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May 2002

‘AND I, MAY I SAY NOTHING?’

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Wilde in Exile: Dieppe as Arcadia, An Abstract from Work in Progress.

D.C. Rose

When Wilde pitched upon Dieppe as his first place of continental exile, he was hardly seeking obscurity. Not only was it the terminus for the Newhaven ferry, then more popular than the Dover—Calais route, but it was the home of well-established English colony.  Although it was not at that time the chief resort of fashionable pleasure-seekers, as were first Deauville (invented by the duc de Morny and an Englishman, Sir Joseph Oliffe), then Trouville, then eventually Deauville again, it did also attract numbers of people from the French beau monde, such as the Caraman-Chimay sisters with their villa 'La Case'.  Trouville (where Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton once shared a villa) was the site of a number of villas owned by wealthy Parisians who entertained their friends during the summer, such as Madame de Bagnières or Madame Lemaire: Prince Hohenlohe visited Princess Troubetzkoy there in July 1875.  Maupassant's wealthy Monsieur and Madame Walter leave Paris for Trouville on the 15th July1, so one may take that as the opening of the season there. Wilde himself managed a few days in Trouville and Le Havre in June 1899.  Dieppe too had its season (June to October), its Casino2, and its chic hotel (the Royal, where Captain Barron took an entire floor every year between 1884 and 1887): this still exists, though converted into flats.  Chiefly it was popular with artists and writers such as Jacques--Emile Blanche and Beardsley.  The art dealer Durand-Ruel took a house there in the summer; the actress Blanche Pierson had a villa described as luxurious; Dumas fils had a château nearby, at Puy.  The Dieppe season was thought to begin when Coquelin aîné took his annual holiday there, where 'always an expansive man, he seemed to expand beyond measure'3.

Wilde's acquaintance with Dieppe dated to August 1879 when he stayed with Walter Sickert and his parents, themselves frequent visitors Dieppe.  Robert Louis Stevenson had been there over the New Year of 1878, staying at the Hotel des Étrangers.  Robbie Ross was familiar with the town.  The painter Madeleine Lemaire entertained Jean de Reszke there; Elinor Glyn was there in August 1894 and was painted by Jacques--Emile Blanche.  It was when Charles Conder made his way to Dieppe in the summer of 1893, and again in the summer of 1895, that he found intellectual company either in persons or in books.  Staying either with the mother of Jacques-Emile Blanche at the Chalet du Bas-Fort or with Ludovic Halévy at the Villa St James, he met the vicomte de Vogüé, de Régnier, Degas (who had been at school with Halévy); read Stendhal, Gautier, Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, Verlaine.  Halévy's son Daniel married Pauline de Cargouet, a cousin of Violet Paget (Vernon Lee), whose friends included Sargent, Paul Bourget and Albert Besnard, whom she could see when passing through Paris on her journeys between Florence and London.

Others staying at Dieppe in the summer of 1893 were D.S. MacColl, the Beardsleys, R.A.M. Stevenson, James Guthrie, Charles Furse, Alfred Thornton, and the editor of The Yellow Book, Henry Harland.4  In August 1895, Charles Conder, Beardsley and Arthur Symons were all in Dieppe.  Symons and Beardsley visited Dumas at Puy, Blanche saw Symons and Beardsley every day.  The well-known portrait of the latter by Blanche dates to this occasion.  'It was at Dieppe that The Savoy was really planned,' wrote Symons of the successor to The Yellow Book, 'and it was in the café, which Mr Sickert has so often painted, that I wrote the slightly pettish and defiant "Editorial Note", which made so many enemies for the first number.'5  When The Savoy folded, it was also from Paris, from 18 avenue Kléber, that Hubert Crackanthorpe wrote to Grant Richards suggesting that Richards should take it on with himself as editor.6

Dieppe was in fact a curious mixture of the Bohemian and the conventional.  'A curious, pathetic town is Dieppe,' wrote George Moore, 'full of nuns and pigeons, old gables and strange dormer windows.'7  Like Deauville, Trouville and Étretat8, it blurred the distinction between Paris and the coast, just as Barbizon/ Grez blurred the distinction between Paris and its rural hinterland.  Within reach was Rouen, with its cathedral painted by Turner and Monet, its collection of illuminated manuscripts, its community of artists, including Charles Angrand who had moved there from Paris in 1896, as well as Joseph Delattre who had once painted the Paris boulevards.  Pissarro stayed in Dieppe in July 1900, renting a cottage for his family in Berneval. Sickert, abandoning London and a failed marriage in 1898, stayed there happily for seven years, lodging with Madame Augustine Villain, known asthe Queen of the Dieppe fish market, a true soul Dieppoise.  (Perhaps the most outré of all the work he produced was a portrait of Clementine Hozier executed with a poker on her hockey stick, despite her telling him that 'You seem to see everything through dirty eyes'9 and despite her cleaning up his studio in a way reminiscent of Christine Hallgrain cleaning up the studio of Claude Lantier10.)  Sickert had his mutable side - A.S. Hartrick described him as 'something of a chameleon'11.

