Wilde left London for Paris in 1897 but never regained the creative impetus that yielded powerful verse and plays like “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”  He died penniless, of meningitis, at 46 in the Hotel d’Alsace, today just L’Hotel, on the Rue des Beaux-Arts, but not before remarking, with characteristic wit, “I am dying as I have lived — beyond my means.” 

Friends put up the money to buy the plot at Père Lachaise and had him buried there with a monument by the young Epstein, which survived intact until the 1960s when its outsize genitals were smashed off in an act of vandalism. ( It is rumored the cemetery director used them as a paperweight.) 

Lengthy negotiations with the French authorities and the Irish government led to the tomb’s restoration, which was completed last month.  The cost of the work was “perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 euros,” Mr. Holland said, or roughly $55,000 to $67,000, the greater part of it put up by the Irish government, despite its fiscal difficulties, and a lesser amount by the Ireland Fund of France. 

The glass wall leaves even supporters of the project with a sense of unease. “ We’re not happy, of course, with the partition, with the glass screen,” said Sheila Pratschke, director of the Irish Cultural Institute in Paris, which helped arrange the tomb’s restoration. “ But it’s more aesthetically pleasing than I expected,” she said. 

It is hard to say how Wilde would have reacted.  But out at Père Lachaise on a recent sunny afternoon, Marc Overton and his partner Ray Fluta, who had traveled from San Diego to pay homage to the writer, were relieved to see the glass barrier. “ He’s a great hero to me, to people who believe that the life of the mind has real value,” said Mr. Overton, who said he had first visited the grave in 1966 and had been returning almost every year since.  He said he was gratified to see “no more disgusting lip marks.” 

However, the glass was already spotted with kisses, and flowers and notes were strewn at the tomb’s foot and inside.  One paraphrased Wilde: “You taught me that wisdom can come only with winter.” 

Another quoted him: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” 

Krzysztof Zembrzycki, 26, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, had come to visit his countryman Frédéric Chopin, who is also buried at Père Lachaise, but dropped by to see Wilde and was put off by the glass wall. “ It’s definitely a negative impression,” he said.