drove him to Paris. He put up at the little provincial Hotel Voltaire on the
Quai Voltaire and quickly made acquaintance with everyone of note in the world
of letters, from Victor Hugo to Paul Bourget. He admired Verlaine's genius to
the full but the grotesque physical ugliness of the man himself (Verlaine was
like a masque of Socrates) and his sordid and unclean way of living prevented
Oscar from really getting to know him. During this stay in Paris Oscar read
enormously and his French, which had been schoolboyish, became quite good. He
always said that Balzac, and especially his poet, Lucien de Rubempre, had been
his teachers.
While in Paris he completed his blank-verse play, "The Duchess of Padua," and
sent it to Miss Mary Anderson in America, who refused it, although she had
commissioned him, he always said, to write it. It seems to me inferior even
to "Vera" in interest, more academic and further from life, and when produced
in New York in 1891 it was a complete frost.
In a few months Oscar Wilde had spent his money and had skimmed the cream from
Paris, as he thought; accordingly he returned to London and took rooms again,
this time in Charles Street, Mayfair. He had learned some rude lessons in the
years since leaving Oxford, and the first and most impressive lesson was the
fear of poverty. Yet his taking rooms in the fashionable part of town showed
that he was more determined than ever to rise and not to sink.
It was Lady Wilde who urged him to take rooms near her; she never doubted
his ultimate triumph. She knew all his poems by heart, took the strass for
diamonds and welcomed the chance of introducing her brilliant son to the Irish
Nationalist Members and other pinchbeck celebrities who flocked about her.
It was about this time that I first saw Lady Wilde. I was introduced to her
by Willie, Oscar's elder brother, whom I had met in Fleet Street. Willie was
then a tall, well-made fellow of thirty or thereabouts with an expressive
taking face, lit up with a pair of deep blue laughing eyes. He had any amount
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