The warden then got very red, because he no longer understood.—‘But P … also says that he’s the one who started! I can’t understand …’

“Imagine that, dear!! He couldn’t understand! He was very embarrassed; he kept saying, ‘But I gave him two weeks …’ and then he added, ‘All right, if that’s how things stand, I’m going to give both of you two weeks.’ Isn’t that extraordinary! That man had no sort of imagination.”

Wilde was enormously amused at what he was saying; he was laughing; he was happy to be telling a story:

“And naturally, after the two weeks, we had a greater desire to talk to one another than before. You don’t know how sweet that can seem, to feel that we were suffering for each other.—Little by little, as we weren’t in the same line every day, little by little I was able to speak to each of the others; to all! to all!… I knew each one’s name, each one’s history, and when he was to leave prison … And to each one of them I would say, ‘When you get out of prison, the first thing you’re to do is to go to the post-office; there will be a letter for you with some money.’—With the result that, in that way, I continue to know them, because I love them very much. And some of them are quite delightful. Would you believe that already three of them have come to see me here! Isn’t that quite wonderful?…

“The one who replaced the nasty warden was a very charming man, aoh! remarkable! quite pleasant to me … And you can’t imagine how much good it did me in prison that Salomé was being played in Paris precisely at that time. Here it had been completely forgotten that I was a man of letters! When they saw here that my play was a success in Paris, they said to themselves, ‘Well! that’s certainly strange! so he has talent.’ And from that moment on, I was allowed to read all the books I liked.

“I thought at first that what would please me most would be Greek literature. I asked for Sophocles, but I couldn’t take to it. Then I thought of the Church Fathers; but they didn’t interest me either. And all at once, I thought of Dante … oh! Dante! I read Dante every day; in Italian; I read him all through; but neither the Purgatory nor the Paradise seemed to be written for me. It was his Inferno especially that I read; how could I have helped loving it? We were in Hell. Hell was the prison …”

That same evening he told me his plan for a drama about Pharaoh and an ingenious story about Judas.

The next day he took me into a charming little house, two hundred yards from the hotel, which he had rented and was beginning to have furnished; it was there that he wanted to write his dramas, first his Pharaoh, then an Ahab and Jezebel (he pronounced it Isabel), which he related marvelously.

The carriage which was taking me away was harnessed. Wilde got into it with me, to accompany me a moment. He spoke to me again about my book and praised it, but with a certain indefinable reticence. Finally the carriage came to a stop. He said farewell to me, started to get off, but suddenly, “Listen, dear, you’ve got to make me a promise now. Les Nourritures terrestres is fine … it’s very fine … But dear, promise me: from now on don’t ever write I any more.”

And as I appeared not quite to understand him, he went on, “In art, don’t you see, there is no first person.”

1 This term, which may here seem unexpected to the reader, appears in English in the original text. (Translator’s note.)

IV

WHEN I WAS BACK IN PARIS, I WENT TO TELL B … what was happening to him. B … said to me, “But that’s all utterly ridiculous. He’s quite incapable of putting up with boredom. I know him very well: he writes to me every day; and it’s my opinion too that first he has to finish his play; but afterwards, he’ll come back to me; he’s never done anything good in solitude; he constantly needs distraction. All the best things that he’s written were written when he was with me.—Just look at his last letter …” B … showed it to me and read it to me.—It begged B … to let him finish his Pharaoh in peace, but said, in effect, that, once the play was written, he would come back, would join him again—and ended with this glorious phrase: “… and then I shall again be the King of Life.”

V

AND SHORTLY AFTERWARD, WILDE CAME BACK TO Paris.1 His play was not written; it never will be. Society knows quite well how to go about it when it wants to dispose of a man, and knows means subtler than death … For two years Wilde had suffered too much and too passively. His will had been broken. The first months, he could still delude himself, but he very soon gave way. It was like an abdication. Nothing remained in his shattered life but the mournful musty odor of what he had once been; a need every now and then to prove that he was still thinking; wit, but artificial, forced, crumpled. I saw him again only twice.

One evening, on the boulevards, when I was strolling with G …, I heard my name called. I turned about: it was Wilde. Ah! how changed he was!… “If I reappeared before having written my drama, the world would insist on seeing only the convict in me,” he had said to me. He had reappeared without the drama, and, as a few people had shut their doors to him, he no longer tried to return anywhere; he roamed about. Friends, again and again, had tried to save him; they used all their ingenuity, they took him to Italy … Wilde very quickly escaped; relapsed.