He took rooms at the Hotel Voltaire, and saw most of the better known people of the day. But, as always, he was not content to leave a part half played. He was in Paris as a poet, and, if he was ready to receive the poet's reward of admiration and homage, he was determined also to earn it, to write poetry, and not to rest on what he had already written. He was, at this time, impressed as much by Balzac's power of work as by his genius, and his biographer tells us that, with a view to imitating it, he wore, while working, a white robe with a hood, like the dressing-gown in which Balzac sat up at night, drinking coffee and creating his fiery world. He also walked out with an ivory stick, set with turquoises, like the stick that pleased Balzac because it set the town talking. At a later time he sought a similar adventitious aid to industry in buying Carlyle's writing table. He felt, like Balzac, that the special paraphernalia of work was likely to induce the proper spirit. In these circumstances, in the Hotel Voltaire, he finished _The Duchess of Padua_, and possibly either wrote or re-wrote _The Sphinx_. _The Duchess of Padua_ is a play on the Elizabethan model of dark and bloody tragedy. It is a sombre spectacle, marred by a constantly shifting perspective. The folds of tragedy's cloak fall over an angular figure, a little stiff in the joints, and the verse has the effect of voluntary draping. It is the performance of a young man who has not yet achieved the knowledge of the stage that was later to be his; the performance of a young man who has not yet achieved a knowledge of himself. It is better built than _Vera_ and more interesting, but it has the faults of the 1881 volume of _Poems_, without the same excuse of eager imitation and criticism. Here and there are lines of poetry that seem now afraid and now defiant of the progress of the play. The poet changes faces too often. He has all the Elizabethans at his back, and writes like the young Shakespeare on one page, and on the next like Shakespeare grown mature. His predilections are now for simplicity and now for such overworked conceits as this:-- "GUIDO. Oh, how I love you! See, I must steal the cuckoo's voice, and tell This one tale over. DUCHESS. Tell no other tale! For, if that is the little cuckoo's song, The nightingale is hoarse, and the loud lark Has lost its music." Wilde's weakness of grip on himself and his play is shown by the quite purposeless inclusion of cumbersome, would-be-Shakespearian comic relief:-- "THIRD CITIZEN. What think you of this young man who stuck the knife into the Duke? SECOND CITIZEN. Why, that he is a well-behaved, and a well-meaning, and a well-favoured lad, and yet wicked in that he killed the Duke. THIRD CITIZEN. 'Twas the first time he did it: maybe the law will not be hard on him, as he did not do it before."