![]() Fanny was staying there with her daughter Belle and son Leon. They met in 1876 at an artists’ gathering at the Hotel Chevillon in Grez-sur-Loing, on the fringes of the Fontainebleau forest. The woman constantly on his mind was Fanny Osbourne. He must have thought about this a great deal when setting out on a journey through the French Cévennes, consumed as he was by pent up sexual longing of which he did not openly speak. ![]() In this respect he believed France to be the most civilised country in Europe, showing up a British outlook ‘blinkered by chaste puritanism and prejudice’. His stepson Lloyd Osborne wrote that Louis was attracted to the French ‘universal indulgence towards all sexual problems – their clear-sighted toleration of everything affecting the relations of men and women’. The French attitude that considered art to be an essential part of ordinary life seemed more adult to him. ![]() And like many Scots, he had an affinity with France, feeling free and at home there. Well before he became known as a novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson was an essayist and travel writer. ![]()
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