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  It was at this point that Gide once more turned up on his doorstep. For Gide Les Nourritures terrestres had been a passionate statement on the "discoveries" he had made with Wilde in Algeria; naturally, he wanted to hear what Wilde had to say about the book. He discovered that Wilde had taken up residence at Berneval, a small seaside village just to the east of Dieppe—"the sea," wrote Wilde in his conclusion of De Profundis, "washes away the stains and wounds of the world." It would be a substitute for the Jesuits' home in London. Wilde called himself Sebastian Melmoth after a mysterious, satanic hero invented by his maternal grand-uncle, a romantic novelist; the character bore resemblances to Gide's Ménalque in Les Nourritures terrestres.

  Gide records that he arrived in the middle of the day "unannounced"— which is odd for a man like Gide who organized his life like clockwork. Wilde was not there to meet him. He wandered around this "lugubrious village" in the wind and rain. The hotel, populated by "second-rate people," was a "sad society for Melmoth." At eleven that night Wilde's immense profile appeared at the door. He shook the whole Hôtel into life, demanding a grog. He did not say as much as a hello to Gide.

  But he did invite him up to his rooms, where Les Nourritures ter­restres was prominently displayed on a bookshelf. Wilde did not say a word about it. Gide noticed that the skin of his hands and his face was red "like that of a commoner." "When we last met, you knew what was awaiting you in England," remarked Gide. "Oh! naturally! naturally!"— he had his old confident tone—"I knew there would be a catastrophe, this or another, I expected it. It had to finish like that. Just imagine: to go further would not have been possible; it just could not last." He lit up one of his gold-tipped cigarettes and went on: "The public is so terrible that they only see in a man the last thing he has done. If I were to go to Paris now all one would see in me is . . . a condemned man. I do not want to be seen there until I have written a play or two." And he added brusquely: "I was right in coming here, wasn't I?" The rain made the window panes shudder. "I did well, don't you think, to come and live here in Berneval?" he repeated.

  "They call the local church Notre Dame de Liesse! Oh! Isn't that charming? And the customs officers, they are so bored! I've bought them all the novels of Dumas, peré. And the children all adore me. For the Queen's Jubilee I held a great dinner. Isn't that absolutely charming?"*

  Wilde had still not said a word about Gide's novel. Gide began to feel uncomfortable. He got up and deliberately perused the bookshelf where the novel was sitting. "Have you read Dostoevsky's House of the Dead?" he asked. The great thing about the Russian authors, replied Wilde, was their sense of pity "Do you know, dear, it was pity which prevented me from killing myself?" He told Gide that his favourite author now was Saint Francis of Assisi, who had relived the life of Christ. Gide turned out to know a lot about the saint. "Oh admirable! admirable! You want to do me a great favour? Send me the best life of Saint Francis that you know."

  And there surely was the secret. Wilde had set himself a quite impossible task. He wanted to bring the life of Christ to his writing; he wanted to be a modern Saint Francis; but the one area where he could have applied this, the one subject that lent itself to such an ambitious project—his own drama—he refused to write about. No invented tale or piece of theatre could approach the power of his own life story. As the windswept days of Berneval passed by, without as much as a line written, a stanza composed, he came to feel this terribly—like his storyteller who witnessed something fantastic and could only say to the villagers, "I saw nothing."

  The next morning Wilde spoke of his two plays, the plots of which "he recounted marvellously." But he said not a word about Gide's novel. The carriage came up to the Hôtel to take Gide on his way. Wilde mounted and accompanied him for a short part of the route. And at last he brought up the subject of the book.

  He was full of praise—but there was still this reticence. He ordered the carriage to stop, said farewell and was about to descend when he said: "Listen, dear, you now have to make me a promise. Les Nourritures terrestres is good . . . really good. But, dear, promise me: never write I any more." Gide looked at his friend, somewhat baffled. So Wilde explained: "In art, you see, there is no first person."

