Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers Page 22

  ‘No, nothing at all.’

  ‘Rex LaSalle,’ said Oscar. ‘Does that name ring a bell?’

  ‘LaSalle,’ she repeated. ‘Is it French?’

  ‘He comes from Jersey,’ said Oscar. ‘He speaks French. He is a very handsome young man. He’s an actor or an artist – at least he’s not gainfully employed. He claims to be a vampire, believe it or not.’

  Jane laughed. ‘Oh, I believe it,’ she said. ‘We get a lot of young men claiming to be vampires. They think it gives them a licence to do the most extraordinary things!’ She held up the notebook and considered it carefully. ‘I know the type, but I don’t know the name.’

  ‘Lulu never mentioned him?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘And Bram Stoker? Have you heard his name before?’

  ‘It is a strange name. I would have remembered it, I am sure. It means nothing to me, Monsieur.’

  ‘I am pleased to hear it, Mademoiselle. I have known Bram Stoker since I was a boy. He stole my first sweetheart. He’s a thief, with red hair and a beard as well as a moustache, but, even so, I’d be sorry to find he was a murderer.’

  Oscar’s finger moved to the top of the page.

  ‘And how about Mr Parker? He is butler to the Duke of Albemarle.’

  Jane shook her head. ‘These names mean nothing, Monsieur Wilde. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Lavallois never mentioned the name of the Duke of Albemarle – you are certain of that? This is important.’

  Jane sighed. ‘I have not heard the name before. Of course, that does not mean that Lulu did not know him. Not every lover tells you his real name. We have dukes who pay us court pretending to be nobodies – and, naturally, nobodies who pretend to be dukes. We meet rather more of those, but it hardly matters. A man is just a man when the clothes come off.’

  She looked down at the notebook once more and smiled.

  ‘But a prince is something else. As a rule, a prince is too well known to masquerade under a nom de guerre. Besides, he likes to be treated royally, whatever the circumstances. He is so accustomed to it that he cannot cope if you do not curtsy. It’s in the blood.’

  She ran her finger across the next four names on the list.

  ‘These names, I know. Not the page, but the equerry – Monsieur Wilson – and the two princes. I have met them and Lulu knew them well.’

  ‘Lulu was fond of the Prince of Wales?’ enquired Oscar.

  ‘She adored him – and he adored her. He came to see her every spring. He came here, to Paris, to Pigalle – to the Moulin Rouge. He loved Lulu – very much. He came five years in a row – at least.’

  ‘They were lovers?’

  Jane Avril laughed. ‘They were lovers, Monsieur. There is no doubt of that.’

  ‘And Prince Albert Victor?’ asked Conan Doyle.

  ‘They were lovers, also – but that was different. The father brought the son to break him in. That’s not unusual. That happens all the time.’

  ‘Good grief,’ murmured Conan Doyle.

  Oscar laughed and took a sip of calvados. ‘Yes, Arthur. We’re a long way from Southsea now.’

  ‘The young prince came only the once,’ Jane continued. ‘According to Lulu, he is not the man his father is.’

  She smiled. Oscar poured her another drink.

  ‘And Tyrwhitt Wilson?’ he asked.

  ‘Monsieur Wilson made the arrangements,’ said Jane. ‘He brought the money – and the presents. The Prince of Wales was always generous – always a gentleman in bed and always generous afterwards. He has a fine reputation in France.’ She raised her glass and said, in English: ‘God bless the Prince of Wales!’

  ‘And was there ever a falling out between the prince and Mademoiselle Lavallois? Were there disagreements? Did you hear of problems of any kind?’

  Jane slammed her glass upon the table. ‘No, no, no. Between Lulu and the prince there was only ever the most perfect entente cordiale. That’s what he called it, I remember. Theirs was a wonderful friendship. When you saw them together you saw only happiness. The prince adored Lulu. He would not harm the smallest hair on her head. He worshipped her. He is not her murderer. I stake my life on it.’

  ‘Which leaves us with Lord Yarborough,’ said Oscar, picking up his notebook and holding it up for Jane to inspect. ‘Do you recognise his name?’

