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 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 of physical vivacity, and told a good story with immense verve, without for a moment getting above the commonplace:  to him the Corinthian journalism of The Daily Telegraph was literature.  Still he had the surface good nature and good humour of healthy youth and was generally liked.  He took me to his mother’s house one afternoon; but first he had a drink here and a chat there so that we did not reach the West End till after six o’clock.