![]() ![]() She had originally come to France with her family, to study art with her seventeen-year-old daughter her young son Hervey had died shortly afterwards. Fanny was staying there with her daughter Belle and son Leon. They met in 1876 at an artists’ gathering at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, on the fringes of the Fontainebleau forest. ![]() ![]() The woman constantly on his mind was Fanny Osbourne. He must have thought about this a great deal when setting out on a journey through the French Cévennes, consumed as he was by pent up sexual longing of which he did not openly speak. In this respect he believed France to be the most civilised country in Europe, showing up a British outlook ‘blinkered by chaste puritanism and prejudice’. His stepson Lloyd Osborne wrote that Louis was attracted to the French ‘universal indulgence towards all sexual problems – their clear-sighted toleration of everything affecting the relations of men and women’. The French attitude that considered art to be an essential part of ordinary life seemed more adult to him. And like many Scots, he had an affinity with France, feeling free and at home there. ![]() Well before he became known as a novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson was an essayist and travel writer. ![]()
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