  ‘It is a peculiar name,’ said Jane. ‘I have never heard it before. Perhaps he is another English milord who comes to Paris under a different identity. Perhaps when he is here he calls himself “Monsieur Smith”.’ She laughed and sipped her brandy. ‘One night, I recall, we had six Monsieur Smiths come to visit us in our dressing room.’

  Oscar smiled. ‘Lord Yarborough is a physician,’ he explained, ‘and very distinguished – a medical doctor and also what they nowadays call a “psychiatrist”. I believe he comes to Paris regularly – to visit his colleague, Professor Charcot at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jane, raising her glass once more, ‘Professor Charcot – the great Professor Charcot. Of course. I know him well.’

  Conan Doyle sat forward. ‘Jean-Martin Charcot – you know him?’

  ‘I know him very well. I know all his secrets.’

  ‘You were his mistress?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘I was his patient, Monsieur Wilde. I was brought up at Pitié-Salpêtrière. Horrible as it is, for much of my girlhood the hospital was my home. Has Robert not told you my story?’

  She looked across the table to me and shook her head sadly.

  ‘Perhaps he was not listening. He is a man, after all.’

  ‘I have forgotten nothing,’ I protested – but, in truth, I had forgotten.

  Jane turned towards Oscar and Conan Doyle. ‘Professor Charcot was like a father to me – and to Lulu. We loved him, we feared him – eventually, we hated him. I never knew my real father. My mother said he was an Italian nobleman, but, in drink, my mother would say anything. In her cups, my mother was a monster. She beat me, so I ran away from home. I lived on the streets – a mad thing, a wild child, a beggar and a tart – until the authorities picked me up and put me away at Pitié-Salpêtrière.’

  ‘And Mademoiselle Lavallois was at the hospital, too?’

  ‘Yes, that’s where we met. She was older than me – but her story was my story. She did not know her father and she despised her mother. Her mother was a dancer, from Lyons, but Lulu was born in England. Her mother worked at one of the big London theatres and took up with a young nobleman who promised her everything and gave her nothing – apart from a dose of the clap, a baby and ten pounds. When Lulu was eleven or twelve, her mother brought her back to France – to beg and work the streets. But Lulu ran away – and went mad – and, eventually, found herself at Pitié-Salpêtrière. There were hundreds of us there, all with the same story.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said.

  ‘When did you leave the hospital?’ Oscar asked.

  ‘Six years ago, when I was sixteen. We were thrown out, Lulu and I – together. We broke the rules.’

  ‘What rules?’ asked Conan Doyle, his brow earnestly furrowed, his whole face a touching mixture of anxiety, pity and concern.

  ‘Pitié-Salpêtrière is a municipal cesspit, Doctor. It’s where the authorities dump the dregs – the lunatic and the lame, drunkards, prostitutes, opium-eaters and petty thieves, the homeless and the hopeless. Those who have nowhere else to go and are a disgrace to the fine streets of Paris are gathered up and deposited at Pitié-Salpêtrière.’

  ‘Is it not also a hospital?’

  ‘Of course it is, and the great Professor Charcot is the man in charge. The inmates are his patients and his creatures – and he can do with us what he wills. He uses us for his experiments. When we die, he cuts us up. While we live, he studies us as he pleases – he pokes, he prods. We dance for him.’

  ‘I do not follow you,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘Did you dance at the hospital?’

  ‘Yes, we danced. We loved to dance �
�� in the refectory, on the tables – and at Christmas and on special feast days for the visitors and staff. But that’s not what I meant. I meant that we danced to Professor Charcot’s tune. We did his bidding. We did what he told us to do. We had no choice.’

  ‘And what did he tell you to do?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘He told us to play our parts.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Conan Doyle. ‘I am confused.’

  ‘Professor Charcot treats madness with hypnosis. If you are having a fit of hysteria, he will calm you – he will cure you – by putting you into an hypnotic trance. He is famous for it. Every week the doors of the Pitié-Salpêtrière are thrown open for les leçons du mardi – when the great man demonstrates his skills. Young women – dressed in nothing more than night slips – are brought into the lecture theatre to entertain the crowd. We are his patients – girls gripped by hysteria. We dance for him in our bare feet. We cry, we scream, we shout. We contort our bodies and fling our arms into the air. The audience leans forward in silent, rapt attention, as we moan and writhe and lift our nightshirts to demonstrate the extremes of intimate ecstasy. And as we twist and turn and groan and sigh, the great professor describes what is occurring in the minutest detail – and then, with a few words softly spoken and the simplest gestures, he brings calm to our troubled spirits and, miraculously, restores our sanity.’