Near Berneval lived M. and Mme Paul Bérard of the Château de Wargermont, anglophile collectors of Impressionists.  The Bérards were Parisian Protestants with a house in the rue Pigalle (Bérard was a banker).  'Monsieur affected a fundamental scepticism.  Hence his sympathy for the most free-and-easy of his Paris friends'12.  Wilde at Berneval seems to have been totally unaware of the important part this little town had played in the life of Renoir, who had been a welcome guest at the Château de Wargermont, and consequently in the history of Impressionism,13 another instance of Wilde's failure to engage with that movement.

Dieppe also had its merry side.   Dowson, in a much repeated tale, tried to interest Wilde in heterosex at the local brothel, only to hear Wilde report that it 'was like a supper of cold mutton', or so 'it has been reported on sufficiently substantial authority'.14  To adopt the phrase that Iris Storm used about herself in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, Dieppe combined a Chislehurst mind and a pagan body.  The former was represented by 'La Colonie', the collective term for the English inhabitants, composed 'largely of retired and, for the most part, impoverished military men',15 the latter, not only by the artists, but by runaways of various sorts. The Scottish widow Mrs Middleton settled there in 1885 and befriended Sickert.  In 1899, Lady Blanche Hozier escaped from her husband to Dieppe, bringing her two daughters and settling at Puys. This was not entirely an idyll, for Colonel Hozier attempted to kidnap the younger daughter, Clementine, and Lady Blanche's elder daughter, Kitty, was stricken with typhoid and died in March 1900.

The Halévys' Villa St James was next to the Villa Olga, where the half-French, half-American Duchess of Carracciolo, who had eloped with Prince Stanislas Poniatowski16 and debarred herself from both London and Paris society, entertained friends such as Henry James, Charles Haas (the principal model for Swann and one of Sarah Bernhardt's early lovers), and Sir Charles Rivers Wilson17 in her house furnished by Maple's of the Tottenham Court Road.18.  Wilson knew Dieppe well, having boarded there as a schoolboy with the Protestant Pastor, M. Réville, for ten months in 1844: 'It has undergone few changes since those days,' he recorded in 1915.19

One of the odder group portraits of the time is one by Jacques--Emile Blanche showing Prince Poniatowski, the Duchess, Rivers Wilson and Count Mathéus at the Westminster Aquarium.20  Blanche also names as members of the duchess's set Prince Edmond de Polignac, Harry Melvill and his 'bosom friend' Cosmo Gordon Lennox21.  If Sir Charles Rivers Wilson brought a touch of the great world of the public servant (he had once been Minister of Finance in Cairo)22, the three gay men suggest a certain raffishness. 'No Dieppe lady ever called'23 but, less provincial, Madeleine Lemaire, would visit.24  (Lemaire had her own villa in Dieppe, at 32 rue Aguado.)  Olga, the Duchess's daughter after whom the villa was named, was the god-daughter (some supposed the daughter) of Edward VII and later married Baron Adolph de Meyer.25  This was largely a marriage de convenance, and for many years before the Great War Olga was the lover of the princesse de Polignac26  She was much photographed and painted.27

It was generally agreed that Wilde came out of prison in better physical shape than he entered it, and in his early days in Dieppe and Berneval he was in high spirits -- 'splendid health and spirits', Ernest Dowson told Henry Davray.28.  Dowson was enchanted by Wilde's pleasure in the countryside, in going for walks, and in 'the simplicities of life',29 a reversal of his previous attitude as expressed both to Margot Asquith and in The Decay of Lying, but perhaps a recovery of his boyhood holidays in the West of Ireland.

‘Degradation had failed to degrade him.  His intimates noticed how vastly he was improved in physique, in nerve and muscle, in energy and courage; how his whole being seemed rejuvenated.’30

Indeed, Stuart Mason quotes a letter he received from an ex--convict that positively out-Sherards Sherard in depicting an exalted Wilde.

‘No more beautiful life had any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live, than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison.  He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart.’31

Curiously, Wilde himself (at least as Anna de Brémont reports) came to a view of a redemptive quality in his prison life.

‘Would you know my secret […] I have found my soul.  I was happy in prison.  I was happy in prison because I found my soul.  What I wrote before I wrote without a soul, and what I have written under the guidance of my soul, the world shall one day read, it shall be the message of my soul to the souls of men!32

This was spoken, if at all, at the end of August 1900, and can hardly have represented more than self—delusion unless it was meant to refer to De Profundis, meant to suggest that he hoped that one day De Profundis would be published.

