The Daily Picayune New Orleans - Monday, April 22, 1895

BEHIND THE SCENES.
Movements of Actors in the Great Drama of the World.
Personal and Social Events Occurring Abroad.
Instructive and Entertaining Panorama of Royal and Imperial Life.
Reported Daily for the New Orleans Picayune by the Marquise de Fontenoy.

Nor can Lady Russel hope to recover her present law suit the social position, prestige and currency which she completely forfeited when she brought those horrible charges against her husband at the time when she attempted to secure a divorce. They were charges which aimed at placing him on the same level as Oscar Wilde, and were based on such flimsy evidence as to be thrown out of court the very shame of them recoiling on the head of the misguided countess.

What, in the name of everything wonderful, is meant by the constant references in the cable dispatches from Europe, as to the prominent position stated to have been occupied by Oscar Wilde in London society? True, he moved in certain literary, artistic, and dramatic circles where he was considered as a shining light, and his English adaptation of Gailic epigrams and paradoxes admired. But he never belonged to society proper in London, was never to be met at any of the exclusive houses, such as those of Lord and Lady Cadogan, of the countess of Spencer, of Lady Ripon and Lady Warwick. Nor did he belong to any first or second-class club. And that is always a good criterion of a man's status in England. Indeed his name only figured on the list of one or two unimportant and new-fangled clubs, not a single one of the more respectable institutions o this kind having ever consented to admit him. When a man haunts the Regent street cafes and the ephemeral propriety clubs in the streets leading off St. James and Picadilly, you may take it for granted that it is the best he can do, and that he has no social status of any kind whatsoever. The only reason that I can give as accounting for the prevalence of the impressions that Oscar Wilde was a shining light of the London great world, is that he was a successful playwright and magnificently self-advertised in the press. But he was never to be met at any good house or at any really fashionable entertainment, and the most that can be said of his mother, Lady Wilde, the widow of the Dublin physician, who was knighted for his services to medical service, was that she kept a sort of fourth or fifth-rate literary salon, such as there are a few in this country, notably New York. Nor can Oscar Wilde be said to have possessed any association with the aristocracy or even with the gentry constituting London society, save of an unsavory character.