The Place de la Concorde

The Place de la Concorde is a public square in Paris that appears in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as a symbol of exile and melancholy, personified in a poetic image that Dorian Gray reads while attempting to distract himself from the horror of his murder of Basil Hallward. The square is not a setting for any action in the novel but rather an object of literary meditation, its significance emerging from a passage in Théophile Gautier's Émaux et Camées that Dorian reads the morning after the killing. The Place de la Concorde thus functions as a node in the novel's network of aesthetic and psychological associations, linking art, memory, and the guilt that Dorian seeks to suppress.

Appearance in Gautier's Poetry

The Place de la Concorde appears in a poem from Gautier's Émaux et Camées, a volume that Dorian Gray picks up while lying on the sofa in his library, determined not to think about the murder he has just committed. The poem personifies the square's obelisk, describing it as weeping "tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile" and longing to return to the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where sphinxes, rose-red ibises, white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes crawl over green steaming mud. This image of a monument trapped in a foreign city, yearning for its original home, resonates with Dorian's own psychological state: he is a man who has committed an irrevocable act and now feels the weight of his own exile from innocence and peace.

Dorian's Reading and Psychological Context

Dorian reads the poem on the morning of November 8, the day after he stabbed Basil Hallward in the locked room at the top of his house. He has just woken from a peaceful sleep, smiled without reason, and dressed with particular care, selecting his necktie and scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once. He spends a long time over breakfast, tasting various dishes and going through his correspondence, before settling on the sofa with Gautier's book. The poem about the Place de la Concorde is one of several passages he reads, including verses about Venice and about the hand of the murderer Lacenaire, but it is the image of the obelisk's "lonely sunless exile" that most directly mirrors his own condition. Dorian has just destroyed the evidence of his crime—the body has been disposed of by Alan Campbell—but he cannot escape the memory of what he has done. The obelisk's longing for the Nile becomes a figure for his own impossible desire to return to a state before the murder, before the corruption of his soul.

Thematic Significance

The Place de la Concorde, as mediated through Gautier's poetry, serves as a symbol of the aestheticization of suffering that characterizes Dorian's entire approach to life. Just as he earlier viewed Sibyl Vane's suicide as a "wonderful ending to a wonderful play," he now reads about the obelisk's exile as a beautiful image rather than as a genuine expression of pain. The square's obelisk, a real monument that was transported from Egypt to Paris in the 1830s, becomes in the poem a figure for the displacement and alienation that Dorian himself feels but cannot fully acknowledge. The fact that he reads this passage while trying to forget a murder underscores the novel's central tension between aesthetic beauty and moral horror: the same sensibility that allows Dorian to appreciate Gautier's verses also enables him to compartmentalize his guilt. The Place de la Concorde, in this context, is not merely a geographical location but a symbol of the irreconcilable distance between the world of art, where suffering can be transformed into beauty, and the world of action, where violence leaves permanent stains on the soul.