Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

Soon after Colvin’s departure from Menton, Stevenson found himself happily distracted by the company of a group of Russians living in a nearby villa who dined daily at his hotel. These were a pair of sisters, Nadia Zassetsky and Sophie Garschine (the latter an invalid), and two little girls, Pelagie, aged eight, and two-year-old Nelitchka, both daughters of Madame Zassetsky (a mother of ten), though Pelagie had been adopted by her aunt. The women were some ten or fifteen years older than Stevenson, according to Colvin’s guess, and both ‘brilliantly accomplished and cultivated’, 14 with a fascinatingly forthright and colourful turn of phrase (in French) which was unlike anything Stevenson had experienced from female company before. After an initial frostiness towards them, when he believed, correctly, that Madame Garschine was trying to seduce him, Stevenson gave himself over to their charm and novelty, and was soon spending all his time with these exotic, sexy, bored, clever women.

A great part of his delight with the Russians, news of which stuffed his letters back to England, was centred on the toddler Nelitchka, who could say words in six languages and had already learned how to catch and hold the attention of an interested stranger. She at first called Stevenson ‘ polisson ’ for staring at her at table, then ‘ Mädchen ’ on account of his long hair, but soon was bringing him a flower every morning and chattering away confidingly in her polyglot babble. This played right to Stevenson’s partiality; the winning little Russian was halfway to breaking his heart. ‘A quand, les noces?’ Madame Zassetsky asked mischievously as she watched Nelitchka feeding Louis bread. 15 ‘Nellie’, her sister and friend performed a tarantella for him and allowed him to join in their games; he in turn wrote them verses, sent them little presents and laughed endlessly at their locutions. ‘Children are certainly too good to be true,’ he wrote to Fanny Sitwell; and to his mother, rather mysteriously, ‘kids are what is the matter with me’. 16 Was that an oblique rebuke to her for not having provided a sibling-playmate, or did Stevenson mean he was restless to start a family of his own? He was twenty-three at the time, a likely age for such feelings to set in. Colvin was struck the same year by Stevenson’s ‘radiant countenance’ as he watched some little girls playing with a skipping rope under the window of Colvin’s house at Hampstead: ‘Had I ever seen anything so beautiful and wonderful?’ he reports Stevenson asking him. ‘Nothing in the whole wide world had ever made him half so happy before.’ 17

It seems Mrs Sitwell was wounded by Louis’s sudden enthusiasm for the two Russian women, who – as he reported daily in his letters – insisted on sitting up close to him, teasing him about his clothes, reading his palm and confiding secrets of their unhappy marriages. Madame Garschine in particular was making headway, as Stevenson’s inflammatory accounts made clear. He cannot have been altogether displeased when Mrs Sitwell wrote something (destroyed now, with all her other letters) that provoked this reply:

O my dear, don’t misunderstand me; let me hear soon to tell me that you don’t doubt me: I wanted to let you know really how the thing stood and perhaps I am wrong, perhaps doing that is impossible in such cases. At least, dear, believe me you have been as much in my heart these three days as ever you have been, and the thought of you troubles my breathing with the sweetest trouble. I am only happy in the thought of you, my dear – this other woman is interesting to me as a hill might be, or a book, or a picture – but you have all my heart [?my darling] … 18

However mild a complaint Mrs Sitwell had sent, the fact that she sent one at all is striking. To do so is not the action of a woman trying to keep an inappropriate or unwanted suitor at arm’s length, but of a woman needing reassurance that she is still the focus of his attention. Perhaps Mrs Sitwell, who had just taken the decisive step of applying for a secretarial job at a college for working women in Queen Square in London and who was at last breaking free of her marriage, was really in two minds about Louis Stevenson at this date.

It is no great surprise that after a few weeks at the Hôtel Mirabeau in the company of his charming Russian friends, Stevenson was happy to report himself ‘enormously better in the head’. Colvin visited again and the two began to consider – or Stevenson began to consider, and Colvin began to agree – collaborating on a ‘spectacle-play’ on the subject of Herostratus. After months of inactivity, Stevenson was beginning to write again. There was ‘Ordered South’ ready to be sent out to Macmillan’s Magazine (who published it in May), and the idea for a book on ‘Four Great Scotchmen’, to contain pieces about Burns, Knox, Scott and Hume. Like the spectacle-play, nothing came of this (apart from the essays on Burns and Knox that appeared eventually in Familiar Studies ), but Colvin’s interest was vitally encouraging to the young man who so desperately needed to find an independent income if he was ever to escape from his parents and ‘a job in an office’.

Louis had passed almost six months in the South of France, at considerable expense to his father, and as the spring arrived in Scotland, he was expected home. The prospect obviously filled him with dread. As departure neared, he began desperately to posit alternative schemes: perhaps he could remove to Göttingen, and carry on law studies there? His parents were prepared to consider this (Louis must have sold hard the idea of becoming ‘a good specialist in the law’ under the tutelage of a ‘swell professor’ – recommended by one of Madame Garschine’s relations), but it was all pie in the sky. The young dandy of the Riviera had not given a thought to law for almost a year, and had more chance of becoming ‘a good specialist’ in nursery nursing than in jurisprudence. Faced with his parents’ approval, he decided that the scheme was impossible. By this time he was in Paris, desperately stalling, and wanting to go with Bob to the artists’ colony that had formed at Barbizon, near Fontainebleau. His nervous symptoms had come back with a vengeance (Paris is much nearer Edinburgh than is Menton): he caught a cold, and on 11 April 1874 he wrote to Mrs Sitwell, ‘I see clearly enough that I must give up the game for the present: this morning I am so ill that I can see nothing for it than to crawl very cautiously home.’ 19

‘The game’, clearly, was against his parents. ‘You know, I was doing what they didn’t want,’ he complained to Mrs Sitwell from Paris, ‘but I put myself out of my own way to make it less unpleasant for them; and surely when one is nearly twenty-four years of age one should be allowed to do a bit of what one wants without their quarrelling with me.’ 20 The peevishness of this is notable; Stevenson knew better than anyone how much his own self-interest contributed to keeping the ‘game’ going: ‘Going home not very well is an astonishing good hold for me,’ he remarked cynically. ‘I shall simply be a prince.’ 21 There was another factor too: he had hoped, during the long rest-cure at Menton, to make enough progress as an author to prove to his parents that writing could be a viable profession. But he had achieved so little there that he would have to resume law studies; indeed, studying would be seriously strenuous now, with so much ground to catch up. The prospect was appalling. What he really wanted to do, as he told Mrs Sitwell from Paris, was to live permanently in a country inn with a garden, near to friends but alone, and ‘to settle down there for good, among books and papers’. 22 His favourite mood, he had to admit, had become ‘holy terror for all action and inaction equally – a sort of shuddering revulsion from the necessary responsibilities of life’. 23 This was not ‘wanting to be a writer’ any more: this was accidie.