George Sylvester Viereck (he went by Sylvester, which sounded more continental), was himself a pillow-lipped and self-professed sensualist who said he worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models, alongside Napoleon and Christ. “Wilde is splendid,” he wrote. “I admire, nay I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid. I love all things evil! I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption.”
