As the Irish were leaving, an elderly woman arrived and began to rearrange Wilde's tomb as if it were part of her backyard. Madame C.H. has been puttering around the tombs in Père Lachaise for 15 years. Wilde is a favorite. "The notes were a form of pure love" she says, referring to the old custom of stuffing messages around the angel's toes and knees "but the kisses are degrading." I couldn't find any traces of the messages Madame was referring to but I copied down some of the multilingual graffiti that was still legible: "You taught me what is love," writes Luca from Pescara. "What's the craic?" asks Aisling from Dublin. The chorus adds: "Wilde, je t'adore!" "Oscar, it is still pure Greek!" and "You are the best! You can never die!" Deeply etched were the words "The Man."

For Wilde's grandson, who pays for the upkeep, the kisses are the last straw. "I don't know what to do now," he told the London Observer last month. "Perhaps I should write to L'Oréal asking them to put warnings on their lipsticks." He ordered a plaque for the base of the tomb that reads (in English and French): "Respect the memory of Oscar Wilde and do not deface this tomb. It is protected by law as an historical monument and was restored in 1992." Perhaps the tomb smoochers think that they are showing respect. Perhaps they look at themselves in the mirror afterward and say, "Oscar Wilde's kiss is still on my lips."

Wilde was originally buried in utmost obscurity at a grave in Bagneaux Cemetery, a place that seems to have disappeared from any French map. When Robert Ross had him dug up in 1909 and transferred to elegant Père Lachaise, the body was eerily intact. Catholics have always regarded the absence of putrefaction as a sure sign of saintliness. The miracle of Wilde's being "still in one piece" encouraged French writer André Gide to get in touch with his spirit by seance. Gide was grateful to Wilde for being a friend and awe-inspiring role model -- and for seeing through his hetero act and "debauching" him in Algeria with the help of a flute-playing rent boy. A spirit claiming to be that of Wilde visited other mediums and provided a critical review of a West End production of one of his plays in the 1920s.

The word "homosexual" was not in use in Wilde's day. However, a hostile poem written at the time of his downfall accuses him of "sexomania." The word used during his 1895 trial was "indecency," and "Sodomite" became his middle name after his conviction. Technically speaking, Wilde doesn't seem to have buggered anyone if we are to believe his first lover, Robert Ross, and his distinguished biographer, Richard Ellman. According to them, he delighted in oral sex with men and boys but, when push came to shove, preferred it intercrural -- a form of intercourse that involves insertion between the thighs. There was a theory, popular among Victorian academics, that most of the male homosexual relationships among Greeks didn't involve penetration either. Classical scholars in Wilde's day regarded it as altogether more proper to think that Plato and company engaged in leg fucking rather than sodomy.

Wilde might have lived well into the 20th century, writing plays, basking in celebrity and growing old like Quentin Crisp "disgracefully." But his trial and the two years of hard prison labor contributed directly to his death at 46. Although it is still not known if that death was caused by syphilis or a rare type of middle ear infection, either one would have been seriously aggravated by prison life. Whatever the cause of death, his body foamed at the nostrils and ears shortly after he expired. "If I were to outlive the century, it would be more than the English could stand," said Wilde, and he didn't outlive it by much. However, as a social rebel and martyr to artistic and sexual freedom, Wilde's ungainly shadow only grew longer. A decade after his death, he was the second most read author in England after Shakespeare despite his reputation as an agent of the devil. Wilde the artist -- writing works like "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Salomé"; and "The Importance of Being Earnest" -- was always a more serious threat to Victorian morals than Wilde the bugger.

The anti-Wilde hysteria reached a posthumous climax in London during the first production of his play Salomé and ended in yet another trial. Leading actress Maud Allan was forced to sue for libel after a conservative publication accused her of being a lesbian and a traitor. Wilde himself was denounced at the trial by his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, now a bitter proto-fascist and anti-Semite, as "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years." At the same time, in the United States, his plays were immensely successful on Broadway while a pornographic book circulated on college campuses with the title "The Sins of Oscar Wilde."

"I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me," wrote Wilde, after being released from prison. And so it did.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk