Court and will be found in the Appendix to this volume.
CHAPTER XIX
Shortly before he came out of prison, one of Oscar's intimates told me
he was destitute, and begged me to get him some clothes. I took the name
of his tailor and ordered two suits. The tailor refused to take the
order: he was not going to make clothes for Oscar Wilde. I could not
trust myself to talk to the man and therefore sent my assistant editor
and friend, Mr. Blanchamp, to have it out with him. The tradesman soul
yielded to the persuasiveness of cash in advance. I sent Oscar the
clothes and a cheque, and shortly after his release got a letter[7]
thanking me.
A little later I heard on good authority a story which Oscar afterwards
confirmed, that when he left Reading Gaol the correspondent of an
American paper offered him L1,000 for an interview dealing with his
prison life and experiences, but he felt it beneath his dignity to take
his sufferings to market. He thought it better to borrow than to earn.
He is partly to be excused, perhaps, when one remembers that he had
still some pounds left of the large sums given him before his
condemnation, by Miss S----, Ross, More Adey, and others. Still his
refusal of such a sum as that offered by the New York paper shows how
utterly contemptuous he was of money, even at a moment when one would
have thought money would have been his chief preoccupation. He always
lived in the day and rather heedlessly.
As soon as he left prison he crossed with some friends to France, and
went to stay at the Hotel de la Plage at Berneval, a quiet little
village near Dieppe. M. Andre Gide, who called on him there almost as
soon as he arrived, gives a fair mental picture of him at this time. He
tells how delighted he was to find in him the "Oscar Wilde of old," no
longer the sensualist puffed out with pride and good living, but "the
sweet Wilde" of the days before 1891. "I found myself taken back, not
two years," he says, "but four or five. There was the same dreamy look,
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