  ‘And is this treatment all fakery? Is that what you are telling us?’

  ‘No, the treatment does work – on some girls, sometimes. It does not work on all girls, always. But every Tuesday, the show goes on. The audience arrives – all Paris turns out – and Professor Charcot requires results. His favourites supply them, without fail. We do not let him down. We are mad to order. We counterfeit our fits. We act out our paroxysms. We make-believe our ecstasy. In short, we play our parts – and he rewards us.’

  ‘With money?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘With sweets and food and wine – and softer beds and acts of kindness.’

  ‘You say he was like your father,’ said Conan Doyle, nervously holding the tip of his moustache between his thumb and forefinger as he spoke. ‘Did he treat you at all times with respect?’

  Jane laughed, letting her head roll back and closing her eyes. I could see that she was quite tipsy now.

  ‘You mean – did he touch us? No, he never touched us – but he allowed others to do so. When we were on display, supposedly under hypnosis, supposedly in the throes of ecstasy, he would invite members of the audience to step forward to inspect us at close quarters. He would expose our breasts to them and allow them to place their hands between our legs to feel our ecstasy.’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ whispered Conan Doyle.

  ‘This is France,’ murmured Oscar.

  ‘Did you not object to this disgraceful behaviour?’ asked Conan Doyle, his fingers now pressed against his temples in his distress.

  ‘We did, but he would not listen. He told us to count our blessings. He reminded us that we were “under his protection”.’

  ‘What did that mean?’

  ‘The professor’s favourites – the girls like Lulu and me – were well treated at the hospital. The rest – “the unprotected” they were called – were treated no better than slaves. They could be taken by any man who wanted them: the hospital guards, the medical students, other patients, anybody. While I was at Pitié-Salpêtrière at least three of the young girls in our dormitory contracted syphilis. All three of them died – horribly. Professor Charcot would not allow them mercury treatment – he wanted to use their bodies for his experiments. And he did. And when Lulu and I threatened to report what had happened to the board of the hospital, he laughed at us and told us we had broken the rules for the last time. Then he threw us out, back on to the streets.’

  ‘The man is a monster,’ gasped Conan Doyle.

  ‘And a national hero,’ said Oscar. ‘He is one of the great scientists of our time.’

  ‘He is a murderer,’ said Conan Doyle.

  ‘But his English friend – how do you call him? – Lord Yarborough: he may be a very different kind of man.’

  Curious Questions

  70

  Telegram from Oscar Wilde, Gare du Nord, Paris, to Lord Yarborough, 117 Harley Street, London W., despatched at 1 p.m. on Thursday, 20 March 1890

  URGENTLY REQUEST MEETING TO DISCUSS DEVELOPMENTS IN MATTER OF ALBEMARLE AND LAVALLOIS. PLEASE ADVISE SOONEST CARE OF CONAN DOYLE LANGHAM HOTEL. RESPECTFULLY OSCAR WILDE

  71

  Telegram from Oscar Wilde, Gare du Nord, Paris, to Constance Wilde, 16 Tite Street, Chelsea, despatched at 1 p.m. on Thursday, 20 March 1890

  I CAME TO PARIS AND FOUND YOU WERE NOT HERE. AM RETURNING TO LONDON BEFORE THE WEEK IS OUT. KISS OUR BOYS FOR ME AND TELL THEM THE EIFFEL TOWER IS AS HIDEOUS AS THEIR MOTHER IS LOVELY. OSCAR

  72

  From the journal of Arthur Conan Doyle

  I am exhausted. I have barely slept in forty hours. And I have drunk too much.

  The sky is dark and the English Channel at her least hospitable. Huge waves are crashing on to the deck above. I am sheltering below – wrapped in a blanket, wedged into a wicker deckchair in a corner of the first-class saloon. Around me, others with grey faces are tightly wrapped up, eyes closed, bent only on endurance. Oscar and Robert Sherard are rolled up in their blankets, lying on the wooden benches fixed to the saloon walls.

