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very much. And some of them are quite delightful. Would you believe that already three of them have come to see me here! Isn’t that quite wonderful?…
    â€œThe one who replaced the nasty warden was a very charming man, aoh! remarkable! quitepleasant to me … And you can’t imagine how much good it did me in prison that Salomé was being played in Paris precisely at that time. Here it had been completely forgotten that I was a man of letters! When they saw here that my play was a success in Paris, they said to themselves, ‘Well! that’s certainly strange! so he has talent.’ And from that moment on, I was allowed to read all the books I liked.
    â€œI thought at first that what would please me most would be Greek literature. I asked for Sophocles, but I couldn’t take to it. Then I thought of the Church Fathers; but they didn’t interest me either. And all at once, I thought of Dante … oh! Dante! I read Dante every day; in Italian; I read him all through; but neither the Purgatory nor the Paradise seemed to be written for me. It was his Inferno especially that I read; how could I have helped loving it? We were in Hell. Hell was the prison …”
    That same evening he told me his plan for a drama about Pharaoh and an ingenious story about Judas.
    The next day he took me into a charming little house, two hundred yards from the hotel, which he had rented and was beginning to have furnished; it was there that he wanted to write his dramas, first his Pharaoh, then an Ahab and Jezebel (he pronounced it Isabel ), which he related marvelously.
    The carriage which was taking me away was harnessed. Wilde got into it with me, to accompany me a moment. He spoke to me again about my book and praised it, but with a certain indefinable reticence. Finally the carriage came to a stop. He said farewell to me, started to get off, but suddenly, “Listen, dear, you’ve got to make me a promise now. Les Nourritures terrestres is fine … it’s very fine … But dear, promise me: from now on don’t ever write I any more.”
    And as I appeared not quite to understand him, he went on, “In art, don’t you see, there is no first person.”
    1 This term, which may here seem unexpected to the reader, appears in English in the original text. (Translator’s note.)

IV
    W HEN I WAS BACK IN P ARIS, I WENT TO TELL B … what was happening to him. B … said to me, “But that’s all utterly ridiculous. He’s quite incapable of putting up with boredom. I know him very well: he writes to me every day; and it’s my opinion too that first he has to finish his play; but afterwards, he’ll come back to me; he’s never done anything good in solitude; he constantly needs distraction. All the best things that he’s written were written when he was with me.—Just look at his last letter …” B … showed it to me and read it to me.—It begged B … to let him finish his Pharaoh in peace, but said, in effect, that, once the play was written, he would come back, would join him again—and ended with this glorious phrase: “… and then I shall again be the King of Life. ”

V
    A ND SHORTLY AFTERWARD, W ILDE CAME BACK TO Paris. 1 His play was not written; it never will be. Society knows quite well how to go about it when it wants to dispose of a man, and knows means subtler than death … For two years Wilde had suffered too much and too passively. His will had been broken. The first months, he could still delude himself, but he very soon gave way. It was like an abdication. Nothing remained in his shattered life but the mournful musty odor of what he had once been; a need every now and then to prove that he was still thinking; wit, but artificial, forced, crumpled. I saw him again only twice.
    One evening, on the boulevards, when I was strolling with G …, I heard my name called. I turned about: it was