Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1066 page)

Thus, as we have seen, with the exception of his release from law, and the friendship with Mr. Henley, conditions in Edinburgh remained much the same; the Savile and 1 fuvenilia, p. 169.   3 May 1885.

the people he met there were, together with Mr. Colvin’s advice and help, the principal feature of his life in England; it is to France that we must turn for the other influences chiefly affecting him, and for the circumstances of most importance in determining his development at this period. In the winter of 1873-74 he had, as we have seen, renewed acquaintance with the Riviera, which in later days was to become yet more familiar. For the present he returned to that neighbourhood no more, but there was no year from 1874 to l%79 ln which he did not pay one or more visits of several weeks’ duration to another part of France. Except for the time that he was in the Cevennes and on his cruise down the Oise, he stayed mostly in the outskirts of the forest of Fontainebleau, in the valley of the Loing, or in Paris itself. Sometimes, as at Monastier, he was alone; sometimes, as at Nemours or at Cernay la Ville, he was with his cousin Bob or Sir Walter Simpson; but for the most part he lived in familiar intercourse with the artists who frequented his favourite resorts. The life was congenial to him, and his companions understood his temperament, if they did not necessarily appreciate his passion for letters; French was the only foreign tongue he ever mastered, and in that he acquired real proficiency. His knowledge of the language and literature was considerable, and its influence on his work was entirely for good, as it increased the delicacy and clearness of his style, and yet left his originality unimpaired.

It was the country again which seems to have affected him most and not the city; in both he lived with the same intimates, but though Paris might be the more exciting, yet at Fontainebleau he came with lasting results under the influence of the forest, and from it he carried away many vital memories.1

When his friends were painting, he often betook himself to lonely walks and meditations among the heaths 1 ‘Forest Notes’: Juvenilia, p. 211. and woods, but company and conversation counted for a great deal. ‘ I knew three young men who walked together daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects — theology and love.’1

His earliest and perhaps his most frequent haunt was Barbizon. It had been the home of Millet, and its fields were the scene of the Angelus. In the village there existed an inn which was reserved for the artists, a strange society compounded of all nationalities, in which French, English, and Americans predominated. Stevenson himself has described it in an essay.2

‘ I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; et ego in Arcadia vixi\ it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in memory. The great Millet was just dead; the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my first verse was thus an epoch in the history of art.

4 Siron’s inn, that excellent artists’ barrack, was managed upon easy principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your inroads; only at the week’s end a computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger’s name under the rubric, estrats. Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your coffee or cold milk and set forth into the 1 Talk and Talkers, p. 185. 2 Later Essays-. Fontainebleau, p. 212. VOL. I.         I

forest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again at six o’clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron’s table. The whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the estrats, cost you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked for it; and if you were out of luck’s way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave it pending.

‘ Theoretically, the house was open to all comers; practically, it was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had pushed themselves; they had “ made their head”; they wanted tact to appreciate the “ fine shades “ of Barbizonian etiquette. And, once they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty: after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Bailly of our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon, and some were sulky, and some were blatant and inane; but one and all entered into the spirit of the association. . . .

‘Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures, and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life for any naturally minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing currents of the world; he might forget that there existed other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience, like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and, still floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import. . . . We were all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy!’

Barbizon, however, was by no means the only resort of painters in this neighbourhood, nor the only one which Stevenson frequented: in the same paper he enumerates its rivals from his full knowledge. Marlotte, Montigny,1 and Chailly-en-Biere he knew; Cernay la Ville was a favourite of his cousin Bob; but it was Grez which, in spite of an unpromising introduction, was his favourite quarters, and has the most important place in his history.

(Bar&izon, Summer’’ 75.

‘ MY DEAR MOTHER, — I have been three days at a place called Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on the plain. A low bridge, with many arches choked with sedge; green fields of white and yellow water-lilies; poplars and willows innumerable; and about it all such an atmosphere of sadness and slackness, one could do nothing but get into the boat and out of it again, and yawn for bedtime. ... I was very glad to be back again in this dear place, and smell the wet forest in the morning.’