  That was the whole difference between Gide and Wilde. In Gide the first person was all that mattered. Most of his novels were autobiographical. His greatest contribution to literature was his Journal, which he kept from the age of seventeen, editing as he went along. Indeed it is the Journal that alerts us to Gide's lifelong obsession with Oscar Wilde. Gide constantly looks back at him. It could be the discovery, twenty-three years later, of his old Hôtel bills at Biskra. Or it could be some indirect reference, as in the way he noted "progressive decay of age:" "if I didn't look at myself in the mirror there would be nothing to remind me that three days ago I entered my fifty-ninth year"—there is a wink there to Dorian Gray. For Gide, Wilde's greatest work was De Profundis—Wilde's only autobiographical work. He would attend meetings at which it was read aloud, in French or sometimes in German, which he preferred. He records one particularly moving session in May 1905 when Count Harry Kessler of Berlin did the reading. There was Gide's fascination for Wilde's play of masks, Wilde's perpetual game which revealed in a half-light what could not stand the light of day: "it was the profound secret of his flesh which dictated to him, which inspired him, which determined him." 'As for me," adds Gide, "I always preferred frankness."

  Wilde's refusal of the I creates a marvellous play of masks; but Gide, for the sake of his own sanity, comes close to saying, "Let's put the /back into art." After the encounter at Berneval, Gide went on to produce, over the next fifty years, a series of autobiographical works. Wilde, in refusing the J, produced nothing. Within three years he was dead.

  Gide made no further effort to contact Wilde. He did encounter him in Paris. Wilde's Christ-like colossus of a figure in the Paris cafés was not something one could ignore. Wilde hailed him one day from his seat in a street-corner café. Gide took a chair opposite. "No, sit by me," he said; "I am so terribly alone at the moment." Gide was not alone and his friend became agitated; they rose to leave. Wilde made a motion to pay, and then took Gide aside: "I am completely without resources." A few days later Gide saw Wilde for the last time. "Why, oh why, were you in such a hurry to leave Berneval; you had already promised me you would stay longer?" asked Gide, exasperated; he leant over to Wilde: "I can't say I hold it against you, but . . ." Wilde then took him by the arm and shook him vigorously: "You must not hold anything against someone who has been struck down."

  Gide found it difficult to accept that the great Oscar Wilde had been struck down; he would even write that it was that latent element of fate in Wilde which gave his life such beauty There lies the real secret to Wilde's silence—and Dreyfus's. Though Gide lived through two world wars, he did not fully grasp war's appalling nature. It is we, with the perspective of time, who grasp the full horror: the massacre in the trenches, the terror of the camps. The stories of Captain Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde, their imprisonment and their suffering in the preceding de siècle, seem to us so much a premonition of what was to come. The silence of their suffering is particularly striking. In the Second World War German survivors of bombardment would speak of an Emotionslähmung, a paralysis of the emotions, which also occurred in the camps and on the field of combat—on the Somme, at Stalingrad and at Kursk, in Auschwitz and in Kolyma. An Emotionslähmung is what explains the silences of Captain Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde. It seems inevitable that one of the places wiped out by bombing should have been Berneval, where Wilde's fate was decided. Wilde himself would undoubtedly have seen his story as an artistic premonition of war. In which case, nature's imitation of art in the twentieth century proved particularly brutal.

  AFTER HIS SOJOURN in Nice, where Douglas behaved with the barbarity and callous self-centredness that would always mark his personality, Wilde arrived in Paris penniless on 13 February 1898. Zola's trial was in its second week: the mood in the streets of the c
ity was one of civil war. "If I go back to Paris without writing my plays the world will only see me as a condemned man," Wilde had told Gide. So he knew exactly what he was heading for, and it was not writing; he told Ross and several other friends that he would not live to see the new century. "I cannot bear being alone," he wrote to Ross, and Wilde was very much alone; the world was slipping away from him. "I see no one here but a young Irishman called Healy a poet."

  Chris Healy was a bohemian poet who, to stay alive, worked for Rowland Strong, a correspondent of the Observer, the Morning Post and the New York Times, and also an intimate friend of the terrible Douglas. Wilde had, probably on Douglas's recommendation, attempted to contact Strong on his way out to Nice in the hope of borrowing a little travel money He failed to find him. But when Wilde arrived in Paris the following February, Strong was the first man he contacted. That was how he met Healy But he also made another acquaintance.

