Oscar Wilde's Tomb, Paris

Oscar Wilde @ Pére Lachaise 01 ParisWhile Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin to a staunchly Irish nationalist mother, he clearly considered London his home after his time at Oxford. After his two-year prison sentence and subsequent exile, Wilde chose to flee to Paris to live out his final days. Dublin, it seems, wasn't an option, and he only briefly visited his birthplace a handful of times during the height of his authorial success. A large part of this, of course, would have been the public Irish response to having someone with a "tainted" reputation like Wilde's attempting to live in Ireland—he was given enough trouble by English visitors during his days in France. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where his friend and literary executor Robert Ross commissioned sculptor Jacob Epstein to create a sphinx-like stone relief to decorate his tomb. After the tomb's completion in 1914, it became a popular practice for visitors to apply lipstick and kiss the tomb to honor the poet. One would hope that Wilde would have appreciated the gesture.

Image credit: Thomas Oboe Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Coordinates

Latitude: 48.861807500000
Longitude: 2.397962200000