Richard Holmes - Footsteps

Life was not easy in Antwerp. Money was scarce, the lodgings poor, and worst of all the Antwerp Academy would not accept women students. The American Consul tried to help her and Belle find private tuition, but then little Hervey fell ill with fever, and they were advised to take the child to a specialist in Paris. By December they were living in rooms in Montmartre, but in the spring of 1876 Hervey was still ailing, and Lloyd had vivid memories of hanging about hungrily outside patisserie windows because all their money was spent on doctors’ bills. Fanny sent a telegram to Sam Osbourne in San Francisco, telling him their son was dangerously ill. He arrived in Paris to be at Hervey’s death-bed. Bemused with grief, Fanny went back to her life-classes at the atelier , but had fainting fits and hallucinations, and trembled on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Their French doctor strongly advised them to take Lloyd out of Paris to spend the summer in the country. Fanny discussed this with her friends at the atelier , and a young American sculptor told them about the Hotel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing. Sam agreed to come with them, at least for a time; they put their belongings in store and climbed aboard a train.

It was too early in the summer for many others to be in residence, and the hotel was quiet and friendly. Lloyd began to eat and run about like a young colt; Fanny and Belle sat peacefully painting riverscapes and walking in the water-meadows; Sam drank and chatted with Will Low. Gradually other painters turned up at the phalanstére , and each accepted the Osbournes as a picturesque addition to the bohemian enclave. Frank O’Meara fell in love with Belle, and there was much talk of what would happen when the mad Stevensons, Bob and Louis, finally arrived to complete the party. Days were spent swimming, lunching out under the trees, painting in the fields under white umbrellas.

First to arrive at Grez was Bob Stevenson, a tall erratic figure with Mexican moustaches and a ceaseless, brilliant flow of mocking talk. He was generally regarded as the “genius” of the two cousins: painter, musician, linguist, drinker and unreformed rake. He dazzled but also rather frightened Fanny; she described him as “exactly like one of Ouida’s heroes”.

Then, one evening in early July 1876, cousin Louis made his appearance. Young Lloyd Osbourne, who was soon to hero-worship him, remembered the scene vividly. It was dinner-time, with some fifteen of the phalanstére sitting round the long wooden table in the main room of the Chevillon. Oil-lamps stood along the board, pitchers of wine circulated, laughter flew back and forth. The main windows of the dining-room stood open to let in the sweet night air. Occasionally moths flew in from the darkness and fluttered against the bright glass chimneys of the lamps. Fanny and Belle were the only women in the company, and all attention was on them. Then little Lloyd heard a faint noise outside the window, and saw a shadow moving and hesitating beyond the light. There was a clatter of boots, a thin brown forearm on the window-sill, a sharp exclamation, and a dusty figure wearing a slouch hat and carrying a knapsack vaulted lightly into the room. Bob rose gravely from his chair and, turning to the Osbournes, announced like a conjuror: “My cousin, Mr Louis Stevenson.” It was a grand entrance, never to be forgotten, and often to be embroidered. Stevenson himself later said he had waited many minutes outside in the dark, gazing into the bright room, transfixed by Fanny’s face, acknowledging his destiny. Perhaps he did. Certainly Sam Osbourne left Grez and returned to America in September; and when Fanny returned with Belle and Lloyd for the winter to her lodgings at 5 rue Douay in Montmartre, Stevenson soon moved to rooms nearby. As Lloyd put it with delight, “Luly is coming.”

Yet the affair took two years, with much coming and going between Paris and London and Grez, before it became really serious for both of them. Stevenson had other elder Muse figures on hand, notably Mrs Fanny Sitwell, the confidante and future wife of his friend Sidney Colvin. While Fanny Osbourne, for her part, was equally attracted by Bob Stevenson to begin with. Indeed, there is some reason to think that initially Bob was the favourite. She described them both, in a suitably colourful style, in a letter of April 1877 to Timothy Rearden, in San Francisco. It told me a good deal about the Stevenson family penchant for romancing about themselves, and playing incorrigible, boyish bohemians. She wrote:

Bob Stevenson is the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life, and yet somehow, reminds me of you. He spent a large fortune at the rate of eight thousand pounds a year … studied music and did wonderful things as a musician, took holy orders to please his mother, quit in disgust, studied painting and did some fine work, and is now dying from the effects of dissipation and is considered a little mad. [In fact Bob soon married, had a family, and comfortably outlived Louis.]

Louis, his cousin, the hysterical fellow, is a tall gaunt Scotchman with a face like Raphael, and between over-education and dissipation has ruined his health, and is dying of consumption. Louis reformed his habits a couple of years ago, and Bob, this winter. Louis is the heir to an immense fortune which he will never live to inherit. His father and mother, cousins, are both threatened with insanity, and I am quite sure the son is.

Madness, sickness, lost fortunes and wasted genius: it all sounded like a delicious game to Fanny. Yet pretending that she will never meet them again (both cousins had returned home to Britain until the next summer), she added a warmer and truer note:

… The two mad Stevensons with all their suffering are men of spirits, but so filled with joyfulness of there living that their presence is exhilarating … I never heard one of them say a cynical thing, nor knew them to do an unkind thing. With all the wild stories I have heard of them fresh in my mind, I still consider them the truest gentlemen …

“Gentlemen” she uses in an American sense; not snobbishly, but virtuously—men of honour, manners, sincerity.

Fanny became serious about Louis Stevenson after the second summer at Grez. Bob went back to Edinburgh, but Louis returned with her again to Montmartre, and here he was really taken ill, not with consumption, but with a form of conjunctivitis which threatened to leave him blind. Fanny, suddenly thrown into the role of nurse and mother, took one of her headstrong decisions which even in Paris might have been considered socially foolhardy. She moved Stevenson into her own apartment, put him to bed and throughout October 1877 looked after him like one of her own family. When he grew no better she sent another of her telegrams to Sidney Colvin in London, and in November took Stevenson over on the boat-train. It was thus that she suddenly found herself introduced into Stevenson’s London literary circle—meeting Colvin himself, Henley, Gosse, and even his Muse Mrs Sitwell.

Fanny was now dealing with the realities, as well as the dreams, of Stevenson’s existence. She was his nurse as much as his mistress; though Stevenson himself hardly seems to have been aware of this subtle shift of emotional balance. What he saw was a beloved companion who had proved herself true and practical, and utterly regardless of conventions. What his friends saw—and they all liked her instantly—was summed up by Sidney Colvin:

Her personality was almost as vivid as his. She was small, dark-complexioned, eager, devoted; of squarish build—supple and elastic; her hands and feet were small and beautifully modelled, though busy; her head a crop of close-waving thick black hair. She had a build and character that somehow suggested Napoleon, with a firm setting of jaw and beautifully precise and delicate modelling of the nose and lips; her eyes were full of sex and mystery as they changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness.