Monastier, Goudet,
Ussel, Bouchet St. Nicolas
At Grez-sur-Loing, Louis didn’t make it easy for her, partly because he fought it and partly because he could not stop coughing long enough for the spoon to be in and out without clacking against his teeth. And it wasn’t that he resented being fed like a child, although that didn’t help.
“It is what it is,” she said, and wiped spilled soup roughly from his nightshirt with an already-filthy towel. His chest shook, the coughing explosive now, and Fanny looked at him flatly until it subsided. “My husband is coming, two weeks from today. You must leave.”
He felt he might be leaving through Death’s door, if his breaking heart didn’t kill him first.
*
Louis woke.
His journey began here. Le Monastier-sur-Gazeille nestled snug in a green valley below an irregular ridge that separated it from a troubled sky. It was a collection of plain-looking buildings with orange clay-tiled rooves that stood stark from the surrounding backdrop still verdurous from the summer sun, now heading into September.
Lovelorn and worried, Robert Louis Stevenson had flung himself upon the town. Presently, he had just finished entertaining a group of lace makers with the English language. Due to its liberal sprinkling of French, the artisans considered it merely a comical patois of their native tongue. He left some easily-amused ladies with the word “bread”—which they rolled around their lips and the concaves of their mouths until they doubled over with laughter—in search of a less excitable group of people. The rustic streets were created for wandering, in which he now indulged.
He’d arrived in France weeks ago, just after the love of his life, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, departed London for the United States. He’d written to his parents and friends—Sidney Colvin, his editor and occasional benefactor when funds sank truly low; Charles Baxter, an old, dear college chum; and William Henley, one-legged poet and boisterous pal. All but his parents were aware of Fanny. So far as Louis had mentioned, he was here to write another travel book. But, his relations excluded, all knew of Fanny and knew what had happened.
They knew the two had met, had fallen in love, and had spent nearly two years on an emotional carousel that all too often left Louis too dizzy to stand. They also knew she was much Louis’s senior, married to another man with two children, and that she’d returned abruptly to America, so many miles away.
In all his young years, Louis had never been so in love. And had never felt so irreversibly rejected. Except for that one other time. But this was different.
He’d sent letters to his friends from Le Puy within the week of her departure, going on about the new book, Travels with a Donkey in the French Highlands. They knew Louis hurt and that she had given him only enough reason to hope, but no more. They discouraged it—the entire enterprise, beginning and ending with Fanny—and so he said little, except to declare how enthusiastic he was to embark on such an excursion.
In reality, within him was a tempest, calmed only by the act of getting from one point to another. He meant to adventure so hardily and so thoroughly as to punish the heart straight out of him, literally or figuratively; he didn’t care much which. He could arrive at the end of his journey a man without sentiment or dead. It was all the same to him.
Moreover, when he arrived dead, or dead inside, he must arrive after having conquered the worst circumstances; he must have subjugated, if not his aching soul, then certainly the petit-bourgeois sense of impropriety this sort of plan stoked in peoples’ thoughts during this sad and delicately decadent era. People of a time that at once praised the adventure, hero-worshipped the adventurer, but disdained the thought that anyone they knew should attempt such a thing. Louis scoffed at society’s polite system of tethers and drastically cut them when Fanny had left.
Drawn by the wagging tail of a small mutt, Louis seated himself on a low stone wall that stuck out like a peninsula from the corner of a boulangerie, and proceeded to scratch the animal under the chin. His wavy reflection looked back at him from the shop’s multi-paned window. At twenty-seven years old, he struck a strange and curious figure amongst the French inhabitants. As tall as the average Scotsman, his slender frame and lanky limbs gave the impression of height; his sandy-russet hair brushed the base of his neck, uncut and parted in the center. The mustache he’d long been cultivating was finally gaining respectable coverage and drooping down over the lip enough so that he had developed a nervous habit of pulling at it. Lastly, he wore a deep emerald-green velveteen jacket.
Outside the boulangerie, he sat amongst a pleasant group of women and children of all ages. Little girls in lace-trimmed pinafores skipped rope and harassed their mothers as the women took their mending to the cool, shady street. One girl approached Louis, ran her grubby hands over the sleeve of his soft jacket, then tripped away giggling. The dog went with her.
One very old woman lured him into a conversation that lasted the better part of an hour. She demonstrated her sharp wit and tongue on every subject imaginable, and every opinion Louis expressed. Had she not been so pleasant, it might have been exasperating. It continued after he’d brought out his sketchbook and began to render her as faithfully as his skill would allow. With each attempt, she passed judgment and Louis wished the world were full of more like her, for honesty seemed to be in such short supply these days.
“No, no,” she said. “That is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I’m better looking than that. We must try again.”
Louis smiled, tore the page from the book, and began once more.
Behind her, the women sewed and the children played. Men throughout the street argued and laughed over a thousand topics. Buyers of bread came and went. Louis relaxed.
As he sketched, an old man—old to Louis, but younger than the woman who sat before him—wandered up to her, bent to whisper in her ear, and then, upon her pinched face and shooing hand, left.
“Mon fils,” she said, shaking her head.
Her son, Louis thought, must be as big a disappointment to her as he was to his own parents. And again, his heart sank back into the dark depths this light afternoon had brightened for a short time.
The old woman bowed to pick up a potato, signaling that, although she would love to be rendered all day, there was still work to be done. She winked at him and began to peel the vegetable with a paring knife.
Louis continued to scribble away at his work, but allowed his mind to drift over his most immediate plans. Though his boyish spirit was more than up to the journey, his adult frame, weakened by a lifetime of undiagnosable illness, was less enthusiastic. It came and went; his strength ebbed like the swells of a departing sloop against the dock. He was energized when he’d left London and it waned only now in that he could not be off soon enough.
This was not the first time he’d endeavored to make his way through tough and rugged conditions. Two years previous, at about this time of year, Louis and a friend had embarked on a canoe trip through Belgium and northern France, the product of which, An Inland Voyage, had been published just this past April. After so many essays and histories, his first real book had seen print, and now he could call himself a writer, an ink slinger for profit.
In those rare moments of emotional clarity, Louis’s thoughts still inclined to writing, to finding the next conceptual path worth treading, and based on experience, to actually tread a path—to go on an adventure, much to the horror of his parents—was the best way to plot one’s way forward on the page. For now, better than writing fiction—why wrack one’s brains thinking what’s to come next when one can just do and make notes?
But that outing had been before he’d met Fanny.
Lee Harper Oswald 
Sock it to me...