Echo De Paris

Echo De Paris by Laurence Housman

Echo de Paris* by Laurence Housman is a dramatic dialogue reconstructing an imagined 1899 luncheon meeting between the exiled Oscar Wilde and a small circle of friends at a Parisian café near the Place de l'Opéra. The piece opens with three Englishmen—identified only by initials (L. H., representing Housman himself; R. R., standing for Robert Ross; and H. A.)—waiting at the Café Vieille Rose for Wilde, whose chronic unpunctuality is treated with affectionate irony. They are joined by the French writer Henry Davray before Wilde himself arrives by cab, his once-grand bearing diminished but his wit and manner intact. What follows is less a plotted drama than a portrait-in-conversation: an extended set of exchanges in which Wilde, ordering ortolans and white wine, holds forth in his characteristic paradoxical style on art, success, failure, nationality, self-knowledge, and mortality. He recalls meeting an unattractive but graceful Frenchwoman at the same café years earlier, to whom he paid an epigrammatic compliment. He develops an extended theory that true artists must live "the complete life"—embracing both great success and great failure—illustrating this with a discursive attack on the "Scottish" temperament for prizing success, using Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and especially Thomas Carlyle (faulted for choosing to glorify Frederick the Great rather than the tragic failure of Napoleon) as examples. He muses on the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or God, mocking Matthew Arnold's theology and quoting Robert Louis Stevenson's quip on Arnold's death. He offers a mock-serious theology of prayer as a courtesy that must never be answered. At his friends' urging, Wilde tells several embedded stories in his oral, fairy-tale manner: an allegory of a beautiful, damned woman in hell who believes herself in heaven because she still hears her earthly singing voice or the poet's praise of her, unaware of the deception involved; and a longer parable, "The Story of the Man who Sold his Soul," about a man who sells his soul for thirty pieces of silver only to find that, soulless, he can no longer sin, and who must eventually trade his own body to recover a soul—not even his original one—from a woman who bought it cheaply after it passed through many hands. These tales function as veiled meditations on Wilde's own downfall, guilt, and loss of identity. The gathering's warmth is undercut by an unspoken subplot: Robert Ross has arranged, as a surprise, for a young actor and former protégé of Wilde's, Harvey Jerrold, to join them. Jerrold approaches, recognizes the group, meets Wilde's eye—and then deliberately walks on without acknowledging him, pretending not to know him. Wilde perceives this instantly but conceals the pain behind urbane deflection, breaking off his own final story mid-sentence and never finishing it. When the others prepare to go in to lunch, Wilde quietly excuses himself to buy an English newspaper at a kiosk across the street and walks away into the crowd, never returning—choosing voluntary withdrawal over the humiliation of confronting his friends' pity or Jerrold's rejection. The scene closes on the group watching him disappear, with Ross's rueful "Poor Oscar!" as epitaph. Structurally, the work is one continuous scene, essentially a single-act closet drama or "table-talk" piece, built almost entirely of dialogue with minimal stage direction, designed to evoke Wilde's conversational brilliance in his final Paris exile (he died in November 1900) rather than to dramatize external action. Housman, who had known Wilde, presents him as simultaneously performing his old wit for an admiring audience and privately rehearsing his own theory of failure as the artist's truest fulfillment—retrospectively, and painfully, autobiographical. The text is followed by an extensive authorial footnote, written years later, defending Wilde's reputation against moralistic condemnation. Housman argues that the scandal surrounding Wilde's homosexuality should be understood medically and sociologically rather than criminally, criticizes the era's obscurantism (illustrated by an anecdote about a bacteriologist indifferent to the "unmentionable" subject), and describes his own involvement in founding a mixed-sex committee to discuss such issues openly. He closes by framing Wilde's ultimate social destruction as the "complete life of the artist" that success alone could never have furnished him—tying the footnote's argument back to the dialogue's central theme of failure as the artist's necessary and even redemptive completion.

By Laurence Housman · Genre: Philosophical Fiction, Literary Dialogue, Historical Fiction · 11,363 words

First lines

_The echo is from as far back as the year 1899. It is late September. By the entrance of a café, on a street opening into the Place de l'Opera, three Englishmen sit waiting at a small table, relieved for the moment from the solicitations of the garcon anxious to serve them their aperitifs. It is all very well for the café to call itself the "Vieille Rose": no doubt by gaslight it lives charmingly up to its name; but seen in the noonday's glare, its interior upholsterings are unmistakably magenta. From the warm sunshade of its awning the street view is charming; and while one of the trio watches it benevolently with an accustomed eye, the other two, encountering Paris for the first time, find in its brisk movement the attraction of novelty. But it is a reversion to English habit which makes one of them presently look at his watch a little anxiously._

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Echo De Paris is listed on Textopian as a short story by Laurence Housman, dated Date unknown.

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drama · comedy · one-act play · theatre · stage play · British literature · early twentieth century · English-language literature · dialogue-driven · satire · social comedy · literary fiction

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