In a rural retreat in Normandy M. Melmoth might have found content.  There was chance of acquiring a plot of land, of building a chalet: Dalhousie Young offered to put up the money and there was some discussion with John Fothergill, then practising architecture.  The daily diligence between Berneval and Dieppe only cost a shilling.  It is not impossible to believe that Constance might have visited him. Rural retreat was even foreshadowed, like so much in Wilde's life, in his own work, for Dorian Gray 'remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about.  He was tired of hearing his own name now.   Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was'.  Indeed, Wilde told Gide 'I can never leave Berneval because only this morning the Curé offered me a perpetual seat in the choir stalls.'33

Was a new Wilde about to be constructed where 'the air is full of ozone and the place, though quiet, is cheerful'34?  It was possible.  When he was about to leave prison, Wilde listed the books he wanted to form the basis of a new library (including works by Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, 'Dante and all Dante literature; Goethe and ditto', Gautier, Stevenson, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge and Dumas père)35, and from Berneval he wrote to Ross for those of his pictures that had been bought in at the sack of his house in Tite Street.  'I don't know how to thank you for the lovely books that keep arriving here' he told More Adey.36  The reading list is a valuable guide to Wilde's intellectual health at this time, especially as the list is almost identical to that which the Ranee of Sarawak told Marie Belloc Wilde had asked her for: Flaubert, Stevenson, Dumas père, Gautier, Coleridge, Dante, Marlowe, Goethe.  These, said the Ranee, were 'those she herself would have wished to have, had she been in prison.'37

The inclusion of Dumas père may indicate that Wilde saw a parallel between himself and the Count of Monte Cristo, or even between himself and the Man in the Iron Mask.  Curiously, when he died in the Hôtel d'Alsace he was only a few minutes from where Athos died in the rue Servandoni.  Flaubert is easier to explain, on the ground of Salammbô and Hérodias even if no other,38 but one may cite two views of Flaubert that— while contradictory — nevertheless throw some light on Wilde on his wayto exile and silence as Sebastien Melmoth.  The first is Middleton Murry's:

‘There are two Flauberts.  One was born on the 12th December 1821 in the surgeon's house at Rouen Hospital; the other in enthusiastic minds in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  One was a broad, big-boned, lovable, rather simple--minded man, with the look and laugh of a farmer, who spent his life in agonies of the intensive culture of half a dozen curiously assorted volumes; the other was an incorporeal giant, a symbol, a war--cry, a banner under which a youthful army marched and marches still to the rout of the bourgeois and the revolution of literature.39

The second view is that of Martin Turnell a generation later.  In a notable phrase Turnell referred to the persons of Flaubert's works as 'ridiculous dwarf-like characters who move convulsively through the dead silent world like the figures in an animated cartoon'.40  Is there not a sense in which this describes Sebastien Melmoth beside Oscar Wilde?

Wilde doubtless also looked forward to a new collection of signed copies of works by his friends and contemporaries, for there is no better inducement for a writer to write than to receive the admiration made tangible of one's peers - and Tristan Klingsor and Hugues Rebell41 did indeed send him copies of their work, as did George Bernard Shaw - 'inscribed copies of all my books as they came out', Shaw recalled42 (although this was less generous than it sounds: there were not many books to inscribe).  Wilde told Edward Rose that he hoped to be able to write again, and undertook an important review of his philosophy: 'I feel that while there is much that I have lost, still there was much that was not worth keeping.  I am more of an individualist in morals than before, but I see clearly that my life was one quite unworthy of an artist in its deliberate and studied materialism'.43  Gide noticed that compared to their last meeting in Algiers, when he had perceived 'something harsh in his laughter and a madness in his joy […] He had grown reckless, hardened and conceited,' there was now a sweetening in his character.44  Clearly it was time to cure the senses by means of the soul.

He might also effect some sort of social rehabilitation: did he not have a picture of Queen Victoria on his wall?45   When a publisher brought 'a wealthy Irish poet' to visit him, Wilde at once reverted to being a Wilde of Merrion Square and put his visitor right on 'certain points of good breeding'.46  Frits Thaulow and his Russian wife Alexandra welcomed him, even inviting Dieppe notables to a reception at the Villa des Orchides to celebrate his arrival. (The kindly Thaulows had once even bicycled from Dieppe to Paris to take the Strindbergs out to dinner, and August Strindberg stayed with them in July 1896.  Munch's visit to Paris in 1885 was financed by Thaulow, a distant cousin.)  When André Gide went to visit Wilde at Berneval on 20th June 1897, he found that Wilde was in Dieppe, visiting the Thaulows.  The acquaintance does not seem to have prospered, however, for when Wilde  left Berneval, the Thaulows fall out of his story.  One may speculate that the Wilde who gave a party to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was disconcerted by Alexandra Thaulow's strongly held Marxist views - it was said that the only tune she knew was the Internationale47.

Wilde's former associates behaved either well or badly, according to their measure (or their measure of Wilde), but not all is patent.  Stanley Weintraub, for example, writes that 'artists like Conder and Walter Sickert obviously kept out of his way'.48  Why 'obviously'?  Sickert did not move to Dieppe until September 1898, long until after Wilde had left Normandy for Paris and Naples, never to return; when Wilde was in Normandy, Sickert was painting music halls in Paris.  The manner of the slights that were put upon Wilde has also been subject to over-writing.  For example, Jonathan Fryer states that in Dieppe 'Aubrey Beardsley scuttled down an alleyway to avoid meeting him [...]  Jacques--Emile Blanche cut him dead in the street'.49  The incident referred to seems to be one recounted by John Rothenstein.

