cted; the serious part of it was such as any talented young
man might have written. Nevertheless I find in this play for the first
time, a characteristic gleam of humour, an unexpected flirt of wing,
so to speak, which, in view of the future, is full of promise. At the
time it passed unappreciated.

September, 1883, saw Oscar again in England. The platform gave him
better results than the theatre, but not enough for freedom or ease.
It is the more to his credit that as soon as he got a couple of
hundred pounds ahead, he resolved to spend it in bettering his mind.

His longing for wider culture, and perhaps in part, the example of
Whistler, 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 school-boyish, 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 i