On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had been given a quiet, almost clandestine funeral. Holland had spent the day tracing his grandfather’s final, penniless years in exile for a BBC documentary, and it had disturbed him. That evening, several dozen candles were already burning at the entrance to the chapel, far more than on his previous visits.