Conder, Blanche and Beardsley, walking on the quay saw [Wilde] approaching in the distance.  The two Englishmen with one accord took hold of Blanche's elbows and steered him up a side street.  But they were impelled by different motives.  Conder was unnerved, possibly, by the unexpected apparition of a man whom he had once known as the occupant of a brilliant if precarious position, but whom two years' removal from the society of his fellows and ferocious execration had transformed into a legendary monster; or possibly he may have been swayed by Beardsley.  For Beardsley had always disliked Wilde, and now a Catholic he was determined to cut himself off from his pagan past.  By Wilde the slight was fiercely resented.  'It was vile of Aubrey!' he exclaimed afterwards to a friend.  The two never met again.  But Conder was forgiven, and was often in Wilde's company that summer.50

This is milder and more circumstantial than Fryer's account, but itself may not be quite accurate. Blanche, who had in 1883 exhibited a painting of a young girl reading Wilde's poems, gives another side again.

‘Conder and Sickert received without enthusiasm the news of Oscar Wilde's coming arrival at Dieppe […] In discussing the matter with me, Conder said 'You have only been married recently, and it's hardly fair to inflict a man who's just served a sentence of hard labour on your family […] He's sure to make trouble here […] He'll make an exhibition of himself'.

One day when Sickert and I were going for a walk, Oscar, who was sitting in the Café Suisse, beckoned to me.  I pretended not to see.  I know for a fact that he was wounded to the quick, and the reflection of that episode still fills me with remorse.51

That is not very heroic but it is also less dramatic, less absolutely caddish, even if the reference to Sickert is suspect, put in to offer Blanche a sort of retroactive moral support.  This has a sequel.  In 1904 Blanche painted a portrait of Coleridge Kennard52 'Sir Coleridge Kennard sitting on the Sofa'.  When this was exhibited in 1926 in Paris, Kennard wished not to be identified, and at Charpentier's suggestion it was shown under the title The Picture of Dorian Gray, to which Blanche agreed.  Blanche could be feline – Ernest Dimnet refers to the 'peacock studio where Jacques Blanche distils his rather acrid wit'53 – but perhaps Blanche was making some reparation in this roundabout fashion.  At one time Kennard had projected collecting all the unpublished stories of Wilde that he could persuade Wilde's surviving friends to recount.54  He was a friend of Vyvyan Holland's55 and it was his mother, Helen Carew, who financed Epstein's tomb of Wilde.

Vincent O'Sullivan reports meeting Wilde at a lunch with Conder, Robbie Ross and Leonard Smithers and there seems no reason to suppose that this did not happen other than that of false memory made possible by the lapse of time.56  But Rothenstein's tale also contains an oddity in that Conder had a 'deep-rooted and instinctive'57 antagonism towards, not Wilde but Beardsley; while Wilde's hostility towards Beardsley preceded the incident and was intermittent - indeed, in April 1893 Beardsley had proposed to go to Paris with Wilde58.  The friend to whom Wilde complained was probably Vincent O'Sullivan ('probably' because Wilde tended to say the same thing to many people, or so many people would have us believe).  O'Sullivan also writes of the dandified Beardsley increasingly distancing himself from the decaying Dowson.59  O'Sullivan's actual account leaves one feeling slightly more favourable to Beardsley than Wilde was intending: 'It was lâche of Aubrey.  If it had been one of my own class I might have understood [...] But a boy like that, whom I made! No, it was lâche of Aubrey.'60  'Lâche' is certainly weaker than the 'vile' of John Rothenstein's account: the usual translation is 'cowardly'.61

Grant Richards was later concerned to moderate the antagonism between Wilde and Beardsley as reported by Robert Ross.  He quotes Ross as saying 'If Beardsley is carried away in spite of himself by the superb invention of Salome, he never forgets his hatred of its author'.  This, says Richards, is an exaggeration, although 'assuredly there were sides of the Oscar Wilde gospel with which he had no sympathy'62.  The phrase 'a boy like that, whom I made' is particularly displeasing, and not less so when it was repeated.  '"I never guessed, said Wilde, "when I invented Aubrey Beardsley […]".'63

Beardsley stayed at the Hôtel Sandwich from the 10th July to the 23rd August 189764 and, although clearly worried about his health, was enjoying the fine weather, working on the illustrations for an edition of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (a subject that also attracted Felicien Rops), dining with Thaulow, and attending a concert of Saint-Saëns' music and a luncheon given in the composer's honour.  Wilde met him with Leonard Smithers on the 24th and told Robbie Ross that he hoped Beardsley would dine with him, and he certainly saw him at least once again.65.  Beardsley, however, does not appear to have reciprocated this friendliness and Smithers' suggestion that Beardsley should produce a frontispiece for The Ballad of Reading Gaol was unsuccessful.  On 14th September Beardsley returned to Paris, without further contact with Wilde66; subsequently he told Smithers that he would undertake work for a projected periodical 'if it is quite agreed that Oscar Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine anonymously, pseudonymously or otherwise'67.  This was the influence of André Raffalovich, whom Wilde had snubbed once too often.

