Oscar WILDE

The story

Married to Constance Lloyd in 1884 and father of two sons, Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891. The affair was public; Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, made it impossible to sustain. In 1895 the English courts applied to him the gross indecency clause of the 1885 Act, which made sex between men a crime. The wittiest writer in London left for two years' hard labour in Reading Gaol.

Released in 1897, he crossed into France under the name Sebastian Melmoth — borrowed from Melmoth the Wanderer by his great-uncle Charles Maturin. He died of meningitis on 30 November 1900 in a hotel in the rue des Beaux-Arts, at forty-six, ruined. He was buried modestly at Bagneux.

It was Robert Ross, his first lover turned literary executor, who paid off the debts, secured the transfer of the body to Père-Lachaise in 1909 and commissioned the monument from the young sculptor Jacob Epstein. His own ashes were laid in the same tomb in 1950.

The sphinx reached the cemetery in 1912 and caused a scandal: judged indecent, it stayed under a tarpaulin, guarded by a gendarme, until August 1914, when the poet and occultist Aleister Crowley came and pulled the cover off himself. In 1961, unknown hands castrated the statue. The grave became, the Friends of the cemetery say, a meeting ground where the defenders of the homosexual cause crossed paths with their fiercest opponents.

From the 1990s on, the habit of kissing the stone took hold. Thousands of red kisses ate into the limestone, and the cleaning solvents finished the work. A glass panel now protects the monument: visitors leave their kisses on that instead, and the epitaphs cut around the base are legible again.