  I am writing because I cannot sleep and I cannot see to read, but whether I shall ever be able to decipher what I am scrawling here only time will tell. My mood is oddly melancholy. Ten years ago, in the spring of 1880, on such a day as this, in such a storm as this, I set sail from Peterhead on the good ship Hope – a whaler bound for Greenland. I was twenty, a young ship’s doctor hungry for adventure, and the worse the tempest grew, the more I relished it. Today all I feel is deep weariness and faint apprehension.

  As we crossed from the railway train to the steamer at Calais, I told Oscar of my whaling days. Walking up the ramp on to the SS Dover Castle I boasted of my six months in the North Atlantic pitted against the elements.

  Oscar told me, teasingly: ‘I went salmon fishing once, with my father, off the coast in Connemara. It was one of the most dispiriting days of my life. He talked of nothing but past triumphs and we returned home, cruelly sunburnt, with a desiccated bloater and an old brown boot.’

  I said, grandly: ‘To play a salmon is a royal game, but when your fish weighs more than a suburban villa it dwarfs all other experience.’

  ‘I believe it, Arthur,’ he replied, and, suddenly, he seemed in earnest. (I do not quite understand him yet: his tone can change as swiftly as the turning of a coin.) ‘And when you caught and killed your Moby Dick,’ he asked, ‘what was it like?’

  ‘Not as I had expected. Amid all the excitement – and no one who has not held an oar in such a scene can tell how exciting it is – I found that my sympathy lay with the poor hunted creature.’

  ‘You were close to it?’

  ‘Our boat was right alongside. We were roped to it – our harpoons embedded in its flesh.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And you looked into the creature’s eyes?’

  ‘The whale has a small eye,’ I said, ‘little larger than that of a bullock, and I will never forget the silent sadness that I saw in it as it dimmed over in death within a hand’s touch of me.’

  Before the wind rose and the rain came, while our ship remained moored, sheltered in the harbour, and Sherard went below deck in search of further refreshment, Oscar and I stood together at the stern, side by side, holding the ship’s rail, smoking our cigarettes, watching the men working on the quayside.

  ‘I wonder which is easier,’ said Oscar, ‘to kill a whale or send a man to the gallows?’

  ‘That’s a curious question.’

  ‘Tonight or tomorrow, we shall look into the eyes of our murderer, Arthur. What shall we do then?’

  ‘Hand him over to the police.’

  ‘Do you think so? Wh
oever he is?’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Whoever he is. We will have no choice.’

  ‘Oh, we will have a choice, Arthur. There is always a choice.’

  ‘We will do what our conscience dictates,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Arthur,’ he cried, throwing the butt of his cigarette into the black and white water below us, and turning towards me despairingly. ‘The spirit of Southsea really does run deep in you. In my experience, conscience and cowardice are the same things. Conscience is merely the trade-name of the firm.’

  ‘Let’s see if we get our man first,’ I said, trying to deflect him. ‘You imply that you know who the murderer is.’

  ‘We have evidence still to gather,’ he said, ‘and issues to resolve – but, yes, on balance, I think that I do. Don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ I said, emphatically. ‘Jane Avril was a convincing witness, don’t you think?’

  ‘She was drunk, of course,’ said Oscar.

  ‘Only towards the end – and, as we know, what’s said when drunk was thought when sober.’

  Oscar laughed. ‘You and Harry Tyrwhitt Wilson should get together to exchange wise saws and modern instances.’

  He turned up his collar against the growing wind.

  ‘But, yes, Mademoiselle Avril’s testimony rang true, even at the end. I found it most affecting, especially the story of her loveless childhood – and that of little Lulu Lavallois.’ He turned to look at me with the utmost seriousness. ‘You and I have been blessed in our mothers, Arthur. They have never betrayed us, never let us down. They have loved us from the start – and will love us at the finish.’

  I agreed. ‘Mothers are everything,’ I said.

  ‘With good mothering, a man won’t turn to murder,’ he added. ‘It’s well known. It’s why, in the long annals of crime, there have been so few Jewish murderers.’

  ‘We are indeed blessed,’ I said. ‘We have good mothers – and good wives.’

  ‘Oh, Arthur,’ he exclaimed. ‘Leave wives out of this. It’s the wives that drive most men to murder. It’s a good mother that counts. You get only one mother. You can always get another wife.’