On the other side, Wilde's failure to appreciate Beardsley (as Burne-Jones and Whistler and so many others appreciated Beardsley) is yet another indication of Wilde's profound unease with unconventional work: 'Dear Aubrey's designs are like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copy book',68 he said, in the phrase with which every Philistine has dismissed the work of every innovator.  In the context there is something particularly supercilious about that 'dear Aubrey'.

Yet in Normandy Wilde did not lack for company, quite apart from giving 'shelter for a long period to a young novelist who was temporarily penniless'.69  William Rothenstein went to Dieppe, when Wilde met him on the quay: 'he looked surprisingly well, thinner and healthier than heretofore'.70  Gide, Charles Conder, Dalhousie Young, Charles Wyndham and Lugné-Poë visited Wilde at Berneval or Dieppe.  Gide mentions a T—, co-translator of The Ballad of Reading Gaol who with 'warm cordiality' often invited Wilde from Berneval to Dieppe71.  Sir Rupert Hart-Davis identifies this as the Tardieu who visited Wilde's death-bed, Eugène Tardieu, translator of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, although this is problematic, as the translation, by Henri Davray, gives no co-translator's name.  Robert Sherard, despite the fluctuation in the warmth of his friendship with Wilde, met Wilde at the Café Suisse; Sherard also records how a 'group of young poets from Montmartre' dined with Wilde at the Café des Tribuneaux.  Local tradition has it that 'Oscar Wilde is reputed to have written his "Ballad of Reading Gaol" while sitting at a table in the Café Suisse, then next to the ferry'72.  Wilde certainly had started on The Ballad by the 8th July.

Charles Wyndham, a shrewd and practical man with 'a great horror of anything that suggested self--advertisement'73, visited Wilde at Berneval in June 1897 in the hope of persuading him to adapt Eugène Sue's play Le Verre d'Eau, but Wilde after a couple of months turned the idea down.74  It was at this time, however, that Wilde managed one of his rather dubious financial sleights of hand by selling Mrs Brown-Potter and Kyrle Bellew the scenario for Mr and Mrs Daventry.  Nonetheless, if it is true that he was offered three hundred francs a week for a column in Le Journal, one can only regret that he was unable to accept.  This was because he was 'unprepared to agree to the exploitation of the notoriety of his name,' in the phrase of Lewis Broad, who adds mordantly 'it was a strange reluctance on the part of a man who twenty years before had been prepared to exploit any notoriety to get his name before the public'.75  Broad gives no source for this; but J. Joseph-Renaud says that 'M. Fernand Xau lui offrit une chronique hebdomadaire bien payée.  Il refusa'76.  This must have been the same offer, and Ellmann (taking his cue from Sherard) believes that it was77 - Xau was editor of Le Journal, which he had founded in 1892.  Xau had made money out of promoting the Paris season of the Wild West Show of 'Buffalo Bill'.  His paper was aimed at 'the educated lower middle class' and operated from an headquarters in the rue de Richelieu into which Xau had incorporated a theatre and a restaurant.  Wilde was clearly standing on what remained of his dignity, on his old notion of the things a gentlemen could not do.  Had Wilde accepted the offer, he would have found himself appearing with work by Zola, an interesting combination, for the author of J'accuse! (for whose defence Maître Labori had refused to accept any fee) had no more concerned himself with the fate of Wilde than the author of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (for whose defence Sir Edward Clarke had refused to accept any fee) had concerned himself with the fate of Dreyfus.

The Normandy chalet proved to be a château en Espagne (although Richard Ellmann thought it was only in Picardy78).  'I shall start working again,' Wilde told Chris Healy.  'Should the English people refuse my work, then I shall cross to America, a great country which has always treated me kindly.'7  In his interview with Gideon Spilett, he spoke once more writing a play in French,80 and he told André Gide that he wanted peace to write his Pharaoh play, as Gide reported to Lord Alfred Douglas.  Yet Oscar could not play Lord George Heaven when Bosie declined the part of Jenny Mere81 and there was more on offer than cold mutton.  Within three weeks of his arrival in France, Wilde was looking forward to a visit from Lord Alfred,82 and for his part Bosie told Gide that he did not suppose that Wilde would be happy in so rustic a spot.83  In September, members of the Young Ireland Society visited Versailles to mark the centenary of the death of General Hoche, who had led an unsuccessful expedition to Bantry Bay, but the concerns of Irish nationalism had ceased to be Wilde's.  When Bosie appeared in Rouen at the end of August the President of the Immortals resumed his sport with Oscar Wilde.84

 

NOTES

1. Guy de Maupassant: Bel--Ami.  Translated by Margaret Mauldon with an Introduction and Notes by Robert Lethbridge.  Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001 p.269.

