Robert Louis Stevenson

The Edinburgh boy with the weak chest

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850 in Edinburgh, into the family firm of engineers that built Scotland's lighthouses. He was ill from the start, with what was called a weak chest — fevers, coughing, bronchial infections, and in the end the lung haemorrhages he nicknamed Bluidy Jack, Scots for Bloody Jack — and he grew up in the care of a nurse, Alison Cunningham, whom the household called Cummy and who was close enough to travel with the family through Europe.

He entered the University of Edinburgh in 1867 to become an engineer like his father, and gave it up for literature. As a compromise he read law and passed advocate — qualified as a Scottish barrister, a lawyer who argues cases in court — in July 1875, and never took a case. He had already published: "Ordered South", his first paid piece, appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in 1874, and the title was literal. Doctors of the period sent patients with bad lungs south for warm air, and being ordered south is what took him to France in the first place.

Paris, which was mostly the way out

Stevenson first saw Paris on 7 January 1863, aged twelve, on a family tour of Europe. They stayed at the Hôtel Meurice, the grandest hotel in the city, and went to see Notre-Dame, the Madeleine — the church on the Right Bank built in the shape of a Greek temple — and the gardens of the Tuileries. He came back constantly as an adult, and his cousin and biographer Graham Balfour recorded the range of the returns: Stevenson stayed in Paris "in all manner of lodgings, varying from Meurice's Hotel (which was little to his liking) to students' accommodation in the Quartier Latin", scattered anywhere between Montmartre in the north and Montparnasse in the south. The Quartier Latin, or Latin Quarter, is the student district on the Left Bank, named for the Latin its scholars once spoke.

He loved the city and used it in his fiction — a hotel room in New Arabian Nights (1882) where a young man finds a corpse; Paris as the place of ruin in "The Treasure of Franchard" (1883); and above all The Wrecker (1892), which draws on his own months living on the fringes of the art students' world and puts him and his cousin Bob into the book as the brothers Stennis. But the scholars at Edinburgh Napier University who keep the record of his movements put it plainly: Paris, like London, was usually a stopping-place en route to somewhere else. His French life happened thirty-five miles down the road.

Barbizon, and the forest

Barbizon is a village on the western edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, in the Seine-et-Marne countryside — the administrative department south-east of Paris — about thirty-five miles from the centre of the city. From the 1820s it had been the base of the painters now called the Barbizon school: the landscapist Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, who painted peasants at work, and the rest, who came out from the city to paint trees and country people directly from life, out of doors, a habit the Impressionists took up after them. They lodged and argued at a grocer's inn kept by the Ganne family. The Auberge Ganne is now the Musée départemental des peintres de Barbizon, the county museum of the Barbizon painters; Rousseau's house and studio down the street belongs to it too.

By the mid-1870s the village was full of a second generation, including Stevenson's cousin Bob — R. A. M. Stevenson, who was training as a painter — and the American artist Will H. Low, who became a lifelong friend. Stevenson arrived from Paris with Bob on 29 March 1875 and stayed until 19 April at the Hôtel Siron, and kept coming back for six years. What held him was less the painting than the wood: "The vigorous forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves," he wrote in his essay "Fontainebleau". "The place is sanative." Sanative is his word for healing.

Grez-sur-Loing, and the woman at the table

On the far side of the forest, at Grez-sur-Loing, the river Loing runs through the middle of the village, and the painters who wanted water rather than trees went there instead. Stevenson first stopped for three days in August 1875, and liked it better than anywhere in the region: "Gretz is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit," he wrote, spelling the village as he heard it. The village inn was the Hôtel Chevillon, and it ran a long communal table.

In August 1876 Stevenson and his friend Walter Simpson set off in two wooden canoes from Antwerp and paddled the canals and rivers south into France, finishing near Pontoise around 13 September; the trip became his first book, An Inland Voyage (1878). He went briefly to Paris and then on to Grez, and walked into the middle of dinner. Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne was staying at the Chevillon with her daughter Belle and her young son Lloyd; she had brought the family from California so that she and Belle could study art, and they were at Grez recovering from the death of her younger son, Hervey. She was thirty-six and married. Stevenson was twenty-five.

