Prologue

From the previously unpublished memoirs of Robert Sherard

France, 1939

My name is Robert Sherard, and I was a friend of Oscar Wilde. We met in Paris in 1883, when he was twenty-eight and already famous, and I was twenty-one and quite unknown. “You must not call me ‘Wilde’,” he said to me at that first encounter. “If I am your friend, Robert, my name to you is Oscar. If we are only strangers, I am Mr Wilde.” We were not strangers. Nor were we lovers. We were friends. And, after his death, I became his first—and his most faithful—biographer.

I knew Oscar Wilde and I loved him. I was not by him in the poor room of the poor inn where he died. I had not the consolation of following to the nameless grave the lonely hearse that bore no flowers on its pall.

But, as many hundreds of miles away I read of his solitary death, and heard of the supreme abandonment of him by those to whom also he had always been good, I determined to say all the things that I knew of him, to tell people what he really was, so that my story might help a little to a better understanding of a man of rare heart and rarer genius.

I am writing this in the summer of 1939. The date is Thursday 31 August. War looms, but it means nothing to me. Who wins, who loses: I care not. I am an old man now, and sick, and I have a tale I need to tell before I die.

I want to complete the record, ‘finish the portrait’, as best I can. As in a forest of pine-trees in southern France there are great black, burnt-up patches, so too in my memory. There is much that I have forgotten, much that I have tried to forget, but what you will read in the pages that follow I know to be true. In the years of our friendship, I kept a journal of our times together. I promised Oscar that for fifty years I would keep his secret. I have kept my word. And now the time has come when I can break my silence. At last, I can reveal all that I know of Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders. I must do it, for I have the record. I was there. I am the witness.

The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust

Burn to the socket.

—William Wordsworth (1770-1850)