The most traumatic events in Wilde's life were the court trials, and later imprisonment, concerning his personal behavior (see "Three Trials: Oscar Wilde Goes to Court, 1895" in Critical Essays). Prison was very hard on Wilde. He wrote about it, his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, and other matters in a long essay, taking the form of a letter to Douglas, later published as De Profundis. The essay was written from January to March of 1897 and took the form of a letter partly because prison rules allowed Wilde to write only letters. Rather than sending the letter to Douglas, Wilde gave the manuscript to his loyal friend Robert Ross after Wilde was released in May of that year. His last creative work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was written after his release and was published in February 1898. A tale of murder and imprisonment, it contains one of Wilde's more famous lines: "Yet each man kills the thing he loves."
Constance, Wilde's wife, died April 7, 1898. They had two sons, Cyril (born June 5, 1885) and Vyvyan (born November 5, 1886). Wilde's wife changed her name and that of her sons to "Holland" in September 1895 because of her husband's trials and imprisonment. She ultimately decided against divorce but moved the boys out of England. Wilde spent the last three and a half years of his life in Europe, living under the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth. An ancestor on his mother's side, Charles Maturin, had written a successful novel called Melmoth the Wanderer, and Wilde did seem restless and lost in his final years. The trials and prison time had ruined him. He died bankrupt in a Paris hotel on November 30, 1900, at the age of forty-six, receiving the rites of the Roman Catholic Church. A Latin phrase, from the Book of Job, is inscribed on his tombstone: Verbis meis addere nihil audebant et super illos stillebat eloquium meum — "To my words they dare add nothing, and my speech fell upon them."
