People were not yet repudiating him outright, but they no longer made much of having met him.

An extraordinary chance brought our two paths together again. It was in January 1895. I was traveling; I was driven to do so by a kind of anxiety, more in quest of solitude than in the novelty of places. The weather was frightful; I had fled from Algiers toward Blidah; I was going to leave Blidah for Biskra. At the moment of leaving the hotel, out of idle curiosity, I looked at the blackboard where the names of the travelers were written. What did I see there?—Beside my name, touching it, that of Wilde … I have said that I was longing for solitude: I took the sponge and rubbed out my name.

Before reaching the station, I was no longer quite sure whether a bit of cowardice might not have been hidden in this act; at once, retracing my steps, I had my valise brought up again and rewrote my name on the board.

In the three years that I had not seen him (for I can not count a brief meeting at Florence the year before), Wilde had certainly changed. One felt less softness in his look, something raucous in his laughter and something frenzied in his joy. He seemed both more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed in doing so; he was bolder, stronger, bigger. What was strange was that he no longer spoke in apologues; during the few days that I lingered in his company, I was unable to draw the slightest tale from him.

I was at first astonished at finding him in Algeria.

“Oh!” he said to me, “it’s that now I’m fleeing from the work of art; I no longer want to adore anything but the sun … Have you noticed that the sun detests thought; it always makes it withdraw and take refuge in the shade. At first, thought lived in Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. It lived in Greece for a long time, the sun conquered Greece; then Italy and then France. At the present time, all thought finds itself pushed back to Norway and Russia, places where the sun never comes. The sun is jealous of the work of art.”

To adore the sun, ah! was to adore life. Wilde’s lyrical adoration was growing wild and terrible. A fatality was leading him on; he could not and would not elude it. He seemed to put all his concern, his virtue, into overexaggerating his destiny and losing patience with himself. He went to pleasure as one marches to duty.—“My duty to myself,” he would say, “is to amuse myself terrifically.”

Nietzsche astonished me less, later on, because I had heard Wilde say:

“Not happiness! Above all, not happiness. Pleasure! We must always want the most tragic …”

He would walk in the streets of Algiers, preceded, escorted, followed by an extraordinary band of ragamuffins; he chatted with each one; he regarded them all with joy and tossed his money to them haphazardly.

“I hope,” he said to me, “to have quite demoralized this city.”

I thought of the word used by Flaubert who, when someone asked him what kind of glory he was most ambitious of, replied, “That of demoralizer.”

In the face of all this, I remained full of astonishment, admiration, and fear. I was aware of his shaky situation, the hostilities, the attacks, and what a dark anxiety he hid beneath his bold joy.1 He spoke of returning to London; the Marquis of Q … was insulting him, summoning him, accusing him of fleeing.

“But if you go back there, what will happen?” I asked him. “Do you know what you’re risking?

“One should never know that … They’re extraordinary, my friends; they advise prudence. Prudence! But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible … I can not go further … Something must happen … something else …”

Wilde embarked the following day.

The rest of the story is familiar. That “something else” was hard labor.2

1 One of those last Algiers evenings, Wilde seemed to have promised himself to say nothing serious. At length I grew somewhat irritated with his too witty paradoxes:

“You’ve better things to say than witticisms,” I began, “You’re talking to me this evening as if I were the public. You ought rather talk to the public the way you know how to talk to your friends. Why aren’t your plays better? You talk away the best of yourself; why don’t you write it down?”

“Oh!” he exclaimed at once, “but my plays are not at all good; and I don’t put any stock in them at all … But if you only knew what amusement they give!… Almost every one is the result of a wager. Dorian Grey too; I wrote it in a few days because one of my friends claimed that I could never write a novel. It bores me so much, writing!”—Then, suddenly bending over toward me; “Would you like to know the great drama of my life?—It’s that I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve put only my talent into my works.”

It was only too true. The best of his writing is only a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him speak find it disappointing to read him.