Sketch of my new hero - Mr. Oscar Wilde

It's not the first time my friends said I might have "met" more dead people than living ones in Paris. No it was not (completely lol) true.

I did make some effort to get to the tombs of some awesome people that I like a lot. But my collection was not complete because I missed Pere Lachaise, where rested the soul of Oscar Wilde, among many other brilliant minds.

I can still remember it was a gloomy late afternoon in early October. The wind was chill, the sky was dark with layers of gray roiling clouds. The cemetery was just closed when I got there. Disappointed, I decided to linger a little longer. The neighborhood was so quiet that I felt slightly uneasy being the only person standing in front of the firmly closed iron gate. And suddenly, a vast throng of crows rose out of nowhere... 

OUTSIDE Pere Lachaise, Paris

OK. Enough of ghost story setting :p 

Now back to Oscar Wilde. I have to confess the first time I have come across the name was when I watched "Paris Je t'aime", 24 hours before I was on the plane flying to Europe this Sep. The witty quotes definitely caught my attention:

"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being"  

*I really really love this quote

"This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do."
*Can you imagine someone cracked this joke when he was on his dying bed..?!

This was widely believed to be Mr. Wilde's last words, when he was dying painfully in a tiny cheap hotel room in France. 

Oscar Wilde vs Alexander Payne playing him in Paris Je t'aime

Before I googled his picture I actually expected Mr. Wilde to look a lot crazier because he said "life is too important to be taken seriously". To my surprise, he looked perfectly like an intelligent English Irish gentleman (I later read that he disliked being identified as an English). 

So here is my sketch of my new hero :)

I guess I now have every reason to visit Paris again in the near future.