The most famous death of 1900 was that of Oscar Wilde.

By the time the celebrated Irish writer, poet, and playwright finished his jail term, he was a ruined man in London. He fled across the channel to France to live out his days.

At the age of 46, he was living in abject poverty in a dingy room in the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris. He wrote to his publisher to complain that the state of the hotel “really breaks one’s heart: it is so [filthy], so utterly depressing, so hopeless. Pray do what you can.”

Wilde’s room had particularly hideous wallpaper: reportedly, brown flowers on a blue background. But there was no chance he’d seek a room elsewhere. Wilde was penniless and ill with cerebral meningitis. A few weeks before his death, he said glumly to his friend Claire de Pratz, “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has got to go.”

Wilde died on November 30, 1900. I love reading people’s last words but no one is certain what Oscar’s last words were. They are reputed to have been, “I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.” He was poor indeed, given the Hôtel d’Alsace was a flea-ridden kind of place in those days.

Oscar Wilde was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in the 20th arrondissement. Quite an interesting and unusual tomb.

The Hôtel d’Alsace was built in 1828. Being the scene of Wilde’s demise appears to have turned the hotel’s fortunes.  By the 1960s the hotel became the place to stay in Paris.  It was renamed L’Hôtel in 1963 and is today a 5-star luxury hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This tiny hotel has drawn celebrities like Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, Jim Morrison, and Elizabeth Taylor.

 

L’Hôtel honored Oscar Wilde by dedicating a suite to him. The Oscar Wilde Suite is unlikely to be the room where the famed playwright actually stayed. By Paris standards, the room is large, and it has a balcony. Wilde’s quarters were probably not so lovely. The Oscar Wilde suite offers some amends for the hotel’s ancient duel with its famous resident. The wallpaper is a rich green with golden peacocks.  They also named the bar after him, which I think Wilde would have appreciated.

Do you know, the poet Ernest Dowson has a fraction of Wilde’s popularity but his style was very similar. He lived a mad, self-destructive lifestyle and was known for his artistic wit, like, “Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder.” By a strange coincidence, he also passed away penniless at the young age of 33 in 1900.

I wonder if any faint remnant of Wilde’s rebellious, irreverent, and unrepentant spirit still lingers in L’Hotel today. If so, I imagine it divides its time between the bar and the Oscar Wilde suite, rather than the room where room he actually died. The suite named in his honor is the best one in the hotel.  Oscar Wilde was a man with champagne taste, a Coca-Cola budget, and no compunction at all about living the good life on credit!  What a grand fellow!