One afternoon in the June of 1900, the Guatemalan writer Enrique G omez Carrillo, then living in Paris, invited the young Colombian poet Guillermo Valencia to the Calisaya, an American bar on the Boulevard des Italiens, for "a big, unexpected surprise" (Valencia 1936, 5). 1 Upon his arrival Valencia was led past American expatriatesleaning against the copper arm-rest that ran the length of the Calisaya's mahogany counter, or perched on tall wicker stools as they sipped their cocktailsand ushered into a private room (Machado 1903, 355). There, he was greeted by the sight of around a dozen of Paris's most prominent Latin American exiles and expatriatesand the instantly recognisable figure of Oscar Wilde, whom G omez Carrillo introduced as "un nuevo poeta hispanoamericano" (5). Seated on a plush divan between Rub en Dar ıo and the Venezuelan writer and politician Manuel D ıaz Rodr ıguez, Valencia listened as Wildepale and plainly attired, but still garrulousheld court for three hours, discussing "with precision and singular mastery" everything from that year's Exposition Universelle to the merits of various artworks (5). Recording the meeting in his Autobiograf ıa of 1912, Dar ıo recalls Wilde, a little corpulent but still well-groomed and elegant, speaking French with a heavy "accent from across the Channel", and hints that the eagerness of "the great disgraced poet" to associate with Latin Americans may have stemmed from his abandonment by his French friends (98). Still, the tertulia was a success, and the group convened at least twice more before Wilde's death that winter. Thrilled by the encounters, Valencia presented Wilde with a specially bound edition of one of his works-"a very poor tribute to so great a man"and Wilde, in turn, gave Valencia a dedicated copy of Henry-D. Davray's bilingual edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a "priceless jewel" that later inspired Valencia to publish his own translation of the poem (Valencia 1936, 6). Wilde's brief efforts to cultivate a Latin American entourage have now slipped through the cracks of literary history. Valencia, despite becoming the preeminent Colombian poet of his generation and later a prominent politician, is now all but forgotten. A similar fate, one might say, has befallen Wilde, at least in his role as a "poeta hispanoamericano". Many Latin American intellectuals once venerated Wilde for his luminous prose and incisive critical thought; others, though, viewed Wilde chiefly as a dandy, a celebrity, or a mere debaucher. Over the years, the seductions of lurid scandals and reflexive moralising came to eclipse the quieter