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.
In fact Fanny was rather formidable.
Stevenson recovered his health, if not his heart, and went back to Edinburgh for a parental Christmas, while Fanny returned to Paris. It was at this time that Stevenson finally spoke of the relationship to his father and mother, and it seems clear that he was now thinking of marriage. They were hardly pleased: an American woman ten years older than Louis, and moreover a married woman with two children to support. In January 1878 Stevenson went back to Paris, and in February his father Thomas Stevenson joined him there for a man-to-man talk. “Don’t be astonished,” Stevenson wrote to Sidney Colvin, “but admire my courage and Fanny’s. We wish to be right with the world as far as we can.” There is no evidence that his father actually met Fanny, but in the event the vital allowance of a hundred pounds a year was not cut off, as Stevenson had feared; and he seems to have reached a better understanding with his father about his free-thinking religious beliefs.
But what was going on in Stevenson’s mind? By far the most revealing document to me consisted of a linked series of four essays which he wrote for the Cornhill magazine and Henley’s London magazine between 1877 and 1879. He later collected them in 1881 under the general title of Virginibus Puerisque (“To Youths and Maidens”). The first two essays concern marriage and the marriage relationship; the third is headed “On Falling in Love”, with the Shakespearian epigraph—“What fools these mortals be!”; and the fourth is called, severely, “Truth of Intercourse”. But all four are evidently drawn from his passion for Fanny, and they represent an entirely new note in his work and outlook.
The tone Stevenson adopted was ironic, mildly facetious, even slightly misogynic. Considering the circumstances under which he was composing this surprised me very much. It runs right through all four essays, from the famous definition of marriage as “a sort of friendship recognised by the police” to the long peroration on the terrors of the righteous wife. “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave … To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.” What is one to make of all this?
Part of the answer seems to be that Stevenson, having really fallen in love with Fanny, was genuinely frightened—even terrified—by the implications. She was not the first woman he had flirted with, played bohemians with or slept with. But she was undoubtedly the first woman to become so important to him that she made his life incomplete, and challenged his identity. All the rapid shuttlings between England and France vividly suggest this, and everywhere the essays bear it out.
There is the frank avowal: “The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.” Or there is the mocking paradox: “Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.” There is even the rather knowing and hopeful: “It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much better educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.”
Above all, there is Stevenson’s hymn to the eternally boyish in man, the Peter Panish element (though that is an anachronism), which he felt intuitively it was dangerous, even a crime, to deny. The true threat of marriage, as he saw it, came down finally to this: that it would kill the boy in him. This passage is one of the best in the Virginibus Puerisque, and evidently links with Stevenson’s meditations on those threats to “the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth” during his night at La Trappe. He is considering the “unfading boyishness of hope”, what he defines as the piratical quality, the refusal to be quite tamed or rational or responsible, Tom Sawyer’s “Ah, if he could only die temporarily. Turning aside for a moment from the imminent threat of marriage, he suddenly stops to wonder if boyishness is not, after all, an irreducible quality even in the most sage and settled of his fellow-citizens. The thought develops in a now characteristic way, in which a journey through a harsh landscape is already foreseen, even predicted:
Here we recognise the thought of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There
