When Oscar was dying, he knew the end was perilously close. He had earlier written this letter, "my throat is like a lime-kiln, my brain a furnace and my nerves a coil of adders. . . ." His friends hurried to his side, and Oscar was biting his fist at the unendurable pain, and his face was twisted like a German gargoyle. "It is killing me," he said to his friends. On 29 November 1900, the dying man asked to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. This was arranged with quiet ceremony.
Oscar whispered, "Last night I dreamed that I was dining with the damned souls in hell." Turner, we are told, looked at him with great understanding and affection, smiled weakly, and said, "And I've absolutely no doubt that you were the life and soul of the party!"Then this greatest conversationalist of his era lapsed into endless silence. The death certificate, dated 30 November 1900, baldly stated: "Cerebral Meningitis." Three days later his three closest friends were at the burial of the mortal remains of Oscar Wilde at Bagneux Cemetery.
Robbie Ross, a martyr to his long, loyal, and troublous friendship with Wilde was, in years to come, to be asked what he would choose to have inscribed on his own gravestone. A not inconsiderable wit himself, and no doubt recalling his often stormy association with Oscar, Ross replied, "Here lies one whose name is writ in hot water!"
Oscar Wilde rests beneath a monument carved by his old friend, Sir Jacob Epstein. Looking at the large sculpture, one can almost hear an echo of Oscar's witty comment on graveyard statuary, "To me, the frock coat of the drawing-room done in Bronze, or the double waistcoat perpetuated in Marble, adds a new horror to death." On Epstein's huge, rectangular tomb, there is a quotation in Latin from job, followed by a verse:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long, broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
As today's tourists and classical students stand and gaze on the grave of Oscar Wilde, there will doubtless be those who will recall Wilde's own epitaph, spoken in conversation with Robbie Ross, when the last trumpet sounds and we are couched in our eternal porphyry tombs, I shall turn and whisper to you, Robbie, "Let's pretend we do not hear it!" I think he really was a droll person to the last.