2. Managed by a certain M. Bloch.

3. Max Beerbohm: Around Theatres.  London: Rupert Hart--Davis 1953 p.536.

4. Maureen Borland: D.S.MacColl, Painter, Poet, Art Critic.  Harpenden: Lennard Publishing 1995 pp.81-2.

5. Arthur Symons: From Toulouse—Lautrec to Rodin, with Some Personal Recollections.  London: John Lane The Bodley Head 1929 p.175.

6. Grant Richards: Author Hunting, by an Old Literary Sportsman.  Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing 1897--1925.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1934 p.18.

7. George Moore: Memoirs of My Dead Life.  London: William Heinemann 1906.  Revised edition 1928 p.14.

8. It was at Étretat that Guy de Maupassant had helped save Swinburne from drowning in 1868; in 1876 Henry James found it 'a blessed haven of quiet contemplation'.  Sheldon M. Novick: Henry James, the Young Master.  New York: Random House 1996 p.342 -- presumably James' eye was not disturbed by Offenbach's Villa Orphée, with its 'riot of balconies, verandahs and chimneypots'.  James Harding: Folies de Paris, The Rise and Fall of French Operetta.  London: Chappell & Co / Elm Tree Books 1979 p.55.

9. Mary Soames: Clementine Churchill, The Biography of a Marriage.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin& Co 1979 p.24.

10. Emile Zola: L'Œuvre.  1886.  Translated as 'The Masterpiece' by Thomas Walton; translation revised by Richard Pearson.  World's Classics 1993; reissued as an Oxford World's Classics.  Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999 p.106.

11. A.S. Hartrick, R.W.S.: A Painter's Pilgrimage through Fifty Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1939 p.149.

12. Jacques-Emile Blanche Portraits of a Lifetime -- The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant. Translated and edited by Walter Clement.  Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1937 pp.36-7.

13. Steven Adams: The World of the Impressionists.  London: Thames & Hudson 1985 p.158.

14. Mark Longaker:  The Life of Ernest Dowson.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1954; 3rd edition 1967 p.154.  Other than citing Yeats' fondness for the story, the authority is not given, and according to Croft--Cooke it is 'a story which Yeats told on the merest hearsay [...] Even if there is truth in the story itself the disgusting comment on the visit attributed to Wilde is certainly fictitious [...] He would not have said something banal and coarse, as Yeats suggests' – Rupert Croft-Cooke: Feasting with Panthers, A New Consideration of Some Late Victorian Writers.  London: W.H. Allen 1967 p.250.  Ellmann (p.504) gives a slightly different (and rather nastier) version -- 'like chewing cold mutton' – citing a letter from Sherard to Symons.  Yeats actually quoted Wilde as saying 'It was like cold mutton', with nothing about supper or chewing, and adds apparently without irony that Wilde was 'always the scholar and gentleman'.  The cheering crowd that Yeats says accompanied Dowson and Wilde on this expedition sounds like Wilde's own invention.  W.B.Yeats: Autobiographies.  London: Macmillan 1955 p.327.

15. Mary Soames: Clementine Churchill, The Biography of a Marriage.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin& Co 1979 p.23.

16. 1835--1908, father of Prince André Poniatowski and once Master of the Horse to Napoléon III.  When ex-King Milan blamed losses at Monte Carlo on the Prince for distracting him, Poniatowski replied 'Sir, I was not behind you when you lost your throne'.  Baroness de Stoeckl: My Dear Marquis.  London: John Murray 1952 p.109.  Poniatowski had married a daughter of the duc de Morny.

17. 1831--1916.  His discreet memoirs make no mention of his social acquaintances, though one learns something of official life in Paris. Sir Charles Rivers Wilson G.C.M.G.,C.B.: Chapters from My Official Life.  Edited by Everilda McAlister.  London: Edwin Arnold 1916.

18. Or, more probably, by its Paris branch -- Lord Alfred Douglas had furniture in his Paris flat from there, chosen by Wilde.  H. Montgomery Hyde: Lord Alfred Douglas, A Biography.  London: Methuen 1984 p.119.  Maple's opened at 5 rue Boudreau, off the boulevard des Capucines, in October 1896 (information kindly provided by Philip Parnell of Maple's).

19.  Sir Charles Rivers Wilson G.C.M.G., C.B.: Chapters from My Official Life.  Edited by Everilda McAlister.  London: Edwin Arnold 1916 p.6.

20. Dated 1889.  Reproduced in Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portraits of a Lifetime -- The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant.  Translated and edited by Walter Clement. Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent &Sons 1937 opp. p.35.  The Aquarium was on the site where now stands Central Hall, Westminster, whose baroque influence derives from the visits to Paris of its architect, Edwin Rickards.

21. Cosmo Gordon Lennox was the actor who played Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband.  Later he translated plays by Tristan Bernard and  Henri Bernstein.

22. He was a man 'who has been everywhere, knows everyone, and talks easily without pose'.

23. Mary King Waddington: Letters of a Diplomat's Wife 1883--1900.  London: Smith, Elder& Co 1903 p.276.

24. John Rothenstein: The Life and Death of Conder.  London: Dent 1939 p.115.

25. Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portraits of a Lifetime -- The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant.  Translated and edited by Walter Clement.  Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1937 p.53.

