by Nancy Horan
Hyères was only forty miles southeast of Marseilles, but she felt safer there. “Chalet La Solitude,” the funny little house she found, was too small to stay in permanently, but for now it was a lovely, waking dream. They rented it at the beginning of 1883, and the move felt like a fresh start.
The house was toy-sized but possessed all the essentials of a real one. A wealthy man from the area had visited the Paris Exposition and seen miniature models of Chinese pagodas, Turkish mosques, and Swiss chalets. It was the chalet that stole his heart. Though it was intended merely as a model for a larger version, he bought the house on the spot and had it shipped to Hyères, where it was reassembled on the steep, rocky side of a hill. When she cooked, Fanny found the kitchen so small that she risked burning herself on the range or impaling herself on pothooks. Louis’s parents visited shortly after their arrival. They all squeezed into the tiny dining room, where their chairs were pushed up against the walls around the table. A servant, hired for the occasion, handed plates to them over their heads.
By comparison, the garden was spectacular, rich with olive, orange, palm, and eucalyptus trees, nightingales, and a view of the ocean in the distance. Below their terrace, terra-cotta tile roofs rippled picturesquely down the hillside.
The first day of their stay, Fanny woke at dawn to a blue sky marbled with pink clouds. She wandered through the grove of olive trees behind the house, touching her palm to the bark of each one. “Thirty-five!” she told Louis gleefully when he awoke. Everywhere she looked, she saw rosebushes and aloe. It was March. In a few weeks the carpet of fig marigolds would be beaming happily, like a nursery of little pink-faced babies. She wrote immediately to her sister in the States to send vegetable and flower seeds.
An old staircase led down to town. They stayed aloft, mostly, well above the old village. It was a filthy place below, unswept, with refuse blown about the streets by the hot mistral winds. Convinced that Treasure Island would be a greater success as a novel than the syndicated version in Young Folks, Louis spent his days rewriting the material to be published as a book. Only occasionally did he put on his short black cape to venture down for a visit with his friend LeRoux the wine merchant. He followed his usual routine, writing all morning until noon, while Fanny kept herself busy with the house. She painted several interior doors in a Japanese style with female figures. One of the painted women was yawning, and it set anyone who visited to yawning furiously.
Fanny loved marketing in the morning and always found the stalls full of prettily arranged vegetables despite the general disorder of the streets. In the afternoons when Louis stopped writing, they wandered with Bogue through the garden, inspecting Fanny’s beans and lettuces. One night they sat out on the terrace and watched the clouds scudding overhead against the black sky.
“I’d swear the stars are moving.”
“Put your finger on that star,” Louis told her, guiding her finger up toward the sky. “Now keep it there. It’s not movin’, girlie.”
“I am content,” she said. “This is contentment.”
Why is it, she wondered a few weeks into their stay at La Solitude, that whenever I say out loud I’m happy, something goes wrong?
“Louis,” she told him one morning, “I think I’m pregnant.”
Louis was honing the end of a pencil with a pocketknife. He set them down, leaned against the kitchen table and crossed his arms. “How late are you?”
“Two weeks. You could set a clock by me most of the time.” Standing in the tiny kitchen, Fanny tried to count back to find the day when it might have happened.
“We could adapt,” Louis said, summoning an encouraging tone. “Of course we could. I suppose we’d have to.”
Dear Lord, don’t let it be. She remembered how much she had wanted to give Louis a baby of his own. When they married, she’d thought it was still possible, if only his health would stabilize. But the past two years of illness had put that dream to rest.
When another week had passed with no menstruation, he asked, “How do you feel about having a baby?”
“Afraid. We said in Davos that children were out of the question. But I know you wanted a child when we met, and now we never talk about it. How does a baby fit into this traveling circus? I’m forty-four—I could be ill, and then what? And how could we afford it? As it is, we are continually short of funds—”
He put a forefinger on her lips. “Hush. I agree.”
