He tells how delighted he was to find in him the "Oscar Wilde of old," no longer the sensualist puffed out with pride and good living, but "the sweet Wilde" of the days before 1891.

"I found myself taken back, not two years," he says, "but four or five.

There was the same dreamy look, the same amused smile, the same voice." He told M.Gide that prison had completely changed him, had taught him the meaning of pity.

"You know," he went on, "how fond I used to be of 'Madame Bovary,' but Flaubert would not admit pity into his work, and that is why it has a petty and restrained character about it.

It is the sense of pity by means of which a work gains in expanse, and by which it opens up a boundless horizon.