’s really terrible, Frank,” he replied
gravely. “If England persists in treating her criminals like this, she does not deserve to have any....”

“Ah,” said an old lady to him one day at lunch, “I know you people who pretend to be a great deal worse than you are, I know you. I shouldn’t be afraid of you.”

“Naturally we pretend to be bad, dear lady,” he replied; “it is the only way to make ourselves interesting to you. Everyone believes a man who pretends to be good, he is such a bore; but no one believes a man who says he is evil. That makes him interesting.”

“Oh, you are too clever for me,” replied the old lady nodding her head. “You see in my day none of us went to Girton and Newnham. There were no schools then for the higher education of women.”

“How absurd such schools are, are they not?” cried Oscar. “Were I a despot, I should immediately establish schools for the lower education of women. That’s what they need. It usually takes ten years living with a man to complete a woman’s education.”

“Then what would you do,” asked someone, “about the lower education of man?”

“That’s already provided for, my dear fellow, amply provided for; we have our public schools and universities to see to that. What we want
are schools for the higher education of men, and schools for the lower education of women.”

Genial persiflage of this sort was his particular
forte
whether my imitation of it is good or bad.

His kindliness was ingrained. I never heard him say a gross or even a vulgar word, hardly even a sharp or unkind thing. Whether in company or with one person, his mind was all dedicated to genial, kindly, flattering thoughts. He hated rudeness or discussion or insistence as he hated ugliness or deformity.

One evening of this summer a trivial incident showed me that he was sinking deeper in the mud-honey of life.

A new play was about to be given at the Français and because he expressed a wish to see it I bought a couple of tickets. We went in and he made me change places with him in order to be able to talk to me; he was growing nearly deaf in the bad ear. After the first act we went outside to smoke a cigarette.

“It’s stupid,” Oscar began, “fancy us two going in there to listen to what that foolish Frenchman says about love; he knows nothing about it; either of us could write much better on the theme. Let’s walk up and down here under the columns and talk.”

The people began to go into the theatre again and, as they were disappearing, I said:

“It seems rather a pity to waste our tickets; so many wish to see the play.”

“We shall find someone to give them to,” he said indifferently, stopping by one of the pillars.

At that very moment as if under his hand appeared a boy of about fifteen or sixteen, one of the gutter-snipe of Paris. To my amazement, he said:

“Bon soir, Monsieur Wilde.”

Oscar turned to him smiling.

“Vous êtes Jules, n’est-ce pas?” (you are Jules, aren’t you?) he questioned.

“Oui, M. Wilde.”

“Here is the very boy you want,” Oscar cried; “let’s give him the tickets, and he’ll sell them, and make something out of them,” and Oscar turned and began to explain to the boy how I had given two hundred francs for the tickets, and how, even now, they should be worth a louis or two.

“Des jaunets” (yellow boys), cried the youth, his sharp face lighting up, and in a flash he had vanished with the tickets.

“You see he knows me, Frank,” said Oscar, with the childish pleasure of gratified vanity.

“Yes,” I replied drily, “not an acquaintance to be proud of, I should think.”

“I don’t agree with you, Frank,” he said, resenting my tone, “did you notice his eyes?
He is one of the most beautiful boys I have ever seen; an exact replica of Emilienne D’Alençon,
I call him Jules D’Alençon, and I tell her he must be her brother. I had them both dining with me once and the boy is finer than the girl, his skin far more beautiful.

“By the way,” he went on, as we were walking up the Avenue de l’Opera, “why should we not see Emilienne; why should she not sup with us, and you could compare them? She is playing at Olympia, near the Grand Hotel. Let’s go and compare Aspasia and Agathon, and for once I shall be Alcibiades, and you the moralist, Socrates.”

“I would rather talk to you,” I replied.

“We can talk afterwards, Frank, when all the stars come out to listen; now is the time to live and enjoy.”

“As you will,” I said, and we went to the Music Hall and got a box, and he wrote a little note to Emilienne D’Alençon, and she came afterwards to supper with us. Though her face was pretty she was pre-eminently dull and uninteresting without two ideas in her bird’s head. She was all greed and vanity, and could talk of nothing but the hope of getting an engagement in London: could he help her, or would Monsieur, referring to me, as a journalist get
her some good puffs in advance? Oscar promised everything gravely.

While we were supping inside, Oscar caught sight of the boy passing along the Boulevard. At once he tapped on the window, loud enough to attract his attention. Nothing loth, the boy came in, and the four of us had supper together — a strange quartette.

“Now, Frank,” said Oscar, “compare the two faces and you will see the likeness,” and indeed there was in both the same Greek beauty — the same regularity of feature, the same low brow and large eyes, the same perfect oval.

“I am telling my friend,” said Oscar to Emilienne in French, “how alike you two are, true brother and sister in beauty and in the finest of arts, the art of living,” and they both laughed.

“The boy is better looking,” he went on to me in English. “Her mouth is coarse and hard; her hands common, while the boy is quite perfect.”

“Rather dirty, don’t you think?” I could not help remarking.

“Dirty, of course, but that’s nothing; nothing is so immaterial as colouring; form is everything, and his form is perfect, as exquisite as the David of Donatello. That’s what he’s like, Frank, the David of Donatello,” and he pulled his jowl, delighted to have found the painting word.

As soon as Emilienne saw that we were
talking of the boy, her interest in the conversation vanished, even more quickly than her appetite. She had to go, she said suddenly; she was so sorry, and the discontented curiosity of her look gave place again to the smirk of affected politeness.

“
Au revoir, n’est-ce pas? à Charing Cross, n’est-ce-pas, Monsieur? Vous ne m’oublierez pas?...
”

As we turned to walk along the boulevard I noticed that the boy, too, had disappeared. The moonlight was playing with the leaves and boughs of the plane trees and throwing them in Japanese shadow-pictures on the pavement: I was given over to thought; evidently Oscar imagined I was offended, for he launched out into a panegyric on Paris.

“The most wonderful city in the world, the only civilised capital; the only place on earth where you find absolute toleration for all human frailties, with passionate admiration for all human virtues and capacities.

“Do you remember Verlaine, Frank? His life was nameless and terrible, he did everything to excess, was drunken, dirty and debauched, and yet there he would sit in a café on the Boul’ Mich’, and everybody who came in would bow to him, and call him
maître
and be proud of any sign of recognition from him because he was a great poet.

“In England they would have murdered Verlaine, and men who call themselves gentlemen would have gone out of their way to insult him in public. England is still only half-civilised; Englishmen touch life at one or two points without suspecting its complexity. They are rude and harsh.”

All the while I could not help thinking of Dante and his condemnation of Florence, and its “hard, malignant people,” the people who still had something in them of “the mountain and rock” of their birthplace:— “
E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno.
”

“You are not offended, Frank, are you, with me, for making you meet two caryatides of the Parisian temple of pleasure?”

“No, no,” I cried, “I was thinking how Dante condemned Florence and its people, its ungrateful malignant people, and how when his teacher, Brunetto Latini, and his companions came to him in the underworld, he felt as if he, too, must throw himself into the pit with them. Nothing prevented him from carrying out his good intention (
buona voglia
) except the fear of being himself burned and baked as they were. I was just thinking that it was his great love for Latini which gave him the deathless words: