Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile Page 6

  Maman, you will be relieved to know, has recovered completely from the tragic loss of poor Marie Antoinette. We buried her at sea (Marie Antoinette, not Ma man!) in your trunk. The ship’s captain conducted a brief ceremony on the main deck when we were halfway across the Channel and then, together, he and Edmond and Richard Marais heaved your trunk overboard. Maman sobbed and wailed while the rest of us did our best not to giggle. Fortunately the wind was very sharp so that we all appeared to have tears in our eyes.

  The day after our return to Paris Edmond found a new poodle for Maman. She has named this one the Princesse de Lamballe, after Queen Marie Antoinette’s closest friend and confidante. It seems a curious choice of name to me, given the fate of the original Princesse de Lamballe. As I recall, at the height of the Revolution the unfortunate lady was handed over to the mob, raped, beaten and butchered to death. Her head, her arms, her legs —even, I believe, her breasts — were chopped off and displayed on spikes. It was worse than a first night in Marseilles.

  Anyway, Maman is now contente and because she is contente he is content. People say that Alys Lenoir was the love of Edmond’s life. Perhaps she was. I do not know. He never speaks of her. As far as I can tell, it is Maman he lives for — Maman and the great La Grange heritage!

  He loves me too, of course — after his fashion. I know that you do not believe me, Oscar, but I love him, also, and I am grateful to him. He is my protector. I do not know how it is in England, but in France every leading actress must have a protector, a kind gentleman who will feed her, clothe her, pay her rent. In France, every actress must pay for her own costumes! It can’t be done without a protector. Until Edmond took me under his wing I was doing what the other girls do: going out onto the stage each night to scan the boxes. When I caught a particular gentleman’s eye he’d give the signal — folding his programme over the edge of his box and raising his fingers to indicate the number of five-franc pieces he was ready to offer for the night. Edmond has spared me all that. He is a good man — and a great actor.

  And he loves you. And misses you. All he wants in life is applause — and cards — and conversation. He wants your conversation, Oscar! He wants your company. We all do. Traquair, in particular, asks to be remembered to you. He works hard as Edmond’s dresser, but he is lonely. I am trying to teach him French. I have to go! The bell has just gone. I must cover my inadequate breasts and put on my dress for Chimène! It’s Corneille tonight —not many laughs. We want to laugh, Oscar, that’s why we need you. Come to Paris, cher Oscar, come as soon as you can.

  Oscar did as he was bidden. He travelled from London to Paris by the boat-train on Tuesday, 30 January 1883.

  5

  ‘What is your Name?’

  It was in Paris in the early spring of 1883 that I first met Oscar Wilde. I was a callow youth of twenty-one — fair-haired, pale-faced, full of dreams and diffidence. He was twenty-eight and, so it seemed to me, the master of all he surveyed.

  We met, by chance, in the refurbished foyer of the Théâtre La Grange at the fashionable end of the boulevard du Temple, at around eleven o’clock on a Friday morning at the beginning of February. I was standing by the theatre box office. I had just bought myself a single ticket for that evening’s performance of Le Cid. Oscar stepped into the foyer from the back of the stalls. He had been attending a rehearsal of Hamlet. He wore a red suit and a white carnation in his buttonhole. He paused for a moment to light a cigarette. I caught his eye. I smiled awkwardly as my cheeks burnt. I recognised him at once. I had seen his photograph often. I owned a copy of his Poems.

  ‘You have the advantage of me, monsieur,’ he said, stepping towards me with an outstretched hand. ‘Where have we met before?’ He spoke in French. ‘Was it in Parnassus in other times? Or, last week, outside the boulangerie in the rue de Turbigo? Remind me.’

  ‘We’ve not met before,’ I mumbled in English as he shook my hand.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  I hesitated. I looked up at him. He was much taller than me. ‘Sherard, sir,’ I said, ‘Robert Harborough Sherard.’

  He let go of my hand and tilted his large head gently to one side. He surveyed my appearance. He glanced at the battered attaché case that I was holding close to my chest. He narrowed his eyes and chewed a moment on his lower lip. ‘I don’t believe you, sir,’ he said, smiling at me. ‘That’s not your name. How intriguing to begin our friendship upon a lie. I think we will be friends, don’t you? What is your name?’

  ‘Robert Harborough Sherard,’ I repeated, now scarlet with embarrassment.

  ‘That’s not your name — or, if it is, it’s only part of it. What is your real name, Robert?’

  ‘Robert Sherard is my real name now,’ I said. ‘My name was Robert Kennedy until a month ago.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Oscar, blowing a long blue-grey plume of smoke into the air and following its progress with his eyes.

  ‘I had a dispute with my father,’ I stammered, ‘a row over money, and, as a consequence, I confess it, I have changed my name.

  Oscar looked down at me and disarmed me with his smile. ‘A lie and a confession within moments of our meeting … We are going to be close friends, Robert, I’m sure of that. Have you half an hour to spare? Shall we take coffee — or absinthe? Absinthe makes the heart beat faster.’

  Without waiting for my answer, he swept ahead of me, out of the theatre foyer and into the boulevard du Temple. As we passed a poster for the Compagnie La Grange, he paused and ran his finger across the name of Gabrielle de la Tourbillon. ‘That isn’t her real name, either. Everyone’s pretending to be somebody else nowadays.’ He strode ahead, taking it for granted that I would follow. He crossed the road, weaving his way between the trundling carriages, throwing his cigarette end into the gutter and clapping his hands together as if in anticipation of a special treat. He led me down a narrow side street and into a cobbled alley.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said, pushing open the door of a small and dingy estaminet. ‘They’ll look after us here.’ We sat, face to face, across a tiny table by the bar. ‘It’s good to meet you, Robert. The café is Walloon, the absinthe is Swiss, I am Irish and you are — what? English, I assume.’

  ‘English, yes, though I was brought up in Italy and Germany — and Guernsey. My father is an Anglican chaplain.’

  ‘Guernsey,’ said Oscar, smiling broadly. The idea seemed to amuse him vastly. ‘Where the cows come from.’

  ‘My parents shared a house in Guernsey with Victor Hugo,’ I said.

  ‘By all that’s wonderful!’ exclaimed Oscar. ‘Tell me your story, Robert — and I shall try to spot the lies.’

  ‘It’s true about Victor Hugo,’ I insisted. ‘I shall only tell you the truth.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, as the barman placed two empty glasses, a carafe of water and a bottle of absinthe on the table. ‘A lie is often so much more amusing than the truth.’

  ‘It is because of Victor Hugo that I am a writer,’ I said seriously. ‘And because of my great-grandfather, I suppose.

  ‘Your great-grandfather?’ he repeated, pouring an inch of the green liquid into my glass.

  I hesitated. ‘William Wordsworth,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘William Wordsworth, the Poet Laureate? Is this true?’ From a bowl on the table he picked up a small lump of sugar and held it lightly between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘It is. My mother is Wordsworth’s granddaughter.’

  ‘Is she?’ He lifted the carafe of water and slowly, carefully, poured a trickle of water over the sugar lump into my glass.

  ‘She is.’

  ‘I wish she wasn’t, Robert.’ He put down the carafe and the sugar and leant forward across the table. ‘I wish you had continued as you began — with a pack of lies.’ He looked earnestly into my eyes.

  ‘Do you?’ I asked anxiously. I was confused.

  ‘I do, Robert. You see, many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if
nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, as you seem to have done, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy appetite for truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels that are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. You are not writing a novel, are you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ He sighed. ‘A three-volume novel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He reached for the absinthe and poured himself a generous dose. ‘This is dreadful news, Robert. Is it far advanced?’

  ‘It is nearly finished,’ I said.

  He shook his head mournfully and peered bleakly into his glass.

  ‘I also write poetry,’ I added.

  He brightened a little. ‘In the Wordsworth vein?’

  ‘I hope it is original,’ I said, somewhat stiffly.

  ‘No daffodils?’ he asked.

  ‘I am not a plagiarist,’ I replied.

  ‘Do not disdain plagiarism, Robert,’ he said. ‘You have read my poems — I plagiarise. I do so without shame. Plagiarism is the privilege of the appreciative man.’ He smiled at me once more and clinked the side of his glass against mine. ‘In a poet, plagiarism is excusable and lying quite essential. Lying — the telling of beautiful untrue things — is the proper aim of art.’

  That Friday morning in February 1883, in a drab café off the boulevard du Temple, as the green fairy within the absinthe bottle began to weave her spell, Oscar Wilde dazzled me with paradoxes and made me his friend for life. He charmed me in the way that all true charmers do: he made me feel that I was the only person that mattered to him. I was unaccustomed to such attention. He asked me to tell him my story and I did. It did not take long.

  I was in Paris, alone, existing in a rooming-house in the rue de Beauce, earning my crust with bits and pieces of translation work. I was a linguist, but my university career had come to nothing. I had left Oxford because my father had curtailed my allowance. I had left the University of Bonn because he had cut it off altogether. My father disapproved of my republican views and my bohemian ways. He despised my ambition. I had hopes of becoming a full-time writer. I had enjoyed some small success as a part-time journalist. I had secured interviews with three of the great literary figures of the day — Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet — and published accounts of my encounters. In Paris I cultivated the company of men of achievement and, when I managed to meet them, I found that they accepted me; not (I realise now) because I was remarkable or beautiful (no one has ever thought me that!), but simply because I was young. As Oscar liked to say: ‘Youth is a calling card that will gain you admittance anywhere — use it while you may.

  As we were preparing to leave the estaminet, when we had finished our bottle of absinthe (the lunch hour had been and gone), I said to my new friend, ‘Oscar,’ — he insisted that I call him ‘Oscar’ — ‘when we first met this morning, how did you know that Sherard was not my name?’

  ‘Because when I asked you, “What is your name?” you hesitated, Robert. No man hesitates over his own name. And then, when you gave me your answer, you looked me in the eye; it was a look of defiance that said, “Here is my name — take it or leave it.” And, of course, I noticed the battered attaché case that you were clutching to your breast, with the initials RHSK neatly imprinted beneath the lock. You called yourself “Robert Harborough Sherard”. I knew the K must stand for something.’

