17 August 1900

 

Maurice came this morning, armed with scandals.  Joseph was arrested last night on the Boulevard Pasteur: well, if he travels to the suburbs he deserves to be arrested.  Joseph is a sweet boy: he insists that I call him Mary, although I told him that the character of a virgin is always more suspect than that of a carpenter.  A woman hanged herself last night in the Boulevard Sébastopol, right next to the Petits Agneaux - whether in protest against the displays in the front windows, it is impossible yet to determine.  Then Maurice asked me for my own news.

      'Did I tell you about my cousin Lionel?'

      'No.  Because you have no cousin Lionel.'

      Well, Lionel wished to become a writer.  I told him that only thoroughly good people ever become writers, but he was quite insistent.  He wrote back to me: What about Hall Caine?'

      'Oscar, you are talking nonsense, as usual.'

      'I replied, Who is Hall Caine?  Never trust anyone who sounds like a Scottish residence.  But Lionel was adamant.  Only yesterday he sent me the first line of his novel.  Do you wish to hear it?'

      'If it is short.'

      'It goes - "Those are excellent apricots, are they not?"  I have written to tell him that he should go on; I long to hear the answer.  I know so little about apricots.  No, Maurice, I am afraid I have very little news: I am dying and, what is more, I have no cigarettes.'

      Maurice left me two or three 'weeds', as he calls them in his strange English, before he retired to the relative safety of the streets.  I cannot exist without cigarettes: the first, and I think the most awful, experience of prison life came when I was denied them.  The secret of my identity disappeared at once: like God, my face should always be seen behind clouds.  Now, whenever I think of that terrible period, I feel some absurd need to light one.  I smoke continually, of course.  Cigarettes are the torches of self-consciousness, and under their influence I can withdraw from the world into a sphere of private sensation.  I lie upon my bed, and watch the fumes curl towards the ceiling.  It is the only entertainment which my bed provides.

      I do not sleep in it, at least not in the manner which doctors prescribe.  My nerves may be exhausted, but they have a strange facility for reminding me of their presence.  My little Jewish doctor tells me that I suffer from neurasthenia: I told him that only advanced people suffer from that particular complaint, at least according to Ouida, and that I was quite happy to accept his diagnosis.  Indeed, I was flattered to be thought worthy of it.

      I have always suffered from nervous disabilities.  In earlier years I grew pale and sick with asthma, and as I grew older I often lay prostrate with various complaints which cleverly anticipated the crises of my life.  The body has a strange consciousness of its own and, when I was surrounded by renters or by creditors, or when I could not work upon my plays, it would plunge me into disorder.  The body can detect misery and disaster even before the spirit feels them.  This is no doubt the message which Mr Darwin has left us: it only waits to be discovered within the medieval mysteries of his prose.  I am tired now: I must rest.