Health

An impoverished Oscar Wilde, his health ruined by his time in Reading Gaol, wandered Europe during the last years of his life.  From a dingy room in Paris, he complained to friends about his circumstances with wit and pathos, keeping one eye on aesthetics.  Ailing in a first-floor room in what is now the L’Hotel on the Left Bank, he complained about the wall covering: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One or other of us has got to go.”  One wonders what Wilde made of the wallpaper backdrop at Napoleon Sarony’s photography studio in New York, when he posed in January 1882 while on his lecture tour of the United States.  He advised against the indiscriminate use of wallpaper within the home, but generally recommended it as a safe and sanitary decoration: “You will want a joyous paper on the wall, full of flowers and pleasing designs.”  Yet with Wilde’s death on November 30, 1900, it seemed like the wallpaper won.  The hotel now has a suite named after Wilde , compl