  I laughed. I was quite drunk by now. ‘So it’s Oscar Wilde, poet and detective, is it?’

  ‘It is,’ he said, draining his glass and joining in my laughter. ‘And why not? I have come to Paris. I admire the writings of the late Mr Edgar Allan Poe. Let his gentleman detective, le Monsieur Dupin, be my role model!’ He rose to his feet, a little unsteadily, and gazed down upon me seated at the table.

  I reached to the side of my chair to retrieve my tell-tale attaché case. I looked up at him and smiled. ‘Actually, Oscar, tell me, why have you come to Paris? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I have come to write a play — a play of my own. And I have come to assist the great Edmond La Grange with his production of another man’s play: Master Shakespeare’s Hamlet.’ He paused and touched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘And I have come, also, because fate favours the fearless and I am investigating a murder.’

  ‘A murder?’ I repeated, gazing up at him, amazed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding at me with half-closed eyes, ‘the murder of a dog — an unfortunate creature called Marie Antoinette.’

  From that morning onwards, Oscar and I were friends. When we next met — the following evening, for a supper of oysters and champagne at his hotel on the quai Voltaire — he told me of his adventures in America and of the drama that had unfolded when the SS Bothnia docked at Liverpool. ‘The dog was dead,’ he said, ‘but nobody really cared. Curious that.’

  He told me, too, that our encounter coincided with a sea-change in his life. He was entering a new era in a new country and, consequently, he required a new wardrobe. ‘We are now concerned with the Oscar Wilde of the second period, Robert,’ he explained. ‘Let me assure you that he has nothing in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly.’ We went shopping for clothes together. I helped him to dress in the manner of a sophisticated Frenchman of the day, with a silk top hat and a well-cut double-breasted redingote (dove grey, with blue-black buttons) . I accompanied him and his hairdresser to the Musée du Louvre where Oscar showed us a bust of the Emperor Nero and declared that this was the look that he now required for his locks: ‘Roman and imperial’.

  Night after night we dined together. We always ate well (Oscar was the most generous of hosts) and, usually, we drank too much. I amused him by suggesting that white wine was misnamed and should, in truth, be called yellow. He took the idea for his own and rewarded me by telling me that my pale yellow hair was also misnamed: it was, in truth, honey-coloured.

  As we wined and dined, as we walked together along the banks of the River Seine smoking our post-prandial cigarettes, we talked of life and love — and women. Oscar told me of the women in his life: of Florrie and Lillie and Violet and Charlotte, girls that he had loved and lost. He told me, too, of Constance, the girl from Dublin whom he thought he might one day marry. ‘She has beauty and spirit and a name that suits a wife. And, Robert, she reads Dante in Italian — and understands him!’ I told him that I had never been in love.

  Oscar took me to the Théâtre La Grange and introduced me to the company. With the permission of Richard Marais, the company’s ever present homme d’affaires, I was allowed to sit in on the Hamlet rehearsals as a silent observer. Oscar presented me quite formally to Edmond La Grange and to his children, the twins, the young stars of the production: Bernard and Agnès La Grange. They were a striking couple, dark and so beautiful, with skin like burnished olives. Oscar said that they were ‘strange creatures, wild and difficult to know’. He considered the boy, Bernard, ‘spoilt and probably unreachable’, but he believed that Agnès ‘could be tamed’. ‘She has a delicate beauty and a fierce intelligence, but she is troubled and fragile. She wants the love of a good man. Why don’t you fall in love with Agnès, Robert? You are twenty-one, a writer with prospects and honey-coloured hair. She is twenty, an Indian princess, gifted and unattached. She is devoted to her father and he to her, but, so far as I can tell, she has no serious suitors. Fall in love with Agnès La Grange, Robert. Live dangerously. Go on.

  I did not do as Oscar counselled. Instead, I did something very foolish and much more dangerous. I fell i
n love not with Agnès La Grange, but with her father’s mistress. I fell in love with Gabrielle de la Tourbillon.

  6

  Decadence

  That spring Oscar and I spent many days and nights within the orbit of the Compagnie La Grange. Oscar was dazzled by the great leading man and I was bewitched by the old actor’s young mistress. During the Hamlet rehearsals Oscar and La Grange would sit together on the stage, side by side, at a small table set in front of the footlights. When La Grange (who was playing Claudius) was not required in a scene, he would direct proceedings from the table, referring to Oscar constantly. ‘It is our translation, but he is your poet, Oscar; you must tell us where we are going wrong.’

  Oscar was flattered by La Grange’s attention, but embarrassed by it, too. He was anxious not to irritate the other actors. They were skilful players: they knew what they were doing. Bernard La Grange, though only twenty, was clearly going to give a performance of extraordinary grace and intelligence. Even at the first reading, Oscar realised that Bernard’s Hamlet was likely to be one of the great performances of the age. Oscar decided, therefore, that except in matters that directly concerned the text and the translation, he would say as little as possible. He was grateful to be allowed a ringside seat as the production evolved and determined not to overplay his hand.