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Providence and the Guitar, part I

“Earth was his house and heaven his roof;

Sun, moon, and stars his light; Voices of wind and wood and wave

His music day and night.” — RLS

“As summer approached it was always a joy to go back to Grez. How eagerly we looked out the window of the coach for the first glimpse of the church spire. How pleasant it was, as we neared the inn, to see Madame Chévillon and Ernestine waiting for us under the archway, the little green bough fluttering over their heads. It was like coming home to me as I went about the village greeting old friends.”

That is one of the happy memories within the autobiography This Life I’ve Loved (1937) by Mrs. Isobel Field, the stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1916, Mrs. Field and her younger brother, Lloyd Osbourne, had become members and benefactors of the Stevenson Society in Saranac Lake, upon which they unleashed a torrent of Stevenson lore of interest only to members of the worldwide community of Stevenson lovers for whom the RLS Memorial Cottage was established and remains open. However, anyone who is publicly presentable and pays five dollars American can get in.

Mrs. Field’s connection to the charismatic author had begun in the Fall of 1876 when her mother, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, started dating a younger man, an aspiring writer from Scotland with the initials RLS. At the time, Mrs. Field was Belle Osbourne, 17 years of age, and the little French village of Grez with ancient ruins by a river was where everything was happening for certain people in the summers 1876-’78. What happened to two of them there would make for free advertising for the town itself because in time, word would get around in many languages that Madame Chevillon’s inn and the village of Grez were made memorable by the sojourn there of Robert Louis Stevenson and because that is where he met his future wife.

Saranac Lake has suffered a similar fate. Since 1887 Stevenson’s “little Switzerland in the Adirondacks” has been a familiar name to the author’s international fan club as well as literary historians and scholarly types because R.L. Stevenson spent time here, wrote a lot here, and here it was that he made his fateful decision to go to the South Seas, never to return.

For Robert Louis Stevenson and his circle, including his new married though separated American girlfriend and her two kids, those summers at Grez-sur-Loing were Golden. It was the time Will H. Low wrote about in his book, A Chronicle of Friendships (1908): “What was it that rendered our sojourn in Fontainebleau and its outlying villages so influential in our lives and of such compelling charm that, whenever after I met with Bob or Louis, we resumed our intercourse as though intervening time and the accidents along the way were banished, and we were once more at the threshold of our life … Stevenson, for several years to come was to find in Fontainebleau and the adjoining villages of Barbizon and Grez, fields for work and play … to which, in pleasant memory, he often reverted, until the end came in the South Seas.”

Belle Osbourne was a good eyewitness to history: “During the summers we were at Grez, some rather interesting people came that way. There was the Englishman, Enfield, a hearty jovial soul with a ‘haw, haw’ accent, who always wore a monocle … He came to Grez to paint a picture and set up his easel in the garden. To my surprise, it turned out not to be the bridge, but a full-rigged ship in a stormy sea.” Then there was Bloomer from Big Sky country in the American West. His comment about his new surroundings in France was a hit that went viral through the colony. “These parts seem considerable settled, stranger.”

“The painters scorned sunlight and endless time was wasted waiting for a gray day. Then we would all be off; O’Meara and I in one direction, my mother in another, with Louis carrying her painting outfit. Bob might join one couple or the other or go off by himself. In the late afternoon we would come trailing home, range our wet canvases in a row along the wall in the dining room, and criticize each other’s works, which we did with more wit, I’m afraid, than kindness … And such talk — gay, inspiring, electric. Everyone joined in; we discussed art, fashions, religions, history; any subject that came up was pounced upon, tossed back and forth or lauded … Or it might be a book we had all read…We argued, we beat the table, we shouted to be heard, the two Stevensons and Sir Walter in Scottish accents that grew stronger with excitement; Palmer in a Yankee twang, O’Meara in a brogue that was music to my ears, and Will Low in straight American. Fanny Osbourne’s voice was low in tone and she spoke with very little modulation. Louis described it as something like ‘water running under ice.'”

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