But later he wrote how delightful it was 4 to awake in Grez, to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes, out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is “something to do” at Grez. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This “ something to do “ is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone!

1 Where Mr. W. H. Low’s quarters summed up the delights of the ‘ Envoy’ to Underwoods.

But Grez is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of attractions for the navigator; the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lilies, and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.1’

Nemours itself he knew well, and there he often stayed. His first visit is described in a letter to his mother in 1875: —

‘ Nemours is a beautiful little town, watered by a great canal and a little river. The river is crossed by an infinity of little bridges, and the houses have courts and gardens, and come down in stairs to the very brim; and washerwomen sit everywhere in curious little penthouses and sheds. A sort of reminiscence of Amsterdam, The old castle turned now into a ballroom and cheap theatre; the seats of the pit (the places are if. and 2fs. in this theatre) are covered with old Gobelins tapestry; one can still see heads in helmets. In the actors’ dressing- room are curious old Henry Fourth looking-glasses. On the other hand, the old manacles are now kept laid by in a box, with a lot of flower-pots on the top of it, in a room with four canary birds.’

If the country had the more influence in the end, Paris provided more variety and more diversion. There Stevenson stayed, in all manner of lodgings, varying from Meurice’s Hotel (which was little to his liking) to students’ accommodation in the Quartier Latin, and scattered throughout a region extending from Mont- martre on the north to Mont Parnasse on the south.

At one time he writes: ‘ I am in a new quarter, and jldne about in a leisurely way. I dine every day in a cr£merie with a party of Americans, an Irishman, and sometimes an English lady.’ Again: 41 am living along 1 Later Essays: Fontainebleau, p. 220; cf. Juvenilia, p. 199.

with some fellows, and we partly make our own food, and have great fun marketing.’ Another time: 41 have been engaged in a wild hunt for books — all forenoon, all afternoon, with occasional returns to Rue Racine with an armful. I have spent nearly all my money; and if I have luck in to-day’s hunt, I believe I shall lay my head on the pillow to-night a beggar. But I have had goodish luck, and a heap of nice books. Please advance me £10 of my allowance. . . . Heaps of articles growing before me. Hurray.’ An attempt to work in some of the public libraries of Paris failed: the face of officialism was too daunting. ‘They are worse than banks — if that be possible. ... In public offices of all kinds I feel like Esther before Ahasuerus. I suspect there was some truth in my father’s turkeying;1 for the vice has descended to me.’

This was the period when his letters were least frequent and least satisfactory, but of his sojourns in Paris no other memorial survives except the first chapters of The Wrecker, which partly in detail and wholly in spirit are drawn from Stevenson’s recollections of these years. In addition I have collected a few fragments of letters and papers, which may help to eke out the scanty material for a picture of that time.

The first is a letter to his mother, describing a student’s entertainment in the studio which was afterwards depicted in Trilby.

‘ my dear mother, — I was out last night at a party in a fellow’s studio over in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. Some of the people were in costume. One girl was so pretty and looked so happy that it did your heart good to see her. The studio looked very strange, lit with Chinese lanterns and a couple of strange lamps. The floor had been rubbed with candles, and was very slippery. O’Meara, in his character of young Donny-

1 p. 17.

brook, tumbled about like a pair of old boots, and            , for all he is so little, managed to fall into the arms of every girl he danced with, as he went round in the last figure of the quadrille. There was nothing to eat but sweet biscuits, and nothing to drink but syrup and water. It was a rum event/

The next was a typical holiday.

‘ nth October, Paris. — Here I am so far on my way home. . . . Yesterday I had a splendid day. Luxembourg in the morning. Breakfast. Bob, Gaudes the sculptor, Low and I: hours of very good talk in the French idiom. All afternoon in the Louvre, till they turned us out unwilling. At night, the Fran^ais, Rome Vaincue, an impossible play, with Sarah Bernhardt as the blind grandmother, most sublime to behold. At breakfast we had lobster mayonnaise, kidneys, brochet, and tomates farcies, with lots of Carton. Dinner was a mere hurried sustentation of the immortal spirit before exposing it to another excitement. A splendid day, but two running would not do.’