Soon after Wilde left Berneval for Naples, those who controlled the allowance that enabled him to live with his friend purposely stopped it. His friend, as soon as there was no money, left him. "It was," said Wilde, "a most bitter experience in a bitter life." He went to Paris. In February 1898, the ballad, that he had not been able to sell to a newspaper, was published as a book. In March The Daily Chronicle printed the second of the letters on prison abuses. He wrote nothing else after he left prison, but revised _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and _An Ideal Husband_ for publication, and supervised the French translation of the ballad made by M. Davray, who, as he pointed out, had not had the advantage of imprisonment, and was consequently puzzled to find equivalents to some of the words. He suggested the plot of a play that another man wrote. There was talk of his adapting a French play for the English stage; but nothing came of it. He complained that he found it "not easy to recapture the artistic mood of detachment from the activity of life." He often left Paris. In December, 1898, he went to Napoule, and in the following spring to Switzerland. His work was done, and, after the writing of the ballad, he was impotent of any sustained effort, whether in life or in literature. He lost, however, little of his intellectual activity, and none of his power of enjoyment. When he was in Rome in the spring of 1900, he learnt how to use a photographic camera, and took innumerable photographs with a most childlike enthusiasm. He was blessed by the Pope, not once only but seven times. His pleasure in watching the ceremonies of the Church recalled the year when, as an Oxford undergraduate, he had half-hoped, half-feared to find salvation, or, at least, a religious experience.