Beginning in the 1950s, scholars and critics starting with John Peter began to question whether Eliot's poem were an elegy to "a male friend." English poet and Eliot biographer Stephen Spender, who Eliot published for Faber & Faber in the 1920s, speculated it was an elegy, perhaps to Jean Jules Verdenal (1890–1915), a French medical student with literary inclinations who died in 1915 during the Gallipoli Campaign, according to Miller. Eliot spent considerable amounts of time with Verdenal in exploring Paris and the surrounding area in 1910 and 1911, and the two corresponded for several years after their parting. According to Miller, Eliot remembered Verdenal as "coming across the Luxembourg Garden in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilacs," during a journey in April 1911 the two took to a garden on the outskirts of Paris. Both Eliot and Verdenal repeated the journey alone later in their lives during periods of melancholy—Verdenal in April 1912, Eliot in December 1920.