[6] “De Profundis.”  What Oscar called “the terrible part” of the book—­the indictment of Lord Alfred Douglas—­has since been read out in Court and will be found in the Appendix to this volume.

CHAPTER XIX

Shortly before he came out of prison, one of Oscar’s intimates told me he was destitute, and begged me to get him some clothes.  I took the name of his tailor and ordered two suits.  The tailor refused to take the order:  he was not going to make clothes for Oscar Wilde.  I could not trust myself to talk to the man and therefore sent my assistant editor and friend, Mr. Blanchamp, to have it out with him.  The tradesman soul yielded to the persuasiveness of cash in advance.  I sent Oscar the clothes and a cheque, and shortly after his release got a letter[7] thanking me.

A little later I heard on good authority a story which Oscar afterwards confirmed, that when he left Reading Gaol the correspondent of an American paper offered him L1,000 for an interview dealing with his prison life and experiences, but he felt it beneath his dignity to take his sufferings to market.  He thought it better to borrow than to earn.  He is partly to be excused, perhaps, when one remembers that he had still some pounds left of the large sums given him before his condemnation, by Miss S——­, Ross, More Adey, and others.  Still his refusal of such a sum as that offered by the New York paper shows how utterly contemptuous he was of money, even at a moment when one would have thought money would have been his chief preoccupation.  He always lived in the day and rather heedlessly.

As soon as he left prison he crossed with some friends to France, and went to stay at the Hotel de la Plage at Berneval, a quiet little village near Dieppe.  M. Andre Gide, who called on him there almost as soon as he arrived, gives a fair mental picture of him at this time.  He tells how delighted he was to find in him the “Oscar Wilde of old,” no longer the sensualist puffed out with pride and good living, but “the sweet Wilde” of the days before 1891.  “I found myself taken back, not two years,” he says, “but four or five.  There was the same dreamy look, the same amused smile, the same voice.”

He told M. Gide that prison had completely changed him, had taught him the meaning of pity.  “You know,” he went on, “how fond I used to be of ‘Madame Bovary,’ but Flaubert would not admit pity into his work, and that is why it has a petty and restrained character about it.  It is the sense of pity by means of which a work gains in expanse, and by which it opens up a boundless horizon.  Do you know, my dear fellow, it was pity which prevented my killing myself?  During the first six months in prison I was dreadfully unhappy, so utterly miserable that I wanted to kill myself; but what kept me from doing so was looking at the others, and seeing that they were as unhappy as I was, and feeling sorry for them.  Oh dear! what a wonderful thing pity is, and I never knew it.”