Admirers Once Covered Oscar Wilde’s Tomb In Kisses

The enormous headstone of Oscar Wilde, an Irish playwright and wit who passed away in this city in 1900, was recently cleaned by the playwright's family after years of fans' kisses that some claim have eroded and defaced the monument in the hillside Père Lachaise Cemetery. But the choice also required building a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep passionate admirers at bay. The stone, a flying naked angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, was inspired by the Assyrian statues in the British Museum.

In Paris, France's Père Lachaise Cemetery, Wilde's burial is marked with a well-known monument created by artist Jacob Epstein. It's a well-liked attraction for city visitors who have an interest in literature. Visitors started kissing the stone with lipstick in the late 1990s as a sign of respect, but the practice eventually made Wilde's memorial resemble Jim Morrison's, which is located on the other side of the same cemetery. The French and Irish governments paid for a glass fence to be built around Wilde's monument in 2011 because the grease from the lipstick and continuous cleaning started degrading the stone.