  Strong, not unlike Wilde and his fellow decadents in Paris, had a certain attraction to evil. On the day following Wilde's arrival, Strong was taken by another of Wilde's old friends, Robert Sherard, to the offices of La Libre Parole where he was introduced to Commandant Esterhazy In a memoir he wrote at the time, Esterhazy records being introduced by Sherard to "a little man with a red beard . . . and a ferocious enemy into the bargain of all Dreyfosards, past, present and future." Esterhazy was delighted with his new acquaintance, a man with frayed cuffs, very dirty and who stank of drink ten feet away Esterhazy, Strong and Healy went on drinking binges together, first at a café called the Horse Shoe, where Strong would start off by tossing down fifteen or twenty whiskeys without any visible effect, and later at a bar on Rue Saint-Honore, where Strong introduced Esterhazy to Oscar Wilde. Wilde was utterly fascinated by this unshaven, tubercular crook with his long, unkempt moustache, the villain of the world. Wilde entertained him with a "flow of his gayest witticisms," while Esterhazy riposted with his extravagant outbursts about Jews and Dreyfosards. Henry Davray Wilde's translator, thought Wilde was going too far in his enthusiasm for this "crapule"; day after day their meetings went on, regular symposia between Faust and the Devil. Wilde's reply to Davray was that, since his release from gaol, he had been forced into a commerce with thieves and assassins. "If Esterhazy had been innocent," he said, "I should have had nothing to do with him."

  But did Wilde know for sure—at the time of Zola's trial—that Esterhazy was the guilty man? Mrs. Constance Holland had sent the trustee of her marriage settlement on a mission to save Oscar, to get him writing again. "Oscar is or at least was in Paris at the Hôtel de Nice, Rue des Beaux-Arts," she wrote on 4 March. "Would it be possible for you to go and see him there?" Wilde was so delighted to hear that the best man at his wedding, Carlos Blacker, was coming to visit him. "I long to shake you by the hand again," he wrote. "I am living here quite alone: in one room, I need hardly say, but there is an armchair for you." But he warned his old friend, "I don't think I shall ever write again: lajoie de vivre is gone."

  Blacker was also on a second mission. Like virtually every "intellectual" in Western Europe, he wanted to get to the bottom of the extraordinary Dreyfos Affair. But Blacker had dug further than most. He had long been an intimate friend of Colonel Alessandro Panizzardi, the Italian military attaché in Paris and homosexual lover of the German military attachés Colonel Maximilian von Schwarzkoppen, the employer of Commandant Esterhazy's services and author of most of the torn-up notes the charwoman had been turning over to the Section de Statistique. As Blacker himself put it, "Three beings alone knew the whole and entire truth [about Dreyfos], namely God and the two Military Attachés." After the publication of the bordereau in November 1897 and Mathieu's denunciation of Esterhazy as the sole traitor in the case, Blacker developed a plan with Panizzardi that would nail him. Blacker and Panizzardi were close to realizing their project, shortly after Zola's conviction for libel, when Blacker stepped into Wilde's dingy little room in the Hôtel de Nice on Sunday afternoon, 13 March 1898.

  Blacker had spent most of the weekend reflecting on what he would say. He decided to combine the two missions: get Wilde writing again and nail Esterhazy—he could do this by recruiting Wilde to the cause. So Blacker revealed all that he knew to Wilde. But a serious problem developed after he left: his wife, Carrie, was dead set against further meetings between her husband and this infamous sodomite—just the sort of attitude that had so isolated Wilde. Blacker did manage to meet Wilde on a few occasions in cafés alone; he paid his bills and even reinstated his allowance under the marriage settlement, which permitted Wilde to move to the neighbouring and more comfortable Hôtel d'Alsace—a place of pilgrimage today But this was not enough for Wilde. "Could we dine together at some little restaurant?" he wrote despairingly, "just you and I together."

  Despair turned to bitterness. On 28 March Wilde injured his mouth when the horse pulling his fiacre fell, throwing Wilde through the front window and cutting his lower lip almost in two. Wilde asked Blacker to come and see him that afternoon; Carrie would not let him go. Instead, Wilde—according to his own correspondence with Blacker—went out for dinner with Esterhazy, accompanied by Rowland Strong and, it seems, Chris Healy. One can imagine the scene: Wilde with his cut lip, Esterhazy with his drooping moustache. "We are the two great martyrs of humanity," said Esterhazy, "but I have suffered the most." "No," replied Wilde, "I have." 'At the age of thirteen," said Esterhazy, brushing aside Wilde's comment, "I had a profound conviction that I would never be happy again." "And he never was," reported Wide to Blacker. Shaken by his accident and yet strengthened by the revelations Blacker had made barely a fortnight earlier, Wilde decided it was the moment to force a confession out of Esterhazy. He succeeded.

