1905: Alban Fitzartur, Viscount d’Anatis
Private papers
It occurs to me that I may be the last witness to what has been called, not altogether inaccurately, The Great Age of Indiscretion. I have been turning over my old letters—mostly invitations, bills, and hand-drawn cartoons by Wilde that no respectable dealer dares to touch—and realise with a kind of amused horror that the period since 1870 resembles not so much a life as a three‑volume comic opera written by a drunk historian.
Truly, I seem to have been everywhere except sober.
From London to Paris, Vienna to Boston, it has been one uninterrupted cavalcade of candlelight, scandal, and self-regard. The past thirty-five years of my existence can be summarised as a single, endless party which refused to conclude decently, however often a policeman entered the room.
In London, I haunted the Green Room, the Garrick Club, and that unsanctioned institution known as The Aeolian Society—a brotherhood devoted, ostensibly, to the study of music and, more truthfully, of trousers. There I made acquaintance with nearly every man who would later be described as “dangerous” by parliamentary wives. Henry Irving once asked me for advice on lighting; I told him to stand nearer the brandy. Wilde clapped me on the shoulder and said I embodied “the perfect English contradiction—born exquisite, yet educably outrageous”. I replied that he was only half right, but which half I have now forgotten.
Those were our halcyon nights—the West End alive with laughter and lorgnettes, the air salted with rumour. The Prince of Wales was omnipresent—less a man than a weather pattern, forever arriving in clouds of cigar smoke. He once awarded me a sapphire pin “for services to morale”. I have no memory of earning it, but the gesture was gracious.
Paris offered a more cultivated charm. I attended salons where Degas complained about dancers, Pissarro apologised for colours, and Toulouse-Lautrec serenaded the boiler. Once, on a single evening, I inadvertently shared brandy with Colette, embraced Sarah Bernhardt (she mistook me for a critic and tried to bite), and found myself at dawn crossing the Seine with Robert de Montesquiou, both of us dressed as priests for reasons neither could explain. Paris forgives incoherence if it’s properly dressed.
After that came New York, where society was still being invented and everyone behaved as if they owned it. I found the Americans charmingly illiterate in hypocrisy; they called their excesses “entertainment”, and nobody apologised. At the Astor Ball I danced with a Vanderbilt who confided she had married twice “because America expects ambition”. A certain Bostonian philosopher—Emerson, or someone unsettlingly similar—described me as “an unrepentant metaphor”. I thanked him and asked for a cigar.
Every city had its secret fraternity—a world within a world: elegant, invisible, entirely male. We called ourselves gentlemen and meant it, though none of us ever defined what quality distinguished our gentility. We existed in clubs, in cabarets, in hunting lodges that never saw a hound, and in “natural science societies” whose specimens were purely social. It was an empire of the shadow salons—devoutly respectable by daylight, utterly Bacchanalian after dusk.
I rarely met women in any capacity aside from those who innocently believed they had been invited for conversation. The real life of Europe unfolded behind closed curtains, in rooms perfumed with secrecy and admiration. Marriages were mere diplomatic alliances between respectable lives and their explanations. The true community was elsewhere—found in laughter, scandal, complicity, and the occasional midnight sword practice.
Boston tried to reform me. I attended lectures at Harvard on moderation but was expelled mid-syllable for demonstrating that enthusiasm might also be virtue. In New York I fancied myself an impresario, funding a musical called Salome’s Ghost until the police closed it as “too accurate”. My attorney in St. James’s still refuses to list that among allowable deductions.
And yet through it all—the actors, princes, poets, painters, and impersonators—there existed a strange fidelity of spirit. We believed ourselves immortal, and for a while it worked. We survived on anecdotes alone: the century was generous with those. I have waltzed with Tennyson (unintentionally), crossed words with Gladstone (intentionally), and once spent an uncomfortable three days on Count Tolstoy’s estate, where he begged me to simplify my waistcoat.
Now, in this new, electrically lit era, everything seems overexposed. Morality has invaded as ruthlessly as plumbing. The world insists on hygiene in both conduct and conversation. The gentlemen I knew have all been knighted or dead for years; even vice reads quarterly reports.
What a time it was! London humming with its secret grammar, Paris like a ballet painted by delirium, New York with its champagne optimism, Boston with its self-conscious virtue. And through it all I, moving unheroically but always elegantly, conducting my private orchestra of chaos—a traveller without direction, somehow always arriving precisely at the party I hadn’t realised I’d been invited to.
The young imagine their age thrilling; I smile and let them. They can have their electricity. We had atmosphere.
When posterity asks what manner of men we were—those who lived well and too long—let the record show simply this: we were gentlemen who adored life enough to turn it into theatre, and were polite enough never to reveal which parts were improvised.
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