Abstract
I remember another curious meeting with Synge in Paris. We were walking down the Avenue de L’Opéra one sunny day and I saw a man coming towards us whom I recognised — a portly man, with a bowler hat and a plain suit. I had just time to say to Synge, ‘Mark this man,’ because he was on us almost. Synge looked at him, and I looked at him, and this man looked at us very closely, and I said, ‘Oscar Wilde,’ and Synge said, ‘Oh, how interesting, let us go back and meet him again.’ I hated this, but Wilde had stopped I remember, and was looking into a big window with Greek vases in it and bronzes. So we turned around and we met him again, a minute afterwards, and Wilde looked at us hard, and I knew Wilde was thinking, ‘These two men know who I am.’ He was living under the name Sebastian — he had been pointed out to me some months before in the street, that’s how I knew him. So I took him in, but I lowered my eyes and I noticed his brick-coloured complexion and his stained teeth which have been described. Well, Synge was immensely impressed by this appearance of Wilde.
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Irish Literary Portraits, ed. W. R. Rodgers (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972) p. 99.
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© 1979 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Best, R. (1979). Mark This Man. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) Oscar Wilde. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03926-5_44
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