26. 1868-1946.

27. Her portrait of 1907 by Jacques--Emile Blanche is reproduced in Jacques--Emile Blanche: Portraits of a Lifetime -- The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant.  Translated and edited by Walter Clement.  Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1937 opp. p.186.

28. Ernest Dowson to Henry-D. Davray 11th June 1897. Desmond Flower & Henry Maas (edd.): The Letters of Ernest Dowson.  London: Cassell 1967 p.386.

29. Ernest Dowson to Conal O'Riordan 10th June 1897. Desmond Flower & Henry Maas (edd.): The Letters of Ernest Dowson.  London: Cassell 1967 p.384.

30. Robert Harborough Sherard: The Life of Oscar Wilde.  London: T. Werner Laurie 1906 p.407.  For once Sherard was reporting a state that he witnessed without unctuous embellishment.

31. André Gide: Oscar Wilde, A Study from the French. Translated by Stuart Mason. Oxford: Holywell Press 1905 pp.59n--60n.

32. Anna, comtesse de Brémont: Oscar Wilde and His Mother, A Memoir.  London: Everett & Co 1911p.187.

33. André Gide: Oscar Wilde, A Study from the French. Translated by Stuart Mason. Oxford: Holywell Press 1905 p.61.

34. Lord Lytton to Lady Dorothy Nevill  25th August 1889. Lady Betty Balfour (ed.): Personal and Literary Letters of Robert, First Earl of Lytton.  London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1906 Volume II p.388; Lady Dorothy Nevill: Under Five Reigns.  London: Methuen 1910 p.245.  Lytton was staying at the Hôtel Royal.

35. Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross 6th April 1897.  Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): The Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hart-Davis 1962  p.521.

36. Oscar Wilde to More Adey 6th July 1897.  Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): The Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hart-Davis 1962  p.620.

37. Mrs Belloc Lowndes: The Merry Wives of Westminster.  London: Macmillan 1946 p.174. Mrs Belloc Lowndes explicitly identifies the Ranee as the 'lady of Wimbledon' referred to in Wilde's letters to Robert Ross 10th March 1896 and 1st April 1897, rather than Adela Schuster, so identified by Hart-Davis.  Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): The Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hart—Davis 1962 p.399 n.5; p.513.  Ellmann, although he quotes from The Merry Wives of Westminster, does not comment upon the nickname in his reference to Schuster.  Richard Ellmann: Oscar Wilde.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1988  p.491.

38. It is a pity we do not know the titles in which Wilde was interested.  Lucien Leuwen had only been published in 1894 and if Wilde had wished to read it we would have a significant indicator that he was keeping abreast.  The fact that this edition was both inaccurate and incomplete would also add a certain piquancy.

39. J. Middleton Murry: Countries of the Mind.  London: Collins 1922; Oxford University Press edition 1931 p.158.

40. Martin Turnell: The Novel in France.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1950; Peregrine Books1960 p.302.

41. 1867--1905.  A minor poet and historical novelist, his real name was Georges Grassal.

42. George Bernard Shaw: 'My memories of Oscar Wilde' in Frank Harris: Oscar Wilde.  New edition, London: Robinson Publishing 1992 p.333.

43.  Merlin Holland &Rupert Hart-Davis (edd.): The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: Fourth Estate 2000 pp.863-4

44. André Gide: Oscar Wilde, A Study from the French.  Translated by Stuart Mason. Oxford: Holywell Press 1905 p.62.

45. Robert H. Sherard: Oscar Wilde, the Story of an Unhappy Friendship.  London: Greening &Co. 1905 p.62.

46. Martin Battersby: The World of Art Nouveau.  London: Arlington Books 1968 p.65.

47. Stanley Weintraub: Reggie, A Portrait of Reginald Turner.  New York: George Braziller 1965p.83.

48. Jonathan Fryer: André and Oscar —Gide, Wilde and the Gay Art of Living.  London: Constable 1997 p.201.

49. John Rothenstein: The Life and Death of Conder.  London: Dent 1939 p.137.

50. Oscar Wilde to Jacques-Emile Blanche 5th April 1883. Jacques--Emile Blanche: Portraits of a Lifetime--The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant.  Translated and edited by Walter Clement.  Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1937 p.98.  Not in Hart-Davis, but in Holland & Hart-Davis p.206.

51. Jacques-Emile Blanche: Portraits of a Lifetime --The Late Victorian Era, the Edwardian Pageant.  Translated and edited by Walter Clement.  Introduction by Harley Granville Barker.  London: J.M. Dent & Sons 1937 pp.97, 98.  I don't think the reference to Sickert can be substantiated.

52. 1885-1948.

