Oscar Wilde’s graveOriginally uploaded by Andifeelfine The other Sunday I made a pilgrimage to the Père Lachaise cemetery, in the northeast of Paris, France, to pay my respects to the shade of Oscar Wilde. I found I was not alone. The great man’s grave was surrounded by quite a crowd, including a party of Japanese students, a family of Germans (the father was wearing lederhosen) and an assortment of young people in their twenties: French, Italian, British and American. As I arrived, one of the young women was planting a kiss on the huge Jacob Epstein angel that surmounts the poet’s grave. She was kissing the marble deliberately, to leave the lipstick impression of her mouth on the monument. "Why did you do that?" I asked. "Because I love him," she replied. "We all do," added another of the girls (she was from Baltimore). "He’s one of us." Wilde, it seems, is our contemporary. He died in Paris 109 years ago, a near-friendless exile, impoverished, shunned, disgraced. Today, he is world-famous and universally admired. There are 1,000 lipstick impressions on his tomb. He would not have quarrelled with the attention: he was a pioneer of celebrity culture. "If you wish…