[4] Within the last few years the stringency of this regulation has been somewhat relaxed, and it is in the discretion of the Governor to allow conversation at certain times. The Governor of Reading Prison, in the appendix to the Report of the Commissioners for the year ending March 31, 1901, stated: 'The privilege of talking at exercise is much appreciated by the prisoners. They walk and talk in a quiet and orderly manner, and there have been no reports for misbehaviour.' [5] Solitary confinement does not mean in a dark cell. The prisoner still remains in his own cell, but is debarred from exercising with the other prisoners, or accompanying them to Divine Service. The confinement is not consecutive, but applies to every alternate day only--thus, a prisoner sentenced to seven days' bread and water, or solitary confinement, does but four days. [6] _Salome_ was played in Paris early in 1896. [7] Oscar Wilde found the prison library quite unable to satisfy his wants, and he was allowed to receive books from outside. Such books are then added to the prison library. Magazines are forbidden, but novels allowed. In a letter written from prison early in 1897, Oscar Wilde said that he felt a horror of returning to the world without possessing a single volume of his own, and suggested that some of his friends might like to give him some books. 'You know what kind of books I want,' he says, 'Flaubert, Stevenson, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, Dumas père, Keats, Marlowe, Chatterton, Coleridge, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, Dante, and Goethe, and so on.' [8] During the last three months or so of his imprisonment he did no work whatever beyond writing _De Profundis_ and keeping his cell clean. He was allowed gas in his cell up to a late hour, when it was turned down but not turned out. As everything he wrote was examined by the Governor, naturally the prison system is not attacked with the same vehemence in _De Profundis_ as it is in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. [9] This was the Chalet Bourbat where Wilde lived from July to October, 1897. IV. Ah! what else had I to do but love you, God's own mother was less dear to me, And less dear the Cytheræan rising like an argent lily from the sea. IV. On returning to Paris I went to give news of him to ----. ---- said to me: 'But all that is quite absurd. He is quite incapable of bearing the _ennui_. I know him so well. He writes to me every day. I also am of opinion that he ought to finish his play first, but after that he will come back here. He has never done anything good in solitude; he needs to be constantly drawn out of himself. It is by my side that he has written all his best work. Besides, just look at his last letter.'