53. Ernest Dimnet: My New World.  London: Jonathan Cape 1938 p.47.

54. Douglas Ainslie: Adventures Literary and Social.  London: T. Fisher Unwin 1922 p.94.

55. Vyvyan Holland:  Son of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hart--Davis 1954 p.185.

56. Vincent O'Sullivan: Aspects of Wilde.  London: Constable 1934 p.71.

57. John Rothenstein: The Life and Death of Conder.  London: Dent 1939 p.135.

58. Katherine Lyon Mix: A Study in Yellow, The Yellow Book and Its Contributors.  Lawrence: University of Kansas Press and London: Constable 1960 p.47.

59. Vincent O'Sullivan: Aspects of Wilde.  London: Constable 1934 pp.127-9.

60. Vincent O'Sullivan: Aspects of Wilde.  London: Constable 1934 p.87.  My italics.

61.  'Qui manque de courage' says Larousse.

62. Grant Richards: Author Hunting, by an Old Literary Sportsman.  Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing 1897-1925.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1934 p.21.

63. Chris Healy:  Confessions of a Journalist.  London: Chatto & Windus 1904 p.133.

64. He moved to the Hôtel des Étrangers, where the food was better, on the 23rd.

65. Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross 26th July 1897.  Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): The Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hart-Davis 1962 p.627; Oscar Wilde to Reginald Turner 3rd August 1897. Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): More Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: John Murray 1985 p.151.

66. Beardsley remained at the Hôtel Foyot until 19th November, when he departed for Menton and death.

67. Aubrey Beardsley to Leonard Smithers 19th December 1897.  Henry Maas, J.L. Duncan and W.G. Good(edd.): The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley.  London: Cassell 1970p.409.  Beardsley's italics.  This Christian sentiment reflects the influence on Beardsley of the pious Catholic André Raffalovich.

68. Katherine Lyon Mix: A Study in Yellow, The Yellow Book and Its Contributors.  Lawrence: University of Kansas Press and London: Constable 1960 p.49, quoting Frances Winwar.

69. Robert H. Sherard: Oscar Wilde, the Story of an Unhappy Friendship.  London: Greening &Co. 1905 p.231.  Not even Ellmann was able to identify this person (possibly intended for Dowson?).  It is an irritating mannerism of Sherard's that he tells stories whose only point would be the name of the person involved, and then withholding it.  Who was the Englishwoman staying at the Hôtel du Rhin in Paris with whom Wilde dined on several occasions in 1883? Robert H. Sherard: Oscar Wilde, the Story of an Unhappy Friendship.  London: Greening & Co. 1905 p.69.

70. William Rothenstein: Men and Memories, Recollections.  London: Faber and Faber 1931.  Volume I pp.310—1.

71. André Gide: Oscar Wilde, A Study from the French.  Translated by Stuart Mason. Oxford: Holywell Press 1905 p.55.

72. http://www.mairie--dieppe.fr/taste/brits.html

73. T. Edgar Pemberton: Sir Charles Wyndham, A Biography.  London: Hutchinson 1904 p. (unnumbered, but probably) v.  Wyndham had been at art school in Paris in the 1850s and was thoroughly conversant with French drama, appearing in many adaptations at the Criterion Theatre.  Pemberton makes no allusion to this Dieppe visit, however, nor indeed any mention of Wilde, being clearly more Puritanical than his subject.

74. Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.): Max Beerbohm --Letters to Reggie Turner.  London: Hart-Davis1964  p.133n.

75. Lewis Broad: The Friendships and Follies of Oscar Wilde.  London: Hutchinson 1954 p.212.

76. J. Joseph-Renaud: Preface to Oscar Wilde: Intentions.  Paris: Stock 1905 pp.xxi—xxii.

77. Richard Ellmann: Oscar Wilde.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1988  p.510.  Sherard calls Xau Fernaud rather than Fernand, but this inversion is probably attributable to the printer. Robert Harborough Sherard: The Life of Oscar Wilde.  London: T. Werner Laurie 1906 p.278.

78. Richard Ellmann: Oscar Wilde.  London: Hamish Hamilton 1988 p.505.

79. Chris Healy: Confessions of a Journalist.  London: Chatto & Windus 1904 p.135.  Wilde's memory was rather selective.

80. Gideon Spilett in Gil Blas 22nd November 1897, translated in E.H. Mikhail (ed.): Oscar Wilde, Interviews and Recollections.  London: Macmillan 1979 Volume II p.356.

81. A stage version of The Happy Hypocrite was put on as a curtain--raiser to Mr & Mrs Daventry from 11th December 1900.

82. Oscar Wilde to Edward Strangman 15th June 1897 Sir Rupert Hart--Davis (ed.): More Letters of Oscar Wilde.  London: John Murray 1985 p.149.  Douglas was then living in Paris at 25 boulevard des Capucines.

83. Jonathan Fryer: André and Oscar — Gide, Wilde and the Gay Art of Living.  London: Constable 1997 p.206.

84. To be fair, Douglas himself states that 'I have it on Oscar's own word, confirmed by Robert Sherard, that it was Ross who brought him back to his bad ways again at Berneval after he had renounced them on his release from prison'.  Lord Alfred Douglas: Oscar Wilde, A Summing Up.  London: Richards Press 1940 p.43.

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