# Oscar Wilde and . . . who?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [December 5, 2006, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902 "2006-12-05T03:33:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 9
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2006, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/1 "2006-12-05T03:33:04Z")
We all know about Oscar Wilde’s Famous Last Words: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”
But who was in the room to hear him say it, and to tell posterity what he had said?
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### Author:  [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2006, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/2 "2006-12-05T03:43:35Z")
The best evidence is contained in Fred Shapiro’s wonderful new [The Yale Book of Quotations](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300107986), just released and the most authoritative book on quotations. He backs them up with facts.
The operative phrase is
> [@](#):
>
> Decidedly one of us will have to go.
This was quoted in a 1975 biography.
But, it was a variant of a quote from 1908, a letter from William Butler Yeats to Lady Gregory.
> [@](#):
>
> A friend of Oscar Wilde…told me a strange and heroic thing about Wilde…He was in great poverty, often with no money for food & had declared that it was his wall paper that was killing him. ‘One of us has to go’ he said."
So, the deathbed quote is probably apocryphal, but the sentiment was there all along.
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### Author:  [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2006, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/3 "2006-12-05T06:50:51Z")
Sorry, no cite, but what I read a few years ago (legitimate bio, just don’t remember title or author) was that the “wallpaper” quip was made a couple weeks before Wilde died, to a friend (identified in the source the cite for which I can no longer recall) he ran into on the streets of Paris. As I recall, the same source gave as Wilde’s last words, “Alas, I’m dying beyond my means.”
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### Author:  [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/4 "2006-12-06T00:31:35Z")
Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography (Hamish Hamilton; Penguin, 1988, p546) attributes the best source for the joke as Claire de Pratz, the correspondent of _Le Petit Parisien_ and _Daily News_, who came to know him in his last few months in Paris.
In this version, on 29th October Wilde was sufficiently robust that he was able to take a walk in the evening, during the course of which she reported that he said to her “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” He doesn’t actually die until a month later.
Ellmann’s source for de Pratz’s account is an article “Souvenirs inédits” by Guillot de Saix on p141 of an undated edition of _L’Européen_. (The point that Ellmann is citing an article [seems to have confused people in the past](http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:RJSVgixCO0IJ:listserv.dom.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe%3FA2%3Dind0512%26L%3Dstumpers-l%26D%3D0%26O%3DD%26P%3D13095+guillot+de+saix+%22souvenirs+inedits%22&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=2&client=firefox-a).)
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### Author:  [@twhitt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twhitt)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/5 "2006-12-06T01:43:17Z")
What was so bad about the wallpaper?
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### Author:  [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/6 "2006-12-06T03:27:02Z")
I dunno, but everyone who’s seen it is dead, probably.
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### Author:  [@PBear42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PBear42)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/7 "2006-12-06T06:54:19Z")
Thanks, **bonzer**. That sounds very much like the passage I read, though it may have been another bio which borrowed/repeated the anecdote.
As for what was so bad about the walllpaper: nothing. It won.
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### Author:  [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/8 "2006-12-06T19:44:35Z")
[QUOTE=twhitt]
What was so bad about the wallpaper?
[/QUOTE]
Well, the wallpaper in the room with the deathbed is visible in the background of the photograph of the body taken by Maurice Gilbert. That can be seen on [this page](http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/clarklib/wildphot/reading.htm), though it’s better reproduced in Ellmann’s book.
Looks like some sort of floral design, possibly chinoiserie influenced. An entirely ordinary specimen of wallpaper for the period. Which may, of course, have been exactly what Wilde was objecting to about it.
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### Author:  [@teela\_brown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/teela_brown)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2006, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/oscar-wilde-and-who/382902/9 "2006-12-06T21:15:29Z")
[QUOTE=twhitt]
What was so bad about the wallpaper?
[/QUOTE]
Tony Bourdain, in his series _No Reservations_ and in the episode in which he visited Paris, stayed in the room in which Oscar Wilde died. They showed the room’s wallpaper, and although they must have certainly changed it since those days, it was certainly a livid and intimidating wallpaper. It is a lurid deep absinthe green with intertwining grotesque peacocks in a _belle epoche_ style.
Assuming it is in the same or nearly the same pattern as back then, and assuming one drank large quantities of absinthe, I can see the paper giving one the paranoid heebie-jeebies.