During this stay in Paris Oscar read enormously and his French, which had been school-boyish, became quite good.

He always said that Balzac, and especially his poet, Lucien de Rubempre, had been his teachers.
While in Paris he completed his blank-verse play, "The Duchess of Padua," and sent it to Miss Mary Anderson in America, who refused it, although she had commissioned him, he always said, to write it.

It seems to me inferior even to "Vera" in interest, more academic and further from life, and when produced in New York in 1891 it was a complete frost.
In a few months Oscar Wilde had spent his money and had skimmed the cream from Paris, as he thought; accordingly he returned to London and took rooms again, this time in Charles Street, Mayfair.

He had learned some rude lessons in the years since leaving Oxford, and the first and most impressive lesson was the fear of poverty.

Yet his taking rooms in the fashionable part of town showed that he was more determined than ever to rise and not to sink.
It was Lady Wilde who urged him to take rooms near her; she never doubted his ultimate triumph.