The Friend of Oscar Wilde

Le Havre is a French port city on the English Channel at the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy—which is where one might expect it to be located given that Le Havre means “the harbor”.

What might also be self-evident is that when Alfred Douglas visited this pleasant coastal resort, in August 1895, it was not long before he became combative with the local press.

Douglas stayed in Le Havre at the Hotel Continental in “nice rooms” facing the sea, which is where More Adey bade him adieu after their tour together of nearby Rouen.

Reverting to his own devices, Bosie took to sailing and rented a small yacht. However, there were suspicions that deck hands were also being rented, and that Bosie’s own devices implied his own vices as well.

Locals were no doubt aware of Oscar and Bosie’s seaside activities with local youths at Worthing, UK, (noted in the Wilde trials) which had reflected badly on the town. Consequently, a regional newspaper, the Journal Du Havre, accused Douglas of corrupting the youth of city.

As ever, Bosie wrote back to the paper to defend himself. This exchange of correspondence has been previously noted in biographies of Douglas by Rupert Croft-Cooke, Montgomery Hyde, and Douglas Murray. But possibly because the Journal was a provincial newspaper, none of those books carried Bosie’s letter.

The letter is now shown below.

In it Bosie vindicates the local youth, and evidently harbored more than just sailboats, namely a friendship for Oscar Wilde that was undying: quite literally as he asserted.

Here is the full text as reprinted in Le Matin, followed by a translation.¹

THE FRIEND OF OSCAR WILDE
——
A letter from Lord Alfred Douglas — Neither misfortune, nor slavery…
——
LE HAVRE, August 1st. — From a correspondent. — Lord Alfred Douglas, whose presence in our city was reported by the Journal du Havre, addresses the following letter to the director of that newspaper:

August 1st, boulevard François-Ier, nº 66.

Sir,
I have just read in your newspaper insulting things that you have written about me.

For me, who has already suffered so much, it does not matter at all if a small provincial newspaper accuses [me] of all the crimes imaginable; but for my little cabin boy, this poor innocent, and the other brave people, his friends, of whom you speak so lightly, it must be something else.

Let us state, Sir, that I have rented a small yacht and that I have also hired a cabin boy and that I have made on this yacht and with this cabin boy and one of his comrades and with several of the fishermen of Le Havre who are accustomed to taking foreigners on trips, several sea trips; is this a reason to insult and soil, I do not say me, but these other brave people, your compatriots.

For me, it is already too obvious that everyone has the right to insult and injure me because I am the friend of Oscar Wilde.

That is my crime, not that I was his friend, but that I still am, and that I will be until death (and even after, if God wills it). Well! sir, it is not in my system to moralize, to abandon a friend, nor to deny even if that friend is in prison or in hell.

Perhaps I am wrong, but in any case I prefer to consult my conscience than that of the Journal du Havre.

Accept, Sir, my compliments and my apologies for the mistakes that I have undoubtedly made in a foreign language.²

After Le Havre, Bosie went on to Italy via Paris (where he changed trains). While in Paris he was now emboldened to publish an expanded defense of Oscar in the Mercure de France, although it was never published owing to a disagreement with Wilde via Robert Sherard about quoting from Wilde’s letters.

© John Cooper, 2026.

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Footnotes:

1. Translation by Google Gemini AI Mode. ↩︎
2. Possibly a disingenous remark given that Douglas signally refused to acknowledge faults in his French grammar when translating Salomé. ↩︎

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