“To me, also,” he rejoined instantly, “intellectually one may understand it; but in reality it’s horrible.  I want my pleasure unembittered by any drop of pain.  That reminds me:  I read a terrible, little book the other day, Octave Mirbeau’s ‘Le Jardin des Supplices’; it is quite awful, a sadique joy in pain pulses through it; but for all that it’s wonderful.  His soul seems to have wandered in fearsome places.  You with your contempt of fear, will face the book with courage—­I—­”

“I simply couldn’t read it,” I replied; “it was revolting to me, impossible—­”

“A sort of grey adder,” he summed up and I nodded in complete agreement.

I passed the next winter on the Riviera.  A speculation which I had gone in for there had caused me heavy loss and much anxiety.  In the spring I returned to Paris, and of course, asked him to meet me.  He was much brighter than he had been for a long time.  Lord Alfred Douglas, it appeared, had come in for a large legacy from his father’s estate and had given him some money, and he was much more cheerful.  We had a great lunch at Durand’s and he was at his very best.  I asked him about his health.

“I’m all right, Frank, but the rash continually comes back, a ghostly visitant, Frank:  I’m afraid the doctors are in league with the devil.  It generally returns after a good dinner, a sort of aftermath of champagne.  The doctors say I must not drink champagne, and must stop smoking, the silly people, who regard pleasure as their natural enemies; whereas it is our pleasures which provide them with a living!”

He looked fairly well, I thought; he was a little fatter, his skin a little dingier than of old, and he had grown very deaf, but in every other way he seemed at his best, though he was certainly drinking too freely—­spirits between times as well as wine at meals.

I had heard on the Riviera during the winter that Smithers had tried to buy a play from him, so one day I brought up the subject.

“By the way, Smithers says that you have been working on your play; you know the one I mean, the one with the great screen scene in it.”

“Oh, yes, Frank,” he remarked indifferently.

“Won’t you tell me what you’ve done?” I asked.  “Have you written any of it?”

“No, Frank,” he replied casually, “it’s the scenario Smithers talked about.”

A little while afterwards he asked me for money.  I told him I could not afford any at the moment, and pressed him to write his play.

“I shall never write again, Frank,” he said.  “I can’t, I simply can’t face my thoughts.  Don’t ask me!” Then suddenly:  “Why don’t you buy the scenario and write the play yourself?”

“I don’t care for the stage,” I replied; “it’s a sort of rude encaustic work I don’t like; its effects are theatrical!”

“A play pays far better than a book, you know—­”

But I was not interested.  That evening thinking over what he had said, I realised all at once that a story I had in mind to write would suit “the screen scene” of Oscar’s scenario; why shouldn’t I write a play instead of a story?  When we met next day I broached the idea to Oscar: