An infatuated young man

The young man’s love of Oscar Wilde wasn’t merely an intellectual pursuit. It was a slow-burning infatuation, ignited one summer afternoon when he first read The Picture of Dorian Gray, and fuelled further by Wilde’s wicked one-liners, tales of debauchery, and tragic exile. He felt a certain kinship with the Irishman’s wit and defiance, sensing a peculiar sort of elegance even in Wilde’s downfall. Thirty years later, as a man well-versed in life’s ironies, he recalls that fateful day he spent in Père Lachaise Cemetery, strolling aimlessly until he reached Wilde's monument, still smelling faintly of roses and damp soil.

The cemetery itself was like a city for the dead. Its winding paths formed a maze that one could wander into and never return, and perhaps some would have preferred it that way. There was Chopin, with his grave sprawling out like a miniature estate, imposing even in death; nearby were lesser-known composers who probably envied his prime real estate. Not too far off lay Jim Morrison's tomb—humble and overrun by cigarette butts, burnt candles, and leather-jacketed pilgrims who were still trying to decipher the lyrics to The End. The hippies, some in genuine despair and others indulging in performative wailing, crowded around Morrison’s modest resting place, trying to out-cry one another. A weary guide leaned in, mumbling bits of history to an audience that didn’t seem entirely present, “He died young, y’know, like, 27… Club, you’ve heard of it, right?” The young man remembered a passing impulse to make a snarky comment about how Morrison’s poetry might be best appreciated six feet under, but he restrained himself, considering it beneath Wilde's style of humour.

Then there were the massive, ornate graves, dedicated to French generals and forgotten nobility, each as heavy as the egos they once represented. Some of them seemed less like memorials and more like aggressive reminders of bygone wealth. Others were so ostentatious that one could almost hear the echo of pride emanating from the marble. He thought Wilde might have found it all very amusing: death as yet another opportunity to make an entrance.

But finally, the young man found his way to Wilde’s tomb, a silent tribute, a stone angel, winged and inspired by Assyrian art, bore an expression that was part grief, part defiance—like Wilde himself. The man recalls leaning closer, reading the epitaph: "And alien tears will fill for him, / Pity's long-broken urn, / For his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn." He felt a pang then, not of pity but of understanding. The scene was littered with lipstick smears that had bled against the statue, ghostly kisses from admirers who had made Wilde’s grave a canvas for unfulfilled longing.

The young man, now older and more jaded, finds his memory tinged with a certain absurdity: the damp lawn beneath his feet, the faint smell of rotting leaves and cheap perfume from Wilde’s fans, a pigeon that nearly shat on his coat while he tried to read the epitaph for the third time. He wonders now if he truly appreciated the tragedy of Wilde's exile or was merely indulging in his own self-styled melancholy. The angel’s missing genitals—vandalized by an outraged Parisian in 1961—seemed symbolic of Wilde’s own experiences, torn apart by scandal and indignity. Thirty years on, it is the trivial details that linger: the way the richness of the grass, the silence punctuated by a passing car’s honk, the faintest trace of irony that hung in the air like a lingering cologne.

Looking back, he can’t help but laugh at the theatricality of it all. Père Lachaise seemed then, as now, more performance than resting place. The dead were never truly at peace, their biographies always truncated to fit the plaque. Wilde, however, would’ve probably delighted in the contradictions, relishing the fact that even in death, he managed to scandalize—albeit through lipstick prints and vandalized genitalia.

As the man now remembers that day, he recognizes that it was less about Wilde and more about himself—an attempt to touch the hem of greatness, to romanticize suffering, to be a little more interesting for having spent an afternoon with the dead. The truth was simpler, drier, and altogether more fitting for a disciple of Wilde: he was just a young man wandering in Paris, spending an absurd amount of time staring at a stone angel, and wondering if literature could be a balm for existential boredom. Thirty years later, he isn’t sure it can.

FSF