“Out of all my private recollections of remembered inns and restaurants … Some were beautifully situated, some had an admirable table, some were the gathering places of excellent companions; but take them for all in all, not one can be compared with Simoneau’s at Monterey.” — RLS

What made Simoneau’s restaurant stand out in Stevenson’s memory? Beautifully situated it was not, just another adobe building lining a sand street in what then passed for downtown Monterey, California, in 1879, before the tourists came. The structure is long gone, and the space where it once stood is nowadays called Jules Simoneau Plaza, all three sides of which are used by the local tour bus company as their base of operations over the entire Peninsula, Carmel Valley, Big Sur and Salinas. For RLS in Monterey in 1879, Simoneau’s was beautifully situated because it was only a short walk from the French House, where the invalid author from Scotland was rooming. Louis was still convalescing from his recent near-death encounter in the Santa Lucia Mountains. He had gone there to camp out by himself “under the wide and starry sky” while he knew he was in a state of exhaustion, not the brightest decision by a man of genius who lived with chronic bad health.

“To the front, it was part barber’s shop, part bar; to the back, there was a kitchen and a salle-a-manger. The intending diner found himself in a little, chilly, bare, adobe room, furnished with chairs and tables, and adorned with some oil sketches roughly brushed upon the wall in the manner of Barbizon and Cernay. The table, at whatever hour you entered, was already laid with a not spotless napkin and by way of epergne, with a dash of green peppers and tomatoes, pleasing alike to eye and palate. … There were two set meals a day and there it was that our polyglot society assembled … two Frenchmen, two Portuguese and two Ligurians. Among Spanish, English and French, the sound of our talk was like a little Babel. … This friendly synthesis of tongues put everyone at home. We spoke neither English, Spanish nor French; we spoke Simoneaudean, the language of our common country.”

Jules Simoneau, the proprietor, gained immortality in late 1879 because he befriended Robert Louis Stevenson. The latter was big on friends and said in his second book, “Travels With a Donkey,” “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world; and the best that we find in our travels is a friend.” Two of his new friends in the New World, Anson “Cap” Smith and Jonathan Wright, had already saved the amateur emigrant’s life in the mountains behind Monterey. Jules Simoneau possibly saved it, too, whom RLS described to Sydney Colvin as “another jolly old Frenchman, the stranded fifty-eight-year-old wreck of a good-hearted, dissipated and once wealthy Nantais tradesman.”

To Simoneau’s restaurant, Louis went forth daily from his unfurnished room at the French House for his one daily 25-cent meal. Simoneau was “a man of varied talents, who was able to furnish him (RLS) with an excellent dinner, as well as the intelligent companionship which he valued more than food,” according to Nellie Sanchez, the author’s sister-in-law. In his unfinished essay, “Simoneau’s at Monterey,” Louis reflected on “the talks we had upon all subjects divine and human; the studies that we made in chess … the long pleasant evenings in the corner by the stove!”

To Stevenson’s peers of this “polyglot society,” all speaking Simoneaudean, this skinny, down-and-out newcomer was a virtual welfare case but a lovable one because the RLS charm, unconsciously radiated, almost always paved his way. Simoneau conceived a conspiracy whereby Louis could think he was paying his way with his writing, one of his primary principles. In collusion with the regulars of his establishment, two dollars a week was raised between them to pay the salary of the new foreign correspondent, RLS, of the Californian, the flimsiest excuse for a newspaper west of the Mississippi. Crevole Bronson, its owner and solo operator, was one of the conspirators. Louis fell for it completely and died 15 years later, halfway around the world, never knowing that he had been surreptitiously helped by the gang at Simoneau’s who, in turn, would die one by one, without ever knowing that they would be remembered because of their kindness to Robert Louis Stevenson.