Nine months of “happy” living in their Chalet La Solitude, near the town of Hyeres in southern France, had brought Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson to their first and last Christmas there in 1883. It had been a “relatively” good period for the invalid Scottish author, health-wise. The hemorrhaging from his lungs, which had started in America three years past, was frequent but not heavy, therefore “good” in a relative sense. “Bloody Jack” is the name Louis gave to his nemesis, this bloody aspect of his chronic illness, and there were periodic showdowns when Jack came close to finishing off his victim but not at Hyeres — not yet.

A slightly grim artifact behind glass at Baker’s, now officially known as the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage in Saranac Lake, indicates that Bloody Jack stalked Louis to the very end, but it would be a cerebral version of Jack that would deliver the final blow on Dec. 3, 1894, less than three weeks after Stevenson’s 44th birthday.

One of the first tasks Fanny set herself to do as the widow of RLS was to preserve things, and in 1917, some of those things came to Saranac Lake to stay and can still be seen there today — for $5, no checks. Among this collection, the envy of more recent museums, is a linen handkerchief embroidered with the initials, RLS, just the way it was when Fanny took it out of a pocket in the jacket her husband was wearing when he uttered his last words. “Do I look strange?” he said, looking at Fanny, as his hand reached for his head and then he was gone.

This handkerchief has spots of blood on it, maybe from that very day.

“Could Stevenson be cloned from this?” countless visitors to the museum have wondered out loud.

This white, square, spotted artifact also bears evidence that Dr. Trudeau’s most famous patient had ignored his advice and went on smoking cigarettes to the end. But we already knew that. In one of his Samoan letters, Louis said of himself that he was never without a cigarette in his mouth unless he was coughing or kissing, with no mention of eating or tootling on his penny whistle. A hole can be seen on this foldable personal item, which was caused by a burning cigarette and making for a black scar on this otherwise white and pink-spotted field.

Meanwhile, back at the chalet, in those bygone days exciting news had come from Fanny’s daughter “Belle,” short for Isobel. Belle and her husband Joe Strong, an artist, had formed part of the gang memorialized in literature as “The Silverado Squatters” in the summer of 1880, when Robert Louis Stevenson and his little band of vagabonds took over an abandoned silver mine in California. Following their eviction by the owner of the mine, Joe and Belle returned to San Francisco while Belle’s younger brother, Lloyd Osbourne, remained with his mother and her second husband, RLS, to go live in Europe for a while. Soon Joe and Belle had a son and named him Austin. Chapter 16 of Belle’s book, “This Life I’ve Loved,” is devoted to Austin, who grew up to be a successful playwright, superb yachtsman and, like his mother, a member and benefactor of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake.

While Austin was still a toddler, his father was commissioned by John D. Spreckels — son of Claus Spreckels, the “Sugar King” of California, founder of the Oceanic Steamship Company and owner of extensive sugar plantations in Hawaii — to go to Honolulu to make paintings of island life to decorate the company office. Off they went aboard the schooner Consuelo, and their connections out there were so good that they received an official invitation to attend the coronation of Hawaii’s last king, David Kalakaua, in February 1883. Before the ceremony, Joe and Belle “had been taking a glass of wine with the King on an English man-of-war,” according to Louis in a letter to his mother. The Strongs settled into island life while fate put aside a future date for a dramatic reunion of “The Silverado Squatters.”

Things were still going relatively well when, shortly after New Year’s Day, 1884, two of Stevenson’s friends, Charles Baxter and William Henley, went south to see him. Fanny called the chalet they were going to a “dollhouse” because it was pretty but small, and cramped with hardly any elbow room for passing plates around at dinner. Accordingly, a diversion up the Riviera coast to Nice to use a hotel for the occasion was someone’s idea, but not Fanny’s. An invisible wall separated Fanny from some of her husband’s friends, who are suspected of having had a jealousy issue. They probably just preferred the Louis they knew before “she” came along. Fanny might also have seemed to be too overprotective of their friend, especially when it came to spoiling their fun with him. To Fanny, these friends — not just Baxter and Henley but all of them, including cousin Bob — were seen increasingly as a threat because they didn’t comprehend Louis’ limits, that too much fun could literally kill him. Maybe there were two reasons for getting hotel rooms in Nice — bigger rooms than at Chalet La Solitude and a much bigger space between the men and Mrs. Stevenson.

On Jan. 12, the trio set off for Nice, but not without stopping at Monaco, Monte Carlo and Menton on the way there. They had a good time; that’s for sure. Many years later, in 1903, Henley recalled various incidents from it in a letter to Baxter. By then RLS had been dead for 19 years. “As for that Riviera run, its memory remains with me, ever, as that of one of the best things in my life.”

Henley and Baxter did not go back to Hyeres, choosing to return to England from Nice. Here, Louis had caught what seemed at first to be a slight cold, but soon after his two friends were gone, things took a bad turn. This new illness, which began in Nice, marked the beginning of a protracted period of worse-than-usual bad health, which persisted with little relief until Stevenson came to Saranac Lake in 1887.