When she announced the next afternoon that she had begun to menstruate, his face broke into relief. But in the following few days, Louis seemed bereft, as if he had lost an actual child whose fingers and toes he had already counted.
Shortly after the turn of the year in 1884, Henley and Baxter came to Hyères to visit. Fanny’s relations with his friends—other than Bob—had been politely strained since the scene at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. She thought it was best that way, and apparently, so did Louis’s friends, for they’d made little effort to rekindle their old familiarity. She didn’t trust Henley, in particular. She suspected him of a backstairs cunning he never showed to Louis, though she hadn’t any proof.
Still, she found herself trying to win him over. She made a dinner of roast beef especially for him. When they squeezed around the little table at dinner, knocking elbows as they ate, she sought to find the common ground on which they might converse. Treasure Island’s recent publication in book form was a safe topic.
“We’ve received so many letters from readers since it came out,” she said. “Not just children are reading it. Many adults, too.”
“I heard Prime Minister Gladstone has read it through a couple of times,” Baxter reported.
“Shouldn’t he be running the country?” Louis said.
Henley cackled, knowing how deeply Louis despised the man. He maneuvered the bowl of potatoes toward his plate. “It’s a pity about the book rights,” he said. “Only a hundred pounds.” The big man shook his head. “You could be sailing around in a yacht if you wrote plays. I heard recently that George Sims made ten thousand pounds on one melodrama alone.”
“What are you working on now?” Baxter asked.
“A poetry collection,” Louis replied. “I’m calling it A Child’s Garden of Verses.”
Henley nearly choked. “‘A child’s garden …?”
“Go write your damn masterpieces!” Louis shouted. Henley and Baxter laughed, but everyone in the room knew Louis was livid when he jabbed his finger emphatically at Henley as he spoke. “When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium. Anyone who entertains me with a great story is a doctor of the spirit. Frankly, it isn’t Shakespeare we take to when we are in a hot corner, is it? It’s Dumas or the best of Walter Scott. Don’t children, especially children, deserve that kind of refuge? Even if it’s poetry?”
Fanny savored the look of defeat on Henley’s face. He was a poet, after all. “Good heavens, you’re touchy. I was merely teasing!” he protested.
She was already thinking what she would say to Louis in bed that night. “He is so jealous of you.”
Henley had been floundering since his London magazine folded, while Louis’s literary reputation kept growing. The previous week, Fanny had received a copy of The Century with a glowing review of Louis’s newest stories. She could hardly sleep the night the review arrived in the mail. Everyone she knew back in California read The Century. She nearly burst with glee when she thought of the friends who had questioned her choice of a sickly, penniless writer as her new husband. All of them—Timothy Rearden, Dora Williams, Sam Osbourne, her whole blessed family—would finally see how prescient she had been about Louis’s talent.
Fanny thought Henley might be right about playwriting. A melodrama would be the gold mine Henley claimed. And it was probable the two men would do better a second time together. Whatever came, Henley was going to be a fixture in their lives for the duration. So was Baxter. Louis trusted his old friend from law school, and in a moment of candor, even Fanny had admitted to Baxt
er, “I’m no better than Louis with money.” Still, it bothered her that the lawyer held the purse strings.
“Burly, you look positively Brobdingnagian!” Louis remarked when he witnessed Henley’s mighty frame crammed into the chalet’s tiny parlor. The men quickly understood that there was little fun to be had in so small a house. With Fanny’s tepid blessing and a bottle of ergotin in hand, Louis was off with Baxter and Henley to Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Mentone.
It wasn’t long before Fanny got word from Louis that he had fallen ill in Nice, on his way home. His friends thought it was merely a cold, left him at a hotel, and returned to London. Now he was hemorrhaging. She immediately caught a train to Nice, all the while cursing the hides of Henley and Baxter. Were they even bigger fools than she thought them to be? What would it take to make them realize how fragile Louis was?
When she reached his bedside, she found him sleeping; his cheeks were sunken purple shadows, his fingertips white as paper. The French physician attending him told her to go into the hallway.