  Esterhazy plunged into his usual delirium about Jews and Dreyfosards. Wilde leant across the table and tapped Esterhazy on the arm. "The innocent always suffer, Monsieur le Commandant; it is their métier" said Wilde slowly and deliberately "Besides we are all innocent until we are found out. It is a poor, common part to play and within the compass of the meanest. The interesting thing surely is to be guilty and wear as a halo the seduction of sin. "The Commandant fell straight into the trap. "Why should I not make my confession to you? I will." He drew himself up: "It is I, Esterhazy, who alone am guilty I put Dreyfus in prison, and all France cannot get him out." His dinner companions all burst into laughter.

  But the smiles soon turned sour. Chris Healy equipped with the secret information Blacker had passed on to Wilde, went to speak with Émile Zola, with whom he had been in close contact during the weeks of the trial. Zola passed the information to two young writers, Yves Guyot and Francis de Pressensé, who sat down in Joseph Reinach's home and wrote "Lettres dun diplomate." The first of their series appeared in the Dreyfosard Le Siècle on 4 April. The letters, whose initial source was Panizzardi and Blacker, made Esterhazy's position untenable; they would lead eventually to Henry's arrest and suicide, and to Esterhazy's exile. But they also totally undermined Blacker's plan to expose Esterhazy. The anti-Dreyfosards thought Blacker was the author of the "Lettres" and menaced him and his family with so many death threats that he had to leave the country. Blacker was furious with Wilde; the breach between the two men was irremediable—or almost. Rupert Hart-Davis censored the Blacker-Wilde correspondence from his 1962 collection of Wilde letters on the grounds that they would still upset their respective descendants.

  While Blacker descended into rage, Zola made desperate efforts to get in touch with Wilde. But Wilde would have nothing to do with Zola, on the ostensible grounds that he was a "writer of immoral romances." Wilde was basically in Esterhazy's camp.*

  Strong in the meantime drafted an article in defence of the Commandant; it was dated 29 March, the day after the dinner. The article was published in the New Tork Times on 10 April and reported that "an English gentleman connected with the aristocracy named Blacker has obtained from Col. von Schwartzkoppen's [sic] own lips' a statement that Esterhazy had sold him documents. "Major Esterhazy," St
rong added, "declares that the documents, if they exist, are forgeries."

  Esterhazy continued to see Wilde. In June 1898, just a few weeks before Henry's arrest, they stayed at a small hotel, L'Idee, at Nogent-sur-Marne, where they were joined by Maurice Gilbert—one of Wilde's new young men—Rowland Strong, who employed him as his new secretary, and Lord Alfred Douglas. On 7 June, just before he left for England, Blacker came to pay a courtesy visit. According to Wilde he "enquired affectionately into my financial position—actually wept floods of tears—begged me to let him pay the balance of my Hôtel bill—a request that I did not think it right to refuse—and left me with violent protestations of devotion."

  Chris Healy had left Paris in April; he could no longer support Strong's sympathies for the evil Commandant. One suspects he felt the same about Wilde. But his last view of Wilde is, in justice, the image we should all retain of Wilde. He had just learnt of his wife's unexpected death. Healy found him in Notre Dame Cathedral, kneeling. "The sun streamed through the windows," he recalled, "the organ was pealing a majestic chant, and his head was bowed, almost hidden." No person at the time, or even less today, could imagine what lay within that great soul so devoted to the pursuit of beauty. "When I left him," wrote Healy, "he was still kneeling before the altar, his face hidden by his hands."

  * So, in fact, has the body Jim Morrison's remains have been removed to California.

  * Cross-Channel travellers who get off the ferry at Dieppe and drive the short distance to Berneval will be surprised to discover that the village no longer exists. It is one of the villages disparus of the Second World War. In the place of the small church there is a war memorial to the Canadians who fell here during the abortive raid of 19 August 1942. Next to it, a plaque notes that on the opposite side of the street stood the Hôtel du Plage, "where Oscar Wilde spent the summer months of 1897 in exile"; it was destroyed on 3 June 1944 during one of the many air raids that preceded D-Day.