Then in the dusk of a summer's day, as we all sat at dinner about the long table d'hôte, some sixteen or eighteen people, of whom my mother and sister were the only women and I the only child, there was a startling sound at one of the open windows giving onto the street, and in vaulted a young man with a dusty knapsack on his back.

They were together at Grez and in Paris through the autumn of 1876, again in the summer of 1877, and again in July 1878 — and then it stopped. In August 1878 Fanny took her children back to her husband in America, sailing from Liverpool on the fifteenth. Stevenson, wretched and with no idea where he stood, went south.

Twelve days, 120 miles and one donkey

He left Paris in late August 1878 for Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille, a village in the volcanic uplands of the Haute-Loire, a department in south-central France, and lodged at an inn called Chez Morel. On 19 September he wrote to his mother: "Donkey purchased: a love: price, 65 francs and a glass of brandy." The donkey was Modestine. On 22 September the two of them set out south through the Cévennes — high, poor mountains whose villages were largely Protestant, and whose people had risen against the Catholic crown in the early 1700s, a history Stevenson had read and followed as he walked — and in twelve days covered about 120 miles, most of them spent arguing with the donkey.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is the book of that walk, and it is one of the first pieces of writing to treat hiking and sleeping outdoors as things a person might do for pleasure. It is also, quietly, a book about somebody in California: it was written in the weeks after Fanny Osbourne's ship sailed, and the loneliness keeps surfacing through the comedy of the donkey. In August 1879 he followed her, sailing steerage — the cheapest berths, below decks with the emigrants — to New York and crossing the continent on the emigrant trains that carried settlers west, the journey behind The Amateur Emigrant. He reached Monterey on 30 August, nearly killing himself in the process. Fanny obtained her divorce in December, and they married in San Francisco on 19 May 1880.

Treasure Island, Mr Hyde, Rodin, and Samoa

Fame came from a map drawn to entertain his twelve-year-old stepson. Treasure Island — a boy at a seaside inn, a dead sailor's chart, a voyage, and a one-legged ship's cook named Long John Silver who is neither villain nor friend — ran as a serial in the magazine Young Folks from October 1881 and appeared as a book on 14 November 1883. The National Library of Scotland, which holds his letters, photographs and hand-drawn South Seas maps, notes that it has never been out of print. Two years later came Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, finished in October 1885 and published on 9 January 1886: a respectable London doctor brews a drug that separates the decent half of himself from the appetites, and cannot get back. The Writers' Museum in Edinburgh keeps a wardrobe Stevenson owned as a child, made by William Brodie — Deacon Brodie, a title from his place in the trade guild — a cabinetmaker and city councillor who burgled houses by night, and whose double life may have started the idea.

In August 1886, visiting Will Low in Paris, Stevenson was introduced by the poet and editor W. E. Henley to Auguste Rodin, then a French sculptor whose work was being rejected and mocked. They became friends and wrote to each other in French. When the painter Edward Armitage wrote to The Times to defend the Royal Academy in London for refusing to exhibit a Rodin sculpture, Stevenson answered on 6 September 1886: "The public are weary of statues that say nothing. Well, here is a man coming forward whose statues live and speak, and speak things worth uttering. Give him time, spare him nicknames and the cant of cliques, and I venture to predict this man will take a place in the public heart." That December a Rodin sculpture, Le Printemps — Spring — arrived at Skerryvore, the house he and Fanny then had in Bournemouth on the English south coast, named after a lighthouse the Stevenson firm had built. Its arm had broken in transit; repaired, it carried an inscription to a sympathetic artist, faithful friend and dear poet.

His lungs kept losing ground, and he took to the sea, cruising the Pacific. In January 1890 he bought an estate above Apia, the main town of Samoa, named it Vailima, and there he stayed — writing, farming, and taking a public part in Samoan politics, siding with Samoan chiefs against the German, British and American officials then contesting control of the islands. The Samoans called him Tusitala, teller of tales. He died there on 3 December 1894, of a cerebral haemorrhage — a bleed in the brain — aged forty-four, and was carried up and buried on the summit of Mount Vaea.