Paris, outside a café in the gathering dusk. Three Englishmen wait for the arrival of Oscar Wilde, and when he comes, the conversation that follows crackles with the wit, wisdom, and melancholy that made Wilde legendary. This dramatic dialogue, based on an actual conversation the author shared with Wilde, preserves the electric atmosphere of that Parisian evening: the epigrams about art and failure, the paradoxes about success and society, the piercing observations on beauty and the price of living as an artist. Housman renders Wilde not as a monument but as a living presence, his multifacet personality glittering through every exchange. The dialogue ventures into territory that fascinated both men: what constitutes a complete artistic life, why failure often teaches more than triumph, how society judges the very creators it claims to venerate. It's a time capsule of intellectual camaraderie, but also something sadder and more valuable: a record of one of literature's most brilliant minds in conversation, preserved before the tragedy that would silence him. For readers who wish to hear Wilde speak again, this is as close as memory allows.
