Oscar Wilde was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed in a modest hotel room in Paris in 1900. A bearded Irish priest, summoned from the Passionist church of St Joseph, conditionally baptised the still conscious but barely articulate writer on the afternoon of 29 November. Fr Cuthbert Dunne returned the next morning to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. Wilde died that afternoon.

It was a dramatic end to a life of crowded incident.