“Mr. Stevenson has pneumonia, which has aggravated his poor lungs into hemorrhaging,” he said, after closing the door to Louis’s room. “You should notify a male friend or member of the family that he may be needed, in case your husband dies.”
Fanny was stunned. She searched his face and found only dull resignation. “I need to contact his mother to get here right away,” she muttered.
“Where is she?”
“Edinburgh.”
The doctor shook his head. “She won’t arrive in time.”
Fanny sat beside Louis’s bed throughout the night, watching in frozen panic as he struggled to breathe. By morning, though, her husband was performing his Lazarus impersonation once again.
“Would you kindly get me a newspaper, Fan?” he asked when he opened his eyes. “I feel as if I don’t know a thing about what’s going on in the world.”
With the help of the hotel manager, Fanny arranged for a visit from a different doctor, who gave Louis a good once-over and announced, “You could live until you are seventy, sir, but you must curtail the traveling. You are a writer, yes?”
“Yes,” Louis replied. “A very seedy one, at the moment.”
“We are going to have to bind your right arm so that you are not tempted to use it. In this way, you will be able to lie very still. No talking, either. That is how it must be until your hemorrhaging stops.”
Fanny was unsure how she would succeed in transporting Louis sixty-five miles back to Hyères. In a panic, she contacted Louis’s old canoeing friend Walter Simpson; when he declined, she suspected what he thought: that she was a Cassandra and this was a false alarm. She called upon Bob next, even though she had enlisted him far too many times in the past. He was married now, like Walter and the others, but Bob said yes, he would come. They managed to get Louis home slowly, with intervals of rest along the train route. Fanny was relieved and moved when Henley arranged for his trusted English doctor to come to Hyeres to treat Louis. Along with Baxter and Bob, he guaranteed to pay the doctor’s fees.
As she nursed Louis in the weeks that followed, she acted as his amenuensis as well. He was forbidden to pace, let alone get out of bed, though that did not stop him from dramatizing the dialogue as he dictated pieces of a romance he was calling Prince Otto. He growled the prince’s lines and spoke in a high pitch for the females. During the hours she wrote for him, Fanny fell under the spell of his storytelling. She found herself whiling away hours with him as he processed one plot approach after another. She loved collaborating with him, but it was not her only work; there were meals to cook, sheets to change, bedpans to empty.
Exhausted, she hired a local woman named Valentine Roch to help nurse Louis. After one week of caring for him, the plain French countrywoman, wasp-waisted in her white apron, said directly, “I am not leaving you.” She melded into their lives as easily as a nice cousin might. Fanny taught her how to cook the food Louis could eat, and showed her how to lower him into bed on all fours when his back pained him. It was a godsend to have another strong person who could manage the job, and Louis liked her. He teased Valentine shamelessly and called her “Joe.” She was a simple young woman who intuitively understood the conditions that arose when a person boomeranged between life and death.
Louis was heroic, and for his companions to be anything less was unthinkable. “Might you pin some paper to a board and put it in front of me?” he requested of Fanny one day. “I’ve come up with a couple of verses I’d like to set down.” She provided him with the board and paper. He sat in the darkened room and defied doctor’s orders by using his left hand to scribble out the poems.
“There is something else I want you to do for me.”
“What is it?”
“Go out on a walk and think up some story ideas for me, Fan, even if you just walk back and forth in front of the house. We need the money, and Prince Otto has stopped talking.”
“So I am to be your Scheherazade? I think you just want to be rid of me.”
He smiled. “There might be a touch of that in it.”
She found relief in the walks. She had been reading in the newspaper about some young Irish-American men who had returned to Ireland to participate in a bombing plot against the English. She tried to imagine what sort of people could allow themselves to be part of such a heinous scheme. Soon enough, a mysterious man in a sealskin coat was flitting about her head, followed by a wealthy girl using an alias, and a house exploding. At night she spun stories out of thin air the way she’d done as a child, and she glowed when Louis remarked, “My lady has quite the perfervid imagination, thinks I to meself.” She could barely contain her delight when he began concocting threads to connect the disparate tales.
