It was as simple as the life of Des Grieux, Manon Lescaut's lover; and it beat that by omitting Manon and making Des Grieux his own lover and his own hero.
"Des Grieux was a worthless rascal by all conventional standards; and we forgive him everything.

We think we forgive him because he was unselfish and loved greatly.

Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love nobody: I will be utterly selfish; and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster; and you shall forgive me everything.

In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity, not by writing them down, though I could do that so well--in fact, _have_ done it--but by actually living them down and dying them down.' "However, I mustn't start writing a book to you about Wilde: I must just tumble a few things together and tell you them.

To take things in the order of your book, I can remember only one occasion on which I saw Sir William Wilde, who, by the way, operated on my father to correct a squint, and overdid the correction so much that my father squinted the other way all the rest of his life.