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‘The Black Arrow’

Chalet La Solitude seemed like a good name to give the next new home for Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson as they migrated through Europe in search of places conducive to the health of Mr. Stevenson, a certified invalid, even more so since he had returned from his year-long American adventure in 1879-80. The Scottish author left a record of that experience in his third and fourth books called “The Amateur Emigrant” and “The Silverado Squatters.” The wedding of Louis and Fanny in San Francisco had been the crowning event, the whole reason to be for that risky endeavor, which Stevenson’s friends had called an “enterprise of madness.”

By March of 1883, the couple were into their third year of marriage when they hit upon Hyeres to be home, a little town on a hill built around a medieval fortress on the French Riviera. The congenial climate along with the intense brightness and colors of the region were caught on canvas around this time in some of Vincent van Gogh’s master paintings. The setting was a welcome change from their rented Swiss chalet in the Alps, which had been on a hillside above the resort town of Davos. Here in Hyeres, they had stumbled upon another Swiss chalet, also on a hillside but with a view of the sea. How unlikely. Their new landlord explained how it happened. The house had actually been built as a Swiss showpiece for the 1878 Paris Exposition. Seeing it there and wanting it, the landlord, a millionaire, bought it for fun and moved it to his own property where the author would experience, though briefly, something everybody wants. The house is still there, but with a slight makeover from naval artillery in World War II. The blue plaque on the gate is still there too. It says:

“Here during 1883-1884 lived the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. He declared ‘I was only happy once: That was at Hyeres.'”

Fanny described Chalet La Solitude 20 years later in her prefatory note to “The Dynamiters”: “It was like a doll’s house, with rooms so small that we could hardly turn round in them; but the view from the veranda was extensive, the garden was large and wild, with winding paths and old grey olive trees where nightingales nested and sang.” To his mother, Louis wrote, “It is healthy, cheerful, and close to shops and society and civilization. The garden, which is above is lovely and will be cool in summer. There are two rooms below with a kitchen, and four rooms above, all told.” To Frances Sitwell, Sidney Colvin’s girlfriend, he declared Chalet La Solitude to be “the loveliest house you ever saw, with a garden like a fairy story and a view like a classical landscape … Eden, madam, Eden.”

At Hyeres, Louis felt well enough to go back to work, meaning his compulsion to write. Like artists do, he usually had many irons in the fire going at the same time and many, if not most, came to nothing. A new novel, “The Black Arrow — A Tale of the Tunstall Forest,” actually came to something, even a Walt Disney movie in the 1950s. This is a story of love and adventure set in the Wars of the Roses. Its cast of characters includes one individual straight out of history. Richard III has a vital role in the plot, but in “The Black Arrow,” he is a young hunchback still making his way up the royal ladder of succession, and very determined and violent. He is the one who, according to Shakespeare, could be seen running around a field called Bosworth on Aug. 22, 1485, looking for someone to give him a horse in exchange for his kingdom. He died a few minutes later but made news again just a few years ago when his remains were discovered under a London parking lot during excavation.

Stevenson’s research into the 15th century had led him to something called the Paston Letters, from which he invented a style and a plot that he thought might sell. That motive in an artist often demands betraying professional ideals to pander to the masses, but RLS wanted to support his family with his writing, not advances from his inheritance. Cynically, he told his friends that “The Black Arrow” was just “tushery.”

Like “Treasure Island,” this medieval tale first came into print as a serial in Young Folks magazine using the same pseudonym, Captain George North. Surprisingly, it had a following far beyond that of its predecessor, even spiking the circulation by hundreds of copies a week. Across the Atlantic, American publishers were stealing Stevenson’s works in the absence of international copyright legislation, but by the time Robert Louis Stevenson came to Saranac Lake in 1887, things had changed. He was now the latest American-made celebrity in vogue, and business people from New York City came all the way into Andrew Baker’s house to sit in front of his fireplace and talk with the author of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Sam McClure was one of them. In August 1922, McClure delivered a lengthy talk about his friend, RLS, from Baker’s veranda to members and guests of the Stevenson Society of America seated on the lawn. He briefly mentioned “The Black Arrow”:

“‘The Black Arrow’ had never been put into book form, and I asked Stevenson if I could arrange with him to syndicate it. … So he sent over to England and got a copy from the files of Young Folks, and I came up here to this little cottage to see him and examine the story. I sat down and looked through it (I was quick in those days), and I said to him, ‘I will take this story if you cut out the first five chapters.’ As I say, I was very young and bold in those days. So he said, ‘All right,’ and he cut out the first five chapters. I had it illustrated with line drawings by Will H. Low, an old friend of Stevenson’s since their Barbizon days. That was the first illustrated story we ran in the syndicate, and it brought in more money than any other serial novel we ever syndicated.”

“The Black Arrow” is set convincingly in Middle Ages England, but the hero’s name is Dick, and Dick has a strange way of showing up at odd places unwittingly at critical moments, like when he meets Lord Foxham (Richard III), and there is a lot of white snow in “The Black Arrow.” Whatever RLS meant by “tushery,” his readers liked it. In May 1919, a noted historian of his time, G.M. Travelyan, wrote to London’s The Times to confess, for whatever reason, that he read “The Black Arrow” every three years, saying of the book that it “teaches history in the highest sense.”

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