“I’m fairly sure I can publish these,” he remarked at the end of her fourth night of tale spinning.
She jumped up and opened the best wine in the house. “To our first collaboration,” she toasted.
Out and about every day, Fanny learned from two encounters with English speakers that cholera was raging in Toulon, just three miles away. When she told Louis, they both let down their brave masks. Early in the morning, they could hear the sound of patients in the town below being wheeled to the pest house with the other contagious people. They knew then that cholera was closer than Toulon; it had obviously reached Hyères. In bed, Fanny huddled close to Louis’s left side.
One night in late winter, he began to hemorrhage again. By now Fanny knew what to do. For some time she had carried a small vial of ergotin in pockets that she sewed into her dresses; she was never without it. The sight of Louis filling a bowl with nearly a pint of blood sucked the air right out of her lungs. She raced for water to mix with the ergotin granules in a minim glass, but her hands shook so wildly that Louis took the medicine away from her, he calmly poured himself the proper dosage, and drank it down.
He signaled to her to bring a pencil and paper. With his left hand, he scrawled out, Don’t be afraid. If this is death it is an easy one.
Fanny kept watch through the night. Outside, the trees rustled uneasily. She imagined the wind was blowing up the hillside from the old town, bringing with it thick clouds of germs—cholera, smallpox, typhus, who knew what—from the damp streets and pestilential piles of garbage below. She got up and went to the window. Even the olive trees had taken on a sinister aspect, as if their leaves were coated with a sickening dust.
CHAPTER 42
Gypsies. Vagabonds. Nomads. Those were the words Fanny had used since their marriage to cast their wanderings in a romantic light. But the words didn’t seem colorful or amusing or even accurate. The truth was, Louis’s cruel illnesses whipped around their lives, pushed them toward places they didn’t want to go, and pulled them out of places they loved. They had pursued the ideal climate from Silverado to Davos to Hyères, and she was utterly exhausted from it. Louis’s sickness lived with them like an uninvited guest wherever they settled. Fanny couldn’t be angry with him, but the tyranny of
the illness made her feel murderous. She hated that it tethered Louis to a bed, decided he shouldn’t have his own children, kept him from the simple joys other people took for granted. And then there was the fickleness, when it lifted for a while and let them hope, like fools, that they might live normally.
When they abandoned Hyères, they went to London, where Henley and Baxter claimed they’d located the specialist. George Balfour came down to be present at the consultation. As it turned out, the physician directed his remarks to Uncle George, rather than Louis or Fanny. Louis’s lungs, he said, were clear of disease. “You can stop the ergotin now,” the doctor said before taking a quick exit. And Uncle George had agreed!
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Fanny fumed when they were alone. “You just lived through the worst hemorrhaging imaginable.” She promptly found another doctor who agreed with her. “Most definitely you should return to Davos for the winter,” he warned them.
“Mother says Uncle George believes you have exaggerated my condition,” Louis told her after reading his letters one afternoon. “And Henley is miffed because it was his doctor you went against.”
“I don’t care what they say!” Fanny cried out. “No one could witness what you just went through in Hyeres and believe you have no lung disease.” She stormed around the bedroom, tossing clothing into piles. “Why do they all talk about climate and good air, and none of these people ever talks about germs? Maybe it’s germs that cause tuberculosis; that’s what some articles in the Lancet say … “
“You and the damned Lancet,” Louis moaned.
Fanny glared at Louis in the hotel bed. His hair, which he kept long to protect his neck from drafts, pressed damp against his skull. “Look at you. You shiver. You can’t sleep. You cough constantly. The morphine they give you makes you nauseated … but ‘throw away the ergotin,’ they say. Your lungs are just ducky. What am I to do when you start bleeding again?”