ips, and a look of constant bewilderment.

As for that, Oscar was sufficiently bewildering. He talked infinitely
better than he wrote, and on no topic, no matter what, could he talk
as other mortals must. Once only I heard of him uttering a platitude
and from any one else that platitude would have been a paradox. He
exuded wit and waded in it with a serenity that was disconcerting.

It was on this abnormal serenity and on his equally abnormal
brilliance that he relied to defeat the prosecution. "I have all the
criminal classes with me," he announced, and that was his one
platitude, a banality that contrived to be tragic. Then headlong down
the stair of life he fell.

Hell he had long since summarised as the union of souls without bodies
to bodies without souls. There are worse definitions than this which
years later I recalled when, through a curious forethought of fate, he
was taken, en route to the cemetery, through the Porte de l'Enfer.

But in Tite street, at this time, and in Regent street where he
occasionally dined, he was gentle, wholesome, and joyous; a man who
paid compliments because, as he put it, he could pay nothing else. He
had been caricatured: the caricatures had ceased. People had turned to
look: they looked no longer. He was forgiven and, what is worse,
forgotten. Yet that tiger, his destiny, was but sharpening its claws.

At an inn where Gautier dined, the epigrams were so demoralising that
a waiter became insane. Similarly in the Regent street restaurant it
was reported, perhaps falsely, that a waiter had also lost his reason.
But Wilde, though a three decanter man, always preserved his own. He
preserved, too, his courtesy which was invariable. The most venomous
thing that he ever said of anyone was that he was a tedious person,
and the only time he ever rebuked anybody was at the conclusion of one
of those after-dinner stories which some host or other interrupted by
rising and saying: "Shall we continue the conversation in the
drawing-room?"

But I am in error. That was not his only rebuke. On one occasion I
drove with him to Tite street. An hour previous he had executed a
variation on the "Si j'etais roi." "If I were king," he had sung, "I
would sit in a great hall and paint on green ivory and when my
ministers came and told me that the people were starving, I would
continue to paint on green ivory and say: 'Let them starve.'"

The aria was rendered in